Organizer Daria Berg, University of Oxford
Chair Paul S. Ropp, Clark University
Discussants: Paul S. Ropp, Clark University; Ann Waltner, University of
Minnesota
Recent scholarship has focused attention on the culture of elite women readers and writers in seventeenth-century China but so far women's roles in seventeenth-century Chinese informal and vernacular culture-as opposed to the officially recognized and imperially ordained culture of China-still await further exploration. The late Ming period witnessed a peculiar change in perceptions of women: men began not only to valorize women's voices, but also to venerate women as both morally and intellectually superior. As the Ming state started to crumble, its citizens-both men and women, literate and illiterate-searched for female leaders and role models and created images of goddesses more archetypal and powerful than any existing female deity. This panel attempts to shed light on this phenomenon by analyzing literary sources of that time and placing them into their historical context. Yenna Wu's paper examines the story of a woman who chooses martyrdom to save her family. Allan Barr's paper examines the glorification of women from another angle: it traces the impact of a romance between a late Ming scholar and a courtesan on representations of women in seventeenth-century literature, in particular in tales by Song Maocheng, Feng Menglong and Pu Songling. Daria Berg's paper shows how the apotheosis of an illiterate widow as political leader, savior and goddess reflects a historical moment. The female martyrs, saviors and saints whose stories this panel tries to unravel suggest that women played new roles at all levels of society in a century of collective anxiety and political breakdown. Scholars of both literature and history participate in this panel to explore the intersection of history and fiction.
Du Wei and Her Successors in the Classical Chinese Tale
Allan Barr, Pomona College
This paper examines the cultural ramifications of the ill-fated romance between the Songjiang scholar Fan Yunqian and the Suzhou courtesan Du Wei, lovers who died within months of each other in 1577, in particular the impact of this episode on subsequent representations of women in the writings of Song Maocheng, Feng Menglong and Pu Songling. Comments on the Du Wei story by such late-Ming literati as Chen Jiru, Pan Zhiheng and Shen Defu are evaluated, and Du Wei's suicide and legendary transformation into a powerful water spirit are compared to the tale of Du Shiniang (also known as Du Mei) and its ironic reversal in Pu Songling's "The Huo Woman." It is argued that a progressively more complex depiction of women developed as male authors, through their association with talented courtesans, came to endow their fictional heroines with qualities they admired in their real-life counterparts, and ascribed to female spirits powers of assertiveness and mobility characteristic of elite courtesans.
Visions of the Great Mother: Madame Chao in the Novel Marriage Destinies that
will Bring Society to its Senses (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan)
Daria Berg, University of Oxford
The theme of the Great Mother emerges as a leitmotif in the seventeenth-century vernacular Chinese novel Marriage Destinies that will Bring Society to its Senses (Xingshi yinyuan zhuan), but so far no critical study of this aspect has appeared. Recent research has examined how leading literati in seventeenth-century China began to valorize and glorify women poets and writers. But critical analysis of the novel Marriage Destinies suggests that not only the educated women in scholar elite circles began to attract attention. The story of Madame Chao in the novel depicts how an illiterate woman in provincial society gains a position of moral leadership and religious eminence by virtue of her immaculate morality. The present paper analyzes Madame Chao's transformation from virtuous widow to local leader and her posthumous apotheosis as a goddess, while comparing her representation with the literary context and the historical background of the novel. The mother-figure as goddess and savior in times of disaster dramatizes a millenarian ambiance that appears to have prevailed during the last years of Ming rule. The characterization of Madame Chao reflects the apprehension of the apocalypse and the search for a new kind of moral leadership. She appears as a model to replace the literati elite perceived as failing in their role as leaders on both the local and the national level.