Tradition of Women Poets Flourishes in Old China

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, July 04, 2003

Tradition of Women Poets Flourishes in Old China

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For centuries, Chinese women's poetry has seldom been the focus of the scholarly community.

In particular, studies on women writers in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the best-documented period in Chinese history, has long been neglected by modern researchers of literature.

"Women Writers of Traditional China - An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism," first published by Stanford University Press in 1999, broke new ground in illuminating the development of China's women poets.

The book, co-edited by Kang-i Sun Chang, professor of Chinese literature at Yale University, and Haun Saussy, associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University.

This anthology brings together representative selections from the work of over 120 poets from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) to the early 20th century.

It offers a wealth of literary and historical information and a breadth of coverage of translations of many women poets.

Some of them, such as Song Dynasty (960-1279) poet Li Qingzhao (1084-1151), are well known to scholars in the field, while a large number has been neglected in the past.

The editors said the primary purpose of this anthology was to place before the English-speaking reader evidence of the poetic talent that flourished, against the odds, among women in pre-modern China.

It was also designed to spur reflection among specialists in Chinese poetry, inspiring new perspectives on both the Chinese poetic tradition and the canon of female poets within that tradition, according to Kang-i Sun Chang.

One of the highlights of the anthology is the 100 featured poets from the Ming-Qing period who have not appeared in general anthologies of Chinese poetry.

Ups and downs

Chinese women's writing reached its golden age during the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Female education was far more popular among the elite in this period than ever before in China's history.

Clearly literacy inspired some women to think far beyond the confines of their traditional female sphere.

Despite the constraints faced by educated Chinese women, education was in a way empowering for women, giving them a means of self-expression and participation in the formation of an elite culture.

"Female literacy was encouraged in the upper classes. The literati liked to marry learned women and exchange poems with them," said Kang-i Sun Chang.

Since the late Ming Dynasty, many anthologies of women's poetry have been published, edited by either male writers like Zhong Xing (1574-1624), or women writers like Liu Rushi (1618-64) and Wang Duanshu (1621-1706).

"Study of Works Written by Women of Traditional China" by Hu Wenkai, which was first published in the 1940s, shows that the number of extant works from the Ming-Qing period greatly exceeds the total number of works from the previous dynasties.

Stepping into the 20th century, the May 4 Movement in 1919 exerted powerful influences on Chinese scholars. They condemned Confucianism and traditional society.

Women of bygone days were seen as passive victims of the traditional society, and those women writers were either disregarded or condemned as products of the feudal system because they were full of old moral concepts.

Song Dynasty poets Li Qingzhao and Zhu Shuzhen were among the few women writers able to stamp their names on the pages of Chinese literary history.

As a scholar who has devoted herself to the research of women poets of the Ming and Qing dynasties, Kang-i Sun Chang hoped that the anthology would fill an enormous gap in Chinese literature.

Predicament

In the male-dominated realm of poetry, Chinese women faced a particularly difficult challenge in developing their own voice precisely because men had defined the genre.

"That predicament is what this book is about," the editors explain in the preface to the anthology.

On one hand, women carried on the tradition of writing poetry started by men. On the other, they injected their own concerns into the genre and began to develop their own themes and forms of self-revelation.

They re-inscribed literary codes and topics in constructing their own forms of subjectivity, and thereby achieved a genuine tradition of women's writing in late imperial China.

Many allusions which had frequently appeared in men's poetry implying profound political meaning conveyed rather straightforward and simple messages from a woman's pen.

The editors also believe that to measure the development of Chinese women's poetry, one must take into account not only the poems, but also the prose writings, prefaces, biographies and theoretical tracts that framed them and attempted to shape women's writing as a distinct category of literature. To this end, the anthology contains an extended section of criticism by, and about, women writers.

The criticism of some of these poets, and male counterparts who commented on women's poetry, have been translated, many for the first time.

Yuan Mei (1716-98), a Qing Dynasty poet, greatly admired women's poetic talent. He took women students, taught them to write romantic poetry and helped them to publish under their own names.

By contrast, Zhang Xuecheng (1738-1801), a prominent historian and philosopher of history, wrote his historical survey "Fuxue (Women's Learning)" primarily as an attack on Yuan.

Women, in Zhang's view, were the equal of men in intelligence and ability, but he believed they should study the Confucian classics, and not poetry.

The heated arguments showed that women's poetry had been a focus of social discussion in the 18th century.

Diversity

The editors have striven to unveil diverse pictures of the life of women writers in pre-modern China through the anthology.

Therefore, diversity is one of the most prominent characteristics of the book.

The poets include empresses, imperial concubines, courtesans, grandmothers, recluses, Buddhist nuns, widows, painters and farmers' wives. They were either from the cultural centre or remote border areas.

Each woman had her own reasons for poetry and her own way of writing.

Some women wrote out of isolation and despair, finding in words a mastery that otherwise eluded them. Some dwelt on intimate family matters and cast their poems as addresses to husbands and sons at large in the wide world of men's affairs.

Of course, some of them were far from accomplished poets, but their works reveal the colourful inner world of common women. One example is "Jiangchengzi" by Qing writer Pu Mengzhu, which was actually an account of the author's growing up and her dreams and fears.

Together with the selected poems are short biographies of the authors which help readers get a better understanding of the poets and their writings.

This article first appeared in this year's fifth issue of Reading, a Beijing-based monthly.

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