Bound by Convention: Women's Writing and the Feminine Voice in Eighteenth-Century China

It is no exaggeration to say that the creation of a history of women's writing in eighteenth-century China is still underway. Twenty-five years ago, there was a number of collections in Chinese and Western anthologies of twentieth-century prose writings by women under the general Maoist theme, "women hold up half the sky," but there was precious little to reflect that women had been active participants in the production of culture during late-imperial China.¹ Today, there are three major anthologies of premodern women's writings available in English that demonstrate that women wrote in a number of genres, predominantly poetry, but also religious Daoist and Buddhist texts, Confucian moral tracts, drama, prosimetric narrative drumsongs (tanci), and criticism.² Twenty-five years ago, gender, as something distinct from the study of women, was poorly understood in our field. Today, it is a given that because of the dynamics of binary yinyang associative symbolism, gendered differences in traditional China were not thought of as grounded in biology and were central to the semantic fields of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. This is an exciting time to be working in the intersection of gender and late-imperial Chinese studies because new research is continually reshaping the entire field.

What has enabled the maturation of our field in the last twenty-five years? Perhaps the most important change was the opening of library and archival collections in the People's Republic of China in the postsocialist era. Almost as important was the rejection of the paradigm, held dear for most of the twentieth century, that "a woman without literary talent is a virtuous woman." This popular Ming (1368-1644) saying was taken to mean that Neo-Confucianism, the dominant elite ideology of the late imperial period (1368-1911), promoted illiteracy for women. This view fit the desires of both the May Fourth and the the socialist reformists to paint traditional Chinese society and its practices of footbinding, arranged marriage, and polygamy as uniformly oppressive of women. Portraying traditional China in starkly negative terms enabled these political radicals to present themselves as modern, rational, and democratic saviors who would liberate women and all of society from these feudal forms of oppression. Inspired by feminist scholars in the West, however, a group of unfashionable scholars bucked the Marxist focus on popular literature and have unapologetically focused their attention on the lives and writings of elite women in China. Although literate women represented a numerically and geographically limited slice of society, they nevertheless made up a not insignificant reading population of between 20,000 and 35,000 women.³

From our vantage point in 2007, we can see that the literary scene had changed dramatically for gentry women during the long eighteenth century.⁴ A change in literary and intellectual trends in the sixteenth century that promoted the valorization of emotions, and by analogy the symbolic feminine, prompted a fascination with all things feminine as a pure and authentic alternative to the male world of politics and bureaucratic service that demanded a lifetime of self-sacrifice and ethical compromise. Writings by women had considerable cachet during the late Ming, particularly those by courtesans who had upheld higher standards of loyalty and integrity than their male patrons, and the posthumously published writings by women in gentry households, who had fallen victim to their own passionate yearnings. Although there is a growing consensus that some of the best-known texts by passionate beauties who died young were written by men who understood the power of this new feminine voice in a male field of letters, these writings helped open a discursive space for writings by actual women. By the eighteenth century, the romantic ideal of a companionate marriage was changing ideas about domesticity—companionate marriages were still arranged to be sure, but women were valued for their literary talents as well as their beauty and ability to run a household. This cultural shift, in which marriage became more than just the foundation of moral and economic production, created a space for women and their families...