Overt and Covert Treasures: Essays on the Sources for Chinese Women’s History

14. Personal Writings on Female Relatives in the Qing Collected Works

Personal Writings on Female Relatives in the Qing Collected Works Weijing Lu Writing about women from one’s own family, in forms such as accounts of conduct, elegiac verses, tomb inscriptions, and biographies, was a long-established literati tradition in China. These sources hold untapped stores of information for historians, and the attention paid to them in recent years has already shown that they offer enormously promising material for the scholars of gender and women’s history. To cite just one example, readers of Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History will find the pieces written by Chen Liang 昛亮 (1143– 1194), Luo Rufang 羅汝芳 (1515–1588), and Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠 (1738–1801) about their female relatives among the most enticing readings in this collection.1 They exemplify how such writings can shed light on family interactions centered on women, male emotions, and ideas about gender in a given historical period.2 But historians have barely scratched the surface of this particular type of material. It is a rich mine of insight that has yet to be fully unearthed, appreciated, and utilized. In comparison with other sorts of sources examined in this volume, texts about women from male authors’ own families are unique, first of all, for their personal nature. They present firsthand accounts of women observed by the very men who were a part of their lives. Woven into a narrative with emotions and spoken with a voice of closeness, they yield some of the most intimate records of all in which personal feelings powerfully shape representation. To be sure, depending on the genre and its function, not all texts were produced solely or mainly for the satisfaction of the emotional needs of the literati, and, like commissioned biographical accounts, they could be laced with rhetoric. Nevertheless, the distinctive personal perspective and tangible touch set them apart from other sources about women. 412 | Overt and Covert Treasures Much of this personal flavor is conveyed through minute, freshly revealing domestic scenes. Details of non-dramatic or non-moralist acts are characteristically absent in didactic, official, or other publicly or privately compiled biographical accounts, presumably because they were deemed insignificant and thus undeserving of being recorded.3 But individual writers had special reasons to cherish the “insignificant” details and episodes, and they used them to highlight a particular personal connection. As historical sources, these individual and intimate details open rare windows into facets of domestic life that are often concealed in other types of sources. As will be illustrated in the examples below, the details outshine the otherwise mundane depictions of the text, bringing to life the tensions and negotiations, struggles and joy with which men and women lived in their everyday lives. Given that the vast existing biographical literature is either about “exemplary” women or about senior women (mothers in particular), male writings on female relatives are particularly useful in that they allow historians to study women in a wider range of roles and contexts. They bring into historical view women of junior status or “marginal” roles in the family or social hierarchy, such as young daughters, sisters, or sisters-in-law. Moreover, because the women came from a known family context (they were female relatives of noted scholars), historians are in a better position to contextualize the records and thus have a fuller appreciation of them. In light of the dominance in the records of the lienü literature on “exemplary” women and commissioned biographies, men’s writings about women in their own families diversify and humanize our materials, making it possible for historians to tackle a broad range of questions about family relations and emotions. Here we may note a common sentiment about the scarcity of private writings in Chinese history: in contrast with the ready availability of diaries, letters, and memoirs in Western traditions, few comparable texts existed in China.4 The argument is not invalid, but it rests on a premise derived from the Euro-American model. Our attention would be misplaced if we took the lack of comparable texts as an insurmountable barrier in approaching issues concerning domestic life. In Chinese history, there was a wealth of materials on private matters, but they were packaged in different literary formats and in different cultural modes from those in the West. When treated with due care and sensibility, these sources can yield enormous amounts of historical evidence. Personal Writings on Female Relatives in the Qing Collected Works...