Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (review)

I am precisely the sort of reader for whom Under Confucian Eyes, a collection of eighteen translations on women, gender, and domestic relations in premodern China, is designed. Gender concerns are central to my research, and my undergraduate courses contain a hefty gender component. In fact, I agreed to review Under Confucian Eyes for the self-serving reason that I am in the midst of revamping the syllabus for an undergraduate course on women in imperial Chinese literature, and I am looking for new material to include, especially writings by women. The six items written by women in this anthology, including The Book of Filial Piety for Women, personal letters, and Wu Zao's lovely play Drinking Wine and Reading "Encountering Sorrow," are a much needed and welcome addition to the lyric pieces in Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy's edited volume Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Since Under Confucian Eyes, with its "Guide for Students and Teachers" (pp. 9-15), is designed as a teaching text, my review will be equally pragmatic and address its usefulness as a textbook.

Under Confucian Eyes will appeal to undergraduate readers for a number of reasons. First of all, it is a very handsome volume; the blank pages between chapters along with the illustration that prefaces each selection give the book a feeling of luxury rare in our cost-cutting age. Second, each selection is short, ranging from six to twenty-three pages, including the introduction and notes. The notes sensibly follow each selection and range from explanatory to scholarly. Most important, each of the translations reads well. Students will have the pleasure of working with primary sources that have been translated into a smooth and colloquial English. I particularly like Beverly Bossler's rendering of a timeless truth from Yang Jingsheng's Final Instructions: "when sleeping with others, do not hog the bedding" (p. 129).

This innovative collection also works well in pedagogical ways that may be less apparent to undergraduate readers. The broad thematic, generic, and chronological range of translations provides a model of interdisciplinary research that will give students a glimpse of new possibilities in the China field. The collection demonstrates that the questions and methodologies central to gender studies can enrich the reading of any text. Questions raised by each of the sources also make clear the need for interdisciplinary scholarship. One of the most surprising inclusions, because of its seemingly tangential relationship to gender, is Kathryn Lowry's translation of several forms for personal letters from seventeenth-century epistolary guides. These model letters make the crucial point that even as we look for personal voices in the variety of letters translated in other chapters of the collection, we also need to pay attention to the formulaic conventions of each genre and be aware of how they limit personal expression. How are we to distinguish ideal from reality in these remarkably personal biographies, admonitions, and letters? For example, in her introduction to a series of letters written by women, Yu-yin Cheng writes: "Letters by men to family members, being more or less private letters, tend to be relatively straightforward in their ideas and language. . . . Women's family letters, although similarly straightforward in their ideas, are written in a more elegant, less colloquial style" (p. 170). This suggests that these late-imperial women, whose letters have been preserved, may have been writing with an eye toward crafting a certain image of themselves for posterity, not just communicating with their immediate addressees.

As noted by the editors, the structure of this volume challenges readers to think about voice (pp. 5 and 9). Each of the translations is prefaced by a personal introduction by the translator discussing how or why she or he came to choose their texts. These informal...