Negotiating the Traditional and the Modern: Chinese Women's Literature from the Late Imperial Period through the Twentieth Century

The three books above complement each other in their coverage of Chinese women's literary genres from the late fourteenth through the early twentieth century. The authors' theoretical inquiries invite consideration of the following questions: what meaning, if any, might a feminist imagination or approach have in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) eras, early and late Republican China (1911-1948), and beyond? What do these works have in common regarding the resituating of women's literary status, the reclamation of feminine agency, and the empowerment of female subjectivity in China's literary tradition? These books can be considered in dialogue with Western feminism and studies of women's literature through their various critical lenses, whether revisionist, historicist, feminist, or postmodernist. This essay reflects on how the authors assess the balance between women writers' personal trajectories and their collective presence in China's literary history. It also asks whether the authors presuppose a feminine self as the locus of their scholarship.

Repositioning the Inner Quarters

Grace S. Fong and Ellen Widmer's edited collection The Inner Quarters and Beyond: Women Writers from Ming through Qing provides a comprehensive view of women's literary achievements from these eras in writing poetry, composing and editing anthologies, exploring prosimetrical tanci, and carrying out literary exchanges with their close friends in the inner chambers.¹ The book's eleven chapters are grouped into four parts: "In the Domestic Realm," "Larger Horizons: Editing and Its Implications," "Beyond Prescribed Roles," and "The Personal is Political: Responding to the Outside World." At issue throughout is the theme of shifting historical and literary paradigms, with their ideological implications and constraints as well as the polemical relationship of such paradigms to individual and collective power. Researchers of the Ming and Qing eras have found abundant examples of women's works that question or renegotiate prevailing literary and cultural paradigms. The essays in this book reveal an elite female literary culture that shows evidence of a process of becoming and, as Maureen Robertson notes in her conclusion, of transforming, utilizing women's marginalized literary status as a "site for realizing the potential of historical change" (p. 382).

In part 1, "In the Domestic Realm," Fong contributes a chapter on writing and illness in the context of women's poetry. Using the Ming-Qing Women's Writings database of materials held at the Harvard-Yenching Library, she traces representations of women's experiences of illness, which function as "a prelude and even a pretext to writing" (p. 19). "Poems written about, during, and after illness" suggest that women of the Ming and Qing periods developed an association between illness and poetic production, using the relatively "public" form of poetry to portray the "private and personal aspects of their experience" (p. 19). Examining illness in seminal anthologies of women's works, Fong suggests that "writing poetry would seem to enable the sick or convalescent subject to appropriate a different temporality, a different rhythm of feeling, and altered modes of perception from those of normative experience" (p. 26). Poetic representation of illness constructs an alternative feminine aesthetic space and "takes on gendered conventions" (p. 33). In the poetry collection Yongxuelou shigao (Drafts from Yongxue Tower, author's preface dated 1816), for example, illness allows Gan Lirou (1743-1819) to "experience and write about bodily sensations of a different order" (p. 41). Sickness endows women with emotional intensity, presenting an occasion to transform the domestic realm into an artistic space in which they have access to "a creative or spiritual experience" (p. 43).

Emotional intensity in women's poetry is also a core concept in chapter...