Voicing the Feminine: Constructions of the Gendered Subject in Lyric Poetry by Women of Medieval and Late Imperial China

VOICING THE FEMININE: CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE GENDERED SUBJECT IN LYRIC POETRY BY WOMEN OF MEDIEVAL AND LATE IMPERIAL CHINA* Maureen Robertson "Granted that pen and ink are definitely not the business of women, what are we to make of it when they do employ them?" Xin Wenfang, editorial comment in his Biographies of Literary Geniuses of the Tang (Tang caizi zhuan), 1304. "Although wandering the five sacred mountains of Shenzhou [China] and sailing to the three mountain-islands of the immortals in the middle of the mysterious sea is not the business of women, still when I look into the distance at mists and clouds or gaze at the sun and moon, they do not seem so far away to me. The beauty of the natural world, the romance of private life—a day, a night, a smile, a word—all remains vividly in my mind without being lost or forgotten, and thus I have written about it, composing two sections of verses. Human beings are not peach and pear trees; they cannot remain 'speechless'." Wu Xiao, from the preface to her collection, Poems from Whispering Snow Retreat, First Collection (Xiao xue an shiji, chuji), seventeenth century.1 *Prepared for the Colloquium on Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China, University of California, Los Angeles, October 20, 1990. lThe reference to silent peach and pear trees is an allusion to a statement by Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian, in the appended remarks to the biography of General Li Guang in his Historical Records, (Shi ji, "Lie zhuan" 49). Praising Li as a man of modesty and noble character who was not only unversed in the self-promoting rhetoric of the ambitious but actually quite inarticulate (kou bu neng dao ce), Sima says, "The peach and the pear are without speech, yet paths naturally form beneath them." The flowering trees represent the man of integrity who attracts admiration simply for the beauty of his character. Wu Xiao contests this model—one which identifies virtue with silence and which thus might easily be enlisted to encourage the "virtue" of silence, of reticent speech {or writing) in women—by disallowing the analogy which makes trees and human beings comparable with respect to speech. Wu's preface is reprinted in Hu 1985:105. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 63-110© by the Society for Qing Studies 63 64Maureen Robertson In the 1,355 page edition of his history of premodern Chinese literature, a history that spans over 2,500 years, Liu Dajie mentions only five women who produced literary texts, none of them from periods later than the Song Dynasty.2 Although we can safely assume that these women have not strayed into literary history because they were mistaken for men, it is clear that, given the extraordinary disproportion between the numbers of men and of women represented, these five have been included as honorary men. They have, for literary and social reasons, been considered to have met criteria derived from and sustained by men's literary culture. One might say that the rule excluding unnumbered women writers from a major modern history of traditional Chinese literature is simply the traditional rule of "separate spheres" of activity , extrapolated into twentieth century literary historiography, requiring that distinct histories be written for men and for women. Certainly in the past few centuries women's writings have been treated separately from men's, and there have indeed been attempts to write women's literary history as a separate narrative,3 though these works are useful mainly as compilations of biographical data and specimens of writing. While the concept of separate spheres is relevant, the better explanation would be more complex. To account for the absence of women in standard Chinese literary histories , one must consider the naturalization and institutionalization of women's exclusion from all intellectual and literary activity, with rationales based upon a purported "natural order" that defines sexual difference in such a way as to empower patriarchy and allocate written language to the masculine, public sphere. Further, the consequent informality of women's literary education; the narrow construction by male writers of a feminine literary voice; and most of...