Poetry and Women's Culture in Late Imperial China: Editor's Introduction

Abstract

POETRY AND WOMEN'S CULTURE IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA: EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Charlotte Fürth The essays which make up this symposium were first presented at a daylong meeting of the Southern California China Colloquium gathered at UCLA on October 20, 1990.1 It brought together for the first time in the Anglophone scholarly community feminist researchers who were exploring writings by Chinese from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties (c. 1600-1800). If scholarship on gender issues in China before the twentieth century is no longer a novelty, the present research breaks new ground in its recovery of a very substantial body of literary production by late imperial upper-class women. The collaboration of historians and literary scholars makes it possible for us to hear the literary "voices" of these women through the classical poetry they wrote, and so to explore their intellectual and social worlds in new depth.2 The introduction of women's self-representations makes possible a more sophisticated analysis of historical discourses in which women were involved and gender was constructed, while also opening up new avenues for cross-cultural comparison. The Problem of "Women's Culture" To talk of "women's culture" is to raise basic interpretive questions about the place women have occupied in the creation and transmission of the culture of a major historical civilization like that of China. Women alone neither produced such historically-dominant cultures, nor as subordinates have they shared in them in an unambiguous way. The term "women's culture" as it emerged in American feminist discourse in the 1970s carried with it holistic connotations—implying that women as a gender are a solidarity group like a 1FOr their sponsorship of the original symposium, thanks are owed to the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies, the USC East Asian Studies Center, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. 2Research in English has built upon work in the 1980s by scholars in China, notably Hu Wenkai. Besides the contributors to this issue, Kang-i Sun Chang, Grace Fong, Paul Ropp, Pauline Yu and others are already actively adding to the English language scholarship on learned and literary Chinese women. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 1-8© by the Society for Qing Studies 1 2 Charlotte Fürth social class or a race and that these other social cleavages do not fundamentally divide them. It was part of a rhetoric of protest: the search in separation for a sphere of autonomy, a wellspring of creativity, or alternatively an arena where protest or subversion might deploy. The feminist concept of "separate spheres," on the other hand, is more accommodative. It draws attention to those activities and creations of women which men have had no special interest in—whether women's religious activities, rituals, crafts, social networks or domestic skills. Further, it points to those activities of women marked as legitimate in a social/cultural division of labor approved by patriarchial or other male-dominated orthodoxy. In choosing the umbrella of "women's culture" in this symposium, we have had to ask questions about these fundamental problems of the relationship of male and female spheres. Research about women writing in late imperial China places them in an arena which is at the center of the production of Confucian civilization. Writing, for Chinese men, was an ontologically central and civilization-defining activity. It was also a public social practice which legitimized careers and through which men competed for status. Therefore women entering this arena were especially dependent upon a language which they did not create. As writers, women had to define themselves in terms of a long established canonical literary tradition (poetical genres like ci and shi, traditions of classical scholarship like those surrounding the Book of Odes, and even tropes like willow and plum). Here we found it especially difficult to talk about a separate woman's culture or even sphere. What the literary production itself—the poems and letters—appeared to reveal was the presence of a woman's voice or voices. A major theme of all four essays...