Haihong Yang - Women’s Poetry and Poetics in Late Imperial China: A Dialogic Engagement

Womens Poetry and Poetics in
Late Imperial China

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

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ISBN 9781498537865 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 9781498537872 (electronic)

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To my parents,

Jiya Lu and Shengquan Yang

I am truly grateful for this opportunity to thank those who have stood by me during the composition of this book: to my parents, Jiya Lu and Shengquan Yang, for their endless love and support; to my mentor and doctoral supervisor, Maureen Robertson, for her inspiring instruction, contagious passion for Chinese womens literature and culture, and expert advice; and to my husband, Liqun Li, for everything.

I owe my deepest appreciation to the supporting community of the University of Iowa while I was a graduate student. I particularly owe much to the encouragement and inspiration from my professors in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of English: David H. Wittenberg, Kevin R. Kopelson, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, Alvin Snider, and Huston Diehl. I found inspiration in conversation with scholars at conferences, especially Grace S. Fong, Xiaorong Li, Wanming Wang, Maram Epstein, Yu Zhang, and Ronald Egan.

My research was funded by a doctoral fellowship from the University of Iowa; a General University Research grant from the University of Delaware; and six research travel grants from the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the University of Delaware. The University of Delaware also granted me a six-month research leave which allowed me to concentrate on finishing the book manuscript. I express my deepest gratitude to these organizations for their institutional support.

I wish to acknowledge the anonymous reader for insightful and helpful comments and suggestions. My thanks to Harriet Zurndorfer and the editorial committee of Nan N: Men, Women, and Gender in China for offering invaluable advice and feedback which helped me improve the second chapter of this book. An earlier version of this chapter was published in Nan N: Men, Women, and Gender in China (2016) Koninklijke Brill N.V. Thank you to my editors Eric Kuntzman and Brian Hill at Lexington Books and my copy editor Elise Hansen for their help and advice at various stages of editing and production.

Last but not least I want to thank my parents-in-law, Hui Chen and Yande Li, whose unconditional love and support, patience, and faith accompanied me throughout the journey of writing this book.

This book is an investigation of how women writers in the Ming (13681644) and Qing (16441911) dynasties, often referred to as the late imperial period, participated in the construction of literary conventions with their shi poems and criticisms on shi poetry. Shi is a particular poetic form using lines of four, five, or seven characters in length. It often follows strict tonal patterns and develops an aesthetics of parallelism. As Burton Watson points out in an early study of shi as a literary form, shi poetry is not only as old as Chinese literature itself, but is the vehicle to which the Chinese have entrusted their profoundest and most heartfelt utterances, the form that has come to be recognized as characteristic of the Chinese poetic spirit at its greatest. Yet for centuries, women have been excluded from this form. One obvious reason is that women have a much lower chance of receiving an education than men do. However, even though women did write poems and poetic criticisms, their works are often neglected, if not belittled, and their contribution to the construction and evolving of this poetic form has been ignored.

The emergence of women writers as a discernable group in the late imperial period gradually yet unquestionably changed the landscape of shi poetry as a result of remarkable developments in commercial print culture and the spread of literacy and education to a wider public. In content, women-authored poems often experiment with new poetic subjects or provide new perspectives of already popular themes when the poets write about their life experiences as women. In form, women writers resort to innovative poetic devices and create aestheticisms often deviating from those of the literati when they strive for their own voices to be heard. The dilemma which women writers encounter is two-fold. They have to write in a poetic language in which they are often treated as objects without much agency. The vast poetic tradition is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because of the rich repertoire of themes, subgenres, images, and devices to be employed and the thousands of writers and their poems as well as poetic schools to be studied and followed as models. However, this extremely profuse tradition is mostly relevant to male-specific experiences. At its core, (male) literati are the ones who established the standards of evaluation and served as judges. When women employed such poetic language to describe their own bodies, own thoughts, own feelings, and told their own stories, they had no other choice but to appropriate this language not only for themselves to be heard and understood, but to reinscribe their existence in their own writings. Until very recently, the impact of women writers appropriation of this poetic language has been severely underestimated, if not totally ignored.

In this book, I examine the interactions between womens poetic creations and the existing discourses in the literati tradition and study how these interactions generate innovative self-reinscription and renovations in poetic forms and aesthetics. Women writers, just like their male literati counterparts, wrote within a vast and heterogeneous literati tradition. At the same time, they also wrote beyond that tradition. The tension between womens acts of writing and self-reinscription on the one hand and the cultural and social limitations on their writing contexts on the other results in a discernible womens writing tradition, a heterogeneous and continuous process of construction rather than a stable and static existence.

Close reading of women-authored poems and poetics generates fruitful discoveries when it engages these texts in dialogue with others writers, male and female, past and future. It helps us avoid gynocentric and essentialist traps while reintroducing women and their works into Chinese literary history. Such a dialogic approach enables us to historicize our reading of womens poetry and poetics within their social, cultural, and political contexts, and thus base our reading of the original materials on both their presence and absence from certain dialogues. It is not only contingent on our comprehension of the genre of