Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China (review)

This is a wonderful book, learned, fascinating, and highly readable. Its centerpiece is the Lienü zhuan or Collected Life Stories of Women. This compendium of 125 lives of exemplary women, whose status ranged from ferrywoman to emperor's wife, was conventionally ascribed to the great Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang (ca. 77-6 B.C.E.). The work was extremely influential, first in defining a rubric of female biography that subsequently became standard in the official dynastic histories, and second as a widely read, adorned, and copied bible of female education.

During the publishing explosion of the late Ming dynasty the Lienü zhuan was published in numerous illustrated editions—a tribute to its wide appeal to Ming men as well as women. On close examination, however, it is striking that the virtues portrayed in the Ming versions of the Lienü zhuan had altered significantly. Liu Xiang's original heroines rebuked kings, saved their fathers from unjust punishment, impressed Confucius with their understanding of human affairs, foretold enemy attacks, or exposed unreliable ministers. Like the male heroes of that epoch they were intelligent and prescient. They were learned in astronomy or in the structures of state management. They changed the course of history with a wise word or a cunningly chosen parable. A Ming lienü, on the other hand, was never outspoken, and her brand of heroism more likely consisted of resisting rape and committing suicide, or of slicing off her own flesh to make a healing broth for a dying mother-in-law. "The self-sacrificing, chastity-obsessed, and apolitical lienü of the Ming dynasty were all but unrecognizable from their earlier predecessors" (p. 21).

A good number of recent studies of late imperial China have demonstrated that the most misogynist moralist texts or sayings of the period did not portray a universal norm, and that many women, especially women of rank, had a fair measure of dignity, respect, and power to act or influence. Yet even those men and women who argued that women could excel in virtue, or that they might be both virtuous and talented, took for granted that female learning and virtues must be expressed in a distinctly female mode. If women were to study, it should be so that they could be better mothers, not so that they could write history or advise the emperor on which officials to appoint.

In Liu Xiang's original Lienü zhuan the eight chapters included one on "Sage Intelligence," one on "Benevolent Wisdom," and one on "Skill in Argument." Analyzing the rearrangement of the stories in Ming editions, and closely comparing Ming illustrations of such tales as "The Mother of Mencius" to those in Qing compendia based on Song originals that supposedly went back to the paintings of Gu Kaizhi, Raphals demonstrates how such shifts in representation conveyed a shift in gender ideals. Neo-Confucian values placed women in a domestic sphere separate from men and expected them to fulfill themselves as wives and mothers, that is to say, as devoted members of their husband's lineage. Women could influence their sons or husbands for good, and their personal chastity and loyalty to the honor of the lineage might provide a shining inspiration to men struggling in a political world fraught with decadence and corruption. But that the role of women was to be hierarchically subordinate to and categorically different from men was never in doubt.

Neo-Confucian moralists routinely invoked yin-yang cosmology and the Book of Changes to justify their ideas about the relations between men and women. However, as Raphals shows, many early texts, including the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, the Laozi, and various early medical writings, used yin-yang principally to explain differences of degree, or cyclical processes and oscillations, rather than distinctions of kind. And in close textual comparisons, Raphals...