China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Chi-ying Alice Wang, Purdue University
Chair: Daniel Hsieh, Purdue University
Discussant: Stuart H. Sargent, Colorado State University
This panel will present papers concerning women and love in Chinese literature and painting. Tan Dali explores the relationship between the Chinese poetess Li Qingzhao and the women recorded in Shishuo xinyu of the fifth century; how these "bold and witty" women and their intimate relations with their men serve as role models for Li. Daniel Hsieh’s analysis of the spiritual advancement in fox fairies focuses on the eighteenth-century work Liaozhai zhiyi, but he traces the evolution of this motif to the fourth century. Hsieh finds the heroines in Pu’s stories reveal "evidence of the changing status of women" during the late Ming and Qing Dynasties. Highlighting the active role some women play in Ming and Qing fiction, Sun Qiuqiu’s paper examines female characters who challenge the passive role assigned to them by conventional society. In her paper, Alice Wang will reinforce her colleagues’ views and reexamine the critical position that regards the female image in traditional Chinese paintings as merely "a signification of masculine power and superiority in Chinese society."
All of the papers on this panel have the same interest of presenting their argument in historical and social context. Together, these papers offer a coherent discussion of women and love in Chinese literature and painting from the early twelfth century to the eighteenth century. This panel is also characterized by its interdisciplinary approach that examines the subject from the perspectives of Chinese literature, linguistics, and art history.
Vital to this panel is our discussant, Professor Stuart Sargent. His expertise in the Song poetry and broad knowledge of Chinese literature will provide the necessary link for the individual presentations and offer insight into our shared subject.
Dali Tan, University of Maryland
Commenting on the excellence of Li Qingzhao’s "Postface" to Records on Metal and Stone, the Ming Dynast critic Mao Jin praised Li as being "free of the pedantic airs of Southern Song scholars" and having "achieved the style of the Wei and Jin Dynasties." Li’s extant poems clearly show her extreme familiarity with the Shishuo xinyu which depicts the words and deeds of the literati class in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. Indeed the Shishuo xinyu was one of her most treasured books, under her bed when she wrote her "Postface" in 1131.
In the world of Shishuo xinyu, on the basis of her outstanding literary talent, a woman could be talked about in terms that were almost exclusively used to describe male literati. Bold and witty women and intimate relationships and companionship between husbands and wives in the book were interesting to Li because they were at odds with social norms. In her personal life, Li assumed a role that might have been typical of a bold woman in the Shishuo xinyu. The fact that Li had to go back several centuries to find female models for herself also bespeaks the need of and difficulties for women to find role models to justify their behavior. In this paper, the author will explore the relationship between Li Qingzhao and the women in the world of Shishuo xinyu.
Daniel Hsieh, Purdue University
One of the most striking and oldest of motifs in the tradition of fox fairies is the idea that foxes could not only transform into human form, but that they were capable of a kind of "spiritual" advancement. As early as the fourth century, the Xuanzhong ji spoke of foxes transforming first into beautiful women, and then after one thousand years penetrating into Heaven and becoming celestial foxes. This image proved to be extremely suggestive to later thinkers and writers, and became basis of important themes in the late flowering of Ming and Qing fox stories and anecdotes. Pu Songling, the author of Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio), is especially well known for his many fox fairy heroines. The most obvious appeal of these heroines lies in their embodiment of male fantasies of the ideal woman. But they are more. The motif of spiritual advancement is an important sub-theme in many of Pu Songling’s fox stories. In such stories Pu Songling asks about the nature of women, and the ways in which they can mature and evolve. We find fox fairies changing from questionable sexual creatures into human wives and mothers, but also into world-weary immortals. Such heroines are revealing evidence of the changing status of women and of the new ideas about women that were appearing during the late Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Sun Qiuqiu, North Carolina State University
For many centuries, the motif of "men initiated love relationships" predominated in writings about male-female relations. However, after studying numerous novels of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the author found the motif of "women initiated love relationships" occurring repeatedly among women of different social status. One manifestation of this phenomenon is the transgressive actions of many young heroines who defy the social and sexual etiquette of pre-modern China. Another is women’s extra marital affairs and their efforts to secure their husbands’ sexual loyalty toward themselves. The author will also analyze the historical backgrounds of this motif in traditional Chinese society. This paper will include a detailed discussion of the psychological and linguistic characteristics of this motif