Learned and Literary Women in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe

Abstract

LEARNED AND LITERARY WOMEN IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE Marie Fiorine Bruneau As a feminist scholar engaged in the study of seventeenth-century French literature and culture, I find that looking at the world of learned and literary Chinese women presents both an opportunity and a risk. The opportunity is for cross-cultural comparison on unfamiliar terrain, leading perhaps to a deeper understanding of macro-historical forces shaping female gender. The risk is suggested by Dorothy Ko's essay, which questions the applicability to China of certain Western conceptual frameworks designed to understand events occurring in European history. Undoubtedly this question applies also to Western feminist thinking. A comparison such as I am attempting might therefore turn out to be a nagging reminder that although Eurocentrism is very helpful to understand European history, if one wants to understand China (one of Europe's favorite "others"), one must take the risk of having one's most cherished assumptions shaken. I believe that comparing a specific group of women (learned and literary women of the upper class) in late imperial China and in early modern Europe makes most sense if we do not confine ourselves to the micro-historical framework of two distinct cultures, but also place these cultures in the conceptual context of the macro-historical framework of patriarchy.1 I do not suggest that patriarchy is universal, but only that it seems ubiquitous in the historical societies we know. I use the term patriarchy here, not only to designate a system in which men dominate women, but more precisely one in which men exploit women.2 In this perspective gender relations can be represented by a vertical structure of power relations in which no doubt is left about who dominates and who is dominated. 1Gerda Lerner has convincingly drawn a history of patriarchy which challenges the nineteenth-century mythical notions of Engels concerning the advent of the domination of women by men. According to Lerner, it was not an event, or the outcome of a war, as Engels suggested, but a process that took 2500 years, from approximately 3100 to 600 B.C. See Lerner 1986. It would be interesting to see if and how the history of patriarchy she reconstructs is relevant for China. 2See Walby 1986. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 156-176© by the Society for Qing Studies 156 Learned and Literary Women157 Given these premises, the history of women within patriarchy can also be viewed as the history of women's oppositions, tactical struggles and adaptive devices. Viewed in this way, the history of women is no longer the account of development and progress, nor simply the history of victimization (although that element cannot be forgotten). Nor is it the history of a women's culture studied in isolation but the history of the dynamics of strategies of control on the part of the dominant power and of tactics of survival, negotiation, accommodation , opposition or self-affirmation on the part of women. Women's history, thus understood, becomes the history of a relation of power, opposing blocks of power on a horizontal axis; it could thus more properly be renamed the history of gender ideologies and gender relations. Michel Foucault defines the relation of power in the following manner.3 First, contrary to the relation of violence which must have been its primitive form, the relation of power is a mode of action which is not exerted directly upon another, but rather upon another's actions: it is an action directed upon or in anticipation of an action. Secondly, the relation of power is nonegalitarian and mobile. Thirdly, the relation of power, although inherent to institutions, should not be confused with them. Fourthly, power can be exerted on a subject only insofar as the latter has a free will, for at the very core of such a relation, power is constantly provoked by the will of the subject opposing it, and the intransigence of freedom on the part of that subject. There is no relation of power without the possibility of escape. Finally, relations of power are constantly linked to strategies of struggle, and constantly subjected to the possibility...