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Widmer, Ellen; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362353
Mao Qiling 毛奇齡 (1623–1713) was a celebrated poet, scholar, and official whose life bridged the transition from Ming to Qing. A lesser-known aspect of his life was his interest in and work with women writers, especially the group associated with Shang Jinglan 商景蘭 (1605–1680). In the mid-1670s, Xu Zhaohua 徐昭華 (17th–18th cent.), the daughter of Shang's younger sister Shang Jinghui 商景徽 (17th cent.), became Mao's disciple, one of the most famous. This article sets the Mao-Xu relationship in the context of Mao's other work with women and brings out its special features. After the Mao-Xu relationship became well known, most talented women who sought instruction still chose to work with female teachers, but some pursued the new alternative of working with a talented man.
Wang, Yuefan; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362366
The late Ming (16th–17th cent.) witnessed the newfound popularity of garden writing. This article questions how gentry women negotiated this traditionally male-dominant genre and even employed it to respond to the dynastic change. By analyzing the writings of a family and their acquaintances—namely, Shang Jinglan (1605–1676); her husband, Qi Biaojia (1602–1645); her children; and her male and female acquaintances—this article argues that gender relations significantly influenced not only Shang's writing but also the social-cultural meaning of the family garden. Shang's life before the fall of the Ming reflected entrenched gender divisions between interior and exterior. Dynastic collapse and her husband's suicide as a Ming martyr altered her persona from the feminine, silent figure in Qi's garden writings and pushed her to write explicitly about the family garden, Allegory Garden. The writings by Shang, her beloved family, and friends and acquaintances in turn transformed this garden into a symbol in remembrance of individual persons and the former dynasty. This article attempts to generate a new interdisciplinary discussion of late imperial women's place in the history of Chinese garden literature.
Yang, Binbin; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362379
Yangzhou was known for its “women” but not for women's literature. Underlying literary imaginations about the beautiful women of Yangzhou were salt wealth and a commerce of women serving the wealthy during the late imperial period. The notoriety of this commerce seemed to exclude the possibility that Yangzhou might also boast accomplished women writers, like the cultural heartland of the Jiangnan region. This study revisits these assumptions in light of the literary sources and prominent cases that testify to the vibrancy of women's literary activities in Yangzhou. The city was a transregional literary center and a favored destination of sojourning poets and merchants, particularly those from Huizhou, creating opportunities for women to attain literary fame. Central to this discussion is a poetic language about sites and spaces that became current in Yangzhou during the Qing era. For a woman poet to place herself at the sites of Yangzhou that were repeatedly celebrated by poets was to claim membership in the elite networks or trends of cultural emulation formed on the basis of the sites. Viewed in transregional contexts, sites and spaces comprised the spatial imaginaries in women's literature—defined broadly as the spatial ordering of the world, and Yangzhou's place in it, as imagined and written about by women.
Li, Xiaorong; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362392
Guixiu 閨秀 (cultivated gentlewomen of the inner chambers) and cainü 才女 (women of talent) arguably became authorly identities (referring to women writing in classical verse) as women's literary culture took shape in Ming-Qing China. However, the guixiu and cainü were gradually eclipsed by their rising “modern” sisters, xin nüxing 新女性 (new women) and nü zuojia 女作家 (women writers), during the late-Qing reform (1890s) and the early-Republican New Culture movement (1910s–1920s). This study provides a historical investigation into two cases of the literary practice of men and women who carried the legacy of their Ming-Qing predecessors into the Republican era: Wang Wenru 王文濡 (1867–1935) and his Xiangyan zazhi 香艷雜誌 (Xiangyan Magazine, 1914–1916) and Gu Xianrong 顧憲融 (1901–1955), who published the Hongfan jingshe nü dizi ji 紅梵精舍女弟子集 (Collection of Female Disciples from the Abode of Red Brahman, 1928). They reveal the persistence of guixiu culture in a diversified and transformed world of literary production and consumption from the 1910s to the 1920s.
Theiss, Janet; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362405
This article examines the unusual life of the poet and painter Wang Liang (ca. 1720–1790). Granddaughter of a prominent Jiaxing bibliophile and collector, she lost her father in infancy and married into a respected Huzhou family of officials only to witness their demise amidst a very public sex and corruption scandal in 1740, which also implicated her own wealthy merchant family. In the wake of this disaster, she and her husband severed their family ties and lived out their years in genteel poverty, childless. Surviving her husband by over twenty-five years, she fashioned an independent life and a self-image, echoed by observers, of Daoist detachment from the proverbial dust of the world while cultivating relationships with prominent male mentors and female artists across Jiangnan. As poet, painter, and player of the zither and the game of Go, Wang Liang at times articulated a vision of explicitly ungendered artistic perfection resembling aspects of the androgynous ideal associated with the culture of the Ming-Qing transition. Yet she was also poignantly aware that she was still embedded in relationships that pulled her back into family obligation, gendered hierarchy, and social exchange. I delve into her extant poetry and commentary about her to present her life and art as a contrapuntal play between embedded and transcendent modes of identity and expression.
Fong, Grace S.; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362418
This article engages the ekphrastic mode—the literary representation of visual representation—to examine the female gaze instantiated in women's poetry on paintings of beautiful women in the Ming and Qing periods. Through four case studies, it shows how women poets and painters participated in the visual culture of late imperial China and negotiated gendered difference in their aesthetic vision and artistic production.
Epstein, Maram; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362431
This article focuses on Zaisheng yuan as an intertextual work of creative fiction that draws from male-authored xiaoshuo fiction as well as earlier literary tanci novels. This case study discusses Zaisheng yuan as a key text in an affective archive of narrative works written by women that provides insights into how elite women mentally negotiated the social and ideological expectations that informed their lives. In addition to looking at how women authors rewrote the conventions associated with scholar-beauty romances, the chastity cult, and the gendered symbols associated with proper order, this article discusses tanci novels as a unique outlet for women's explorations of autonomous will (zhi 志) and imaginings of emotional justice.
Moyer, Jessica Dvorak; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362444
This article reads exemplary biographies of chaste widows and women who committed suicide to preserve their chastity in the 1656 Yuding Nei ze yanyi 御定内則衍義 (Imperially Commissioned Expanded Meaning of the “Inner Standards”) by Fu Yijian 傅以漸 (1609–1665, jinshi 1646). In this anthology commissioned by the Shunzhi emperor on behalf of his mother, Fu's commentary emphasizes both the agency of individual women and the mutual resonance of personal virtue and political order. He not only praises the exemplars' virtue but also their agency, intelligence, and strategy. He explicitly acknowledges the different factors that could make chastity more difficult and states that in some situations, multiple courses of action were possible. He comments both on his heroines' political ability and on the political importance of recognizing chastity. Finally, in a context where women's chastity was often linked to political loyalism to the fallen Ming, Fu uses these biographies in a very different way: he presents chastity exemplars of conquered dynasties as foils to the decadent society around them. His commentary is thus recognizably tailored to his audience's circumstances as Manchu and Mongolian imperial women and his own as a Chinese male scholar at the beginning of the Qing.
Blanchard, Lara C. W.; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362457
Yutai huashi (History of Painting from Jade Terrace), published in 1837, is rare among Chinese art-historical texts, not only for its focus on women painters of the imperial period but also for its female authorship. While the text preserves information on women who painted, its acknowledged author, Tang Shuyu, draws connections between women authors (defined broadly here to include both artists and writers) and virtuous women. First, her organization of the text's first five chapters foregrounds the social identities of women painters—a system that hints at their virtue. Second, biographies of women painters who are filial, chaste, and/or faithful appear throughout, but these qualities are emphasized in the “Separate Record” at the book's end, the only section with significant amounts of new writing. Third, the text positions Tang Shuyu as a woman of virtue herself. Tang compiled materials for her book with contributions from her husband, Wang Yuansun, and she establishes herself as a figure deferential to authority, a woman who begins most passages with a source citation and never develops a clear editorial voice. Scholars of the history of Chinese art increasingly use gender as a category of analysis to understand the accomplishments of women artists and patrons as well as representations of female figures. This article analyzes Yutai huashi's gendered subjects and discussions of gender roles as a means of examining both the contributions of women authors and the priorities of Chinese art-historical writers.
Huang, Martin W.; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362470
This article investigates how sons in the scholar-literati class in late imperial China promoted their mothers as Confucian exemplars. From the position and perspectives of a son, what were the strategies of promotion, and how might these strategies be related to the different social roles Confucian literati were expected to play? Through an examination of sons' written tributes to their mothers in a variety of biographical and commemorative genres, this article argues that these writings show an increasing enthusiasm to promote mothers as Confucian exemplars during this historical period, and that this phenomenon was related to these writers' endeavors to promote themselves as members of the Confucian cultural elite and to raise their own social profiles. Some of these writings also expose sons' potential conflicting obligations in the context of polygamy, in which the mother's status as wife or concubine of the father could complicate the son's commemoration and raise questions about the proper ways in which the son could show respect to his different mothers (whether formal mother or concubine mother), especially when his own birth mother happened to be his father's concubine.
Wang, Guojun; Yingde, Guo; Fong, Grace S.; Wang, Guojun
2023 Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture
doi: 10.1215/23290048-10362483
Recent studies of Chinese history and literature have revealed the important role of violence—actual and representational—in constructing gendered subjectivities in late imperial China. This article investigates the relationship between violence and female agency through a case study of literary representations of a concubine who was cannibalized during the defense of Suiyang amid the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) in the Tang dynasty. As a result of that event, the ethically questionable act of cannibalism engendered an assortment of writings down through late imperial China. Although historical writings before the Ming dynasty frequently praise the concubine's husband for sacrificing her, a series of dramatic works starting in the Ming feature the concubine character in contention with her husband. This paper parses those materials to reveal vastly different characterizations of the cannibalized woman—as a loyal concubine, a female knight-errant, an independent state subject, and a maternal deity. We suggest that authorship, generic traditions, family-state dynamics, ethnic relations, and religions together influenced the representations of the concubine. In particular, moving further away from the literati writing tradition, literature and performance derived from the story ascribed increasingly potent agency to the concubine character in late imperial China.