Organizer: Cathy Silber, University of Michigan
Chair and Discussant: Grace Fong, McGill University
The study of women in late imperial China has shown that thinking of the gendered domains nei and wai as coterminous with domestic and state, or private and public, fails to account for the complexities of social experience. The boundaries between these domains shift with circumstance, and are sometimes difficult to locate; often we catch a best glimpse of them when they are tested, contested, or crossed. A boundary crossed is sometimes altered, sometimes reinforced, in the process. When we try to understand women's encounters with various kinds of boundaries, we are sighting moving targets: neither women nor gender boundaries are standing still. Women's transgression of social, ideological, and literary boundaries took on multiple significations in Ming Qing minds and texts. To explore these meanings and their applications, and to interrogate in the process the concept of women's transgression itself, the papers in this panel examine textual presentations of transgressive women, by and for both women and men, in a variety of literary genres-oral and written, urban and rural, so called popular and elite. Though instances of women's transgression occurred in the social world, we are looking at their contained operations in literature. But texts are not merely inert reflections of cultural preoccupations (and the legions of transgressive women in Ming Qing texts show they were that); texts also have effects in the social world. Toward uncovering these effects, we look to the relationships between author, text, and audience in exploring the multiple meanings of the transgressive woman.
The concept of women's transgression is not without problems of its own, for it tends to reinforce the image of boundaries as static. It is easy to think of gendered domains in physical terms, as the mappings and demarcations of social spaces. But the notion of women at home and men abroad falls short. Where does the prostitute fit in this scheme? The nun? The gentry woman publishing her own poetry, breaking with poetic convention to speak in new voices? The village girl (if only imaginary) marching off to find her husband? While contested boundaries are sometimes physical ones, they are also always mental ones-internalized norms or external models and standards clashing with personal experience, actions, or desires.
Maureen Robertson finds elite women breaking with literary convention and propriety of women's speech by producing new textual subjects and voices in poetry, which affected a growing readership of women by offering them enhanced self consciousness and greater ability to generalize their own experiences to all women. Cathy Silber looks at transgressive women in nüshu texts and suggests how images that gratify male fantasy can offer themselves differently to a female audience. Andrea Goldman looks at the nun who breaks her vows in two versions of Sifan, arguing that performance context explains striking differences in her presentation. Paola Zamperini explores the ambivalence of a male readership toward the titillating yet disruptive transgressions of the prostitute in Niehaihua, showing how her journey is used as a trope for China's quest for modernity.
Maureen Robertson, University of Iowa
This paper addresses the following questions: What evidence is there for the existence of assertive, or transgressive, voices and topics in writings by women during the Ming and Qing dynasties? To what extent did an increase in literacy and literary activity by women in these dynastic periods encourage the production of new literary voices that crossed established boundaries of literary and social propriety for the speech of governing class women? I argue that such voices existed and that the works they inhabited offered textual speaking subjects new to literary discourse. As women readers explored the variety of textual subjectivities in circulation, they could gain an enhanced critical self consciousness and greater awareness of what they shared with other women, leading to experimentation with more assertive voices and a more evident ability to generalize their personal experiences to all women.
I have selected a series of complaint poems to support this argument; the poems show how some women writers moved from the performance and reinscription of literati voices and forms to the construction of new voices that neither conformed to literati models nor submitted to the norms for governing class women's demeanor and speech.
The paper also questions the concept of transgression itself. To what extent should acts of verbal transgression such as illustrated here be viewed as isolated, local events? Does not the very concept leave us locked within the dynamics of patriarchal dominance? Is there another way to think transgression, to retain its local character but to place it as well within a larger process occurring among women writers, one that involved changes in the location of boundaries themselves? I propose that as the numbers of women writers increased, a correspondingly larger readership came into being. With the greater availability of women's writings through publication, circulation, and anthologizing, writers and readers engaged in experiments with identity and self discovery through articulating thoughts and feelings in language, and through occupying the subject positions made available in texts. It was in such a process that the possibility arose for women to offer critiques of social arrangements that affected them; the transgressive character of many of these critiques had both a local and a larger significance. Critiques of the social arrangements by which women's lives were ordered depended to a considerable extent upon a collective process that, at least for some women, called boundaries into question and provided a sense of women's community.
Role boundaries for women were virtual to the extent that their existence depended upon the successful interpellation of women within the scene of patriarchal economies, and the exclusive circulation of literati voices that modeled women's roles for them, silencing competing discourses. When women began to speak for themselves, the dominant discourse of women's virtue was susceptible to being disrupted and frayed, if not contradicted outright. The number of texts remaining from Ming and Qing that step outside the safety zone of propriety for women's voices invites consideration.
Cathy Silber, University of Michigan
In Ming Qing Jiangnan, contemporary debates about elite women's use of hanzi (Chinese script) to write poetry reflected anxieties not over female literacy per se, but over women's words going public, transgressing the nei/wai line. Similarly, the use of nüshu (women's script)-the syllabic, phonetic topolect script practiced for centuries exclusively by women and girls in one small part of rural Hunan-did not constitute transgression. Precisely because nüshu literature was exclusively female-men couldn't write or even read it-it never crossed the nei/wai line.
Yet nüshu texts show that this and other gendered boundaries were preoccupations of their writers and readers; indeed, the transgression of boundaries by women is a staple source of dramatic tension in many a Chinese vernacular narrative, where it is usually the product of male fantasies. Some nüshu narratives were imported from the Han popular tradition, and others were created by nüshu writers. But in either case, we know with certainty what one group of women was writing and reading. In this paper, I examine two nüshu texts that offer fantasies of female transgression to an audience of women and girls.
In "The Carp Spirit" (a greatly simplified version of the Longtu gongan story), the spirit impersonates a proper young lady and visits her betrothed in his study at night. Even though the nüshu version was probably imported from the wider narrative heptasyllabic verse tradition (and not adapted directly by nüshu writers), and can be seen to conveniently gratify male fantasy, the locus of reader identification is clearly the wronged young woman (who stands accused and about to lose her marriage match). This provides female readers, whose own virtue remains intact, the vicarious experience of dual transgression: female sexual agency in the male space of the scholar's study.
The other nüshu narrative, probably locally produced, is the "bizarre incident" tale of a young woman who, tired of waiting, marches off to her betrothed's home and presents herself for marriage. In asking directions on the road, and stating her aim at the village gate, she makes her scandalous rejection of protocol quite public. Though the man's family finally grudgingly receives her, throwing an ad hoc wedding, their disapproval will make her life miserable. As a ludicrous moral counter exemplar, this character serves to reinforce the social unacceptability of any expression of a girl's desire to marry, while allowing her to fantasize the unthinkable. Thus this narrative must be situated in the context of other nüshu discourses about marriage, as well as frustrations shared by parents and offspring alike over the exigencies of wedding protocol.
Nüshu readers found both these stories titillating and hilarious. Capitalizing on the knowledge that women and girls enjoyed these stories, producing and reproducing them in their own literary tradition, this paper will examine how fantasies of female transgression, whatever their origin, can offer themselves to men and women in different ways.
Andrea S. Goldman, University of California, Berkeley
Bawdy clerics-depraved monks or sex starved nuns-are no strangers to Chinese vernacular literature. Suspect by virtue of the extremity of their vows of abstinence and their rejection of family, these types of characters often are depicted as social pariahs-individuals living on the margins of society and thereby a potential threat to a social community structured by Confucian family values. Opera and story telling versions of Sifan ("Longing for the Secular Life") differ from other portrayals of wayward nuns, however, in that the protagonist is cast in a sympathetic light.
"Longing for the Secular Life" recounts the tale of Sekong, a young woman forced to become a Buddhist nun by her devoutly religious parents. The bulk of the story consists of an exposition of the young nun's emotions, her resentment at being denied the pleasures of conjugal life, and her decision to run away from the nunnery. The nun's actions ostensibly represent a challenge to the social norms of her time on three different levels: she mocks Buddhist teachings by her defiance of religious vows, she rebels against the authority of family by thwarting her parents' design for her, and she transgresses the bounds of traditional female propriety by her frank expression of sexual desire.
This paper explores female desire and female transgression of social norms through comparison of two different l9th century performance versions of Sifan, one Kunqu text and one zidi ballad libretto. To what extent does the reluctant nun test the boundaries of appropriate behavior for women in Qing China? What are the ways the nun's challenge to Buddhist and Confucian mores are voiced-through complaint, through action? And to what end is this theme of a woman's defiance of socially circumscribed spheres of thought and action manipulated for audience appreciation? I will argue that in the Kunqu version there are limits to the extent to which the protagonist breaks with conventional standards of female propriety. Her testing of limits is just sufficient to be titillating to the audience, to turn the nun into the object of the audience's sexual fantasies. In the end, Sekong's transgression is not complete, for she embraces a new familial and gender status as restrictive as the one she sought to leave behind. In the zidi ballad version of the Sifan story, however, a more empathetic view of the nun is presented. She is not just depicted as an object of sexual desire; rather, much more of a sense of identity between the protagonist and the audience emerges from this text.
The question arises as to what accounts for the variation in the way the two Sifan stories are presented. Are the differences symptomatic of the formal features of genre? Or, are textual differences a reflection of values and sensibilities particular to the audiences for each type of performance? Ultimately, the social context of performance-the relationship among text, performer and audience-is crucial to understanding how the theme of female desire and transgression is used in each version.
Paola Zamperini, University of California, Berkeley
In late imperial fiction, courtesans and prostitutes were represented not only as sex workers but also as entertainers in arenas-the stage, the brothel, private dwellings of the patron, the street-that had very fluid borders. Catering mostly to male readers, courtesans often defied and transgressed gender roles and proper female behaviors: cross dressing, outrageous conduct in public places, and sexual exuberance constituted their appeal. But these very characteristics also made them dangerous and destabilizing factors for the status quo in which readers operated. The focus of this paper is the physical and social journey of the courtesan Fu Caiyun in the late Qing novel Niehaihua. My aim is to explore how the role of a prostitute is defined and negotiated and to examine the meanings attached to her figure by author and readers alike.
Fu Caiyun (based on the famous courtesan Sai Jinhua, 1874-1936) is presented as a harlot of modest social origins who abandons prostitution by marrying a high official. This takes her not only up the social ladder, but also out of China. When her husband is appointed ambassador to Europe, she accompanies him and becomes the darling of Western royalty and nobility, assuming the guise of the Lady of the Camellias and speaking foreign languages. After her return to China, her husband dies and she returns to prostitution, this time as a madam. Her status grants her freedom of movement denied to other women, and she invests the capital of her beauty to her best social and economic advantage. Yet characters like the Russian Nihilist heroine Xialiya (modeled upon martyr Sophia Petrovskaya) reveal the narrowness of her pursuit of independence. She challenges her husband, his first wife, and the stale and corrupt morality they represent, yet her journey ends exactly where it started-in the brothel.
Her whole journey is steeped in social and moral ambiguity. Throughout the work she steps in and out of different gendered domains, sometimes transgressing internal and external norms of behavior, at other times sanctioning them. As the novel unfolds, however, it becomes clear that the greater mobility her prostitute identity seems to grant her is more superficial than real, and she fares no better in the end than prostitutes in other novels of this period. The very unruliness that constituted her appeal was also disruption that had to be contained; audience desires for both titillation and order are gratified. The journey of Fu Caiyun plays to this ambivalence.
Author Zeng Pu's declared intent is to use Fu Caiyun's individual journey as a trope for China's national quest for freedom and modernity, and her fate symbolizes the predicament of the Chinese people at the turn of the century. But Caiyun's new clothes merely reveal and reinforce her role as subordinated sex worker. They cannot conceal the inability of a woman of her background (or China as a whole) to solve the social, political, and historical problems and contradictions inherent to the end of the Qing dynasty, as they are exposed in Niehaihua.
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