women's literary history: inventing tradition in modern china

Women’s Literary History:

Inventing Tradition in Modern China

Megan M. Ferry

In the introduction to The Literary Lives of Chinese Women (Zhong-guo nüxing de wenxue shenghuo), the literary historian Tan Zhengbi

(1901–91) affi rms that history is the “play wherein the two sexes act their parts.”1 With this statement Tan seeks to demonstrate women’s importance throughout Chinese history, and in his work he cites liter-ary references to the mythical couple Fuxi and Nüwa as an example of the equal partnership of men and women. His analysis, which promises new knowledge about women, elevates them to the same social status as men. Emerging from one of several early-twentieth-century discourses about constructing a Chinese modernity, Tan’s book set out to compen-sate for women’s perceived absence from public spaces and canonical treatises throughout history and to grant women writers legitimacy in rewriting cultural history altogether.

In short, Tan’s purpose was to make women historical subjects. In early-twentieth-century Chinese social, cultural, and scientifi c debates, it was assumed that women’s exclusion from public society hindered their full participation in Chinese culture. Seeking to recuperate female agency from centuries of patriarchal oppression, such debates underscored the Chinese preoccupation with humanism at this time. In legitimating women as historical subjects throughout Chinese history, Tan and others promoted a female personhood with both local and

Modern Language Quarterly 66:3 (September 2005): 299–327. © 2005 University of Washington.

1 Tan Zhengbi, Zhongguo nüxing de wenxue shenghuo (1930; rpt. Yangzhou: Jiangsu guangling guji keyinshe, 1998), 2.

300 MLQ September 2005

universal values. Thus cultural reformers like Tan looked to women’s sociopolitical and literary positions as signposts en route to the modern development of China. They pursued women’s education to raise the country’s standing among world cultures, arguing that China’s feudal and patriarchal past hindered not only women’s sociopolitical and liter-ary development but the development of Chinese society as a whole. As long as women remained only partial citizens, they reasoned, China’s modernization agenda could not succeed. Directed by leading intel-lectuals in philosophy, literature, and the social and natural sciences, the reassessment of women’s historical position took place largely in print media. Various publications outlined the problems that had led to the dismissal of women’s historical subjectivity, considered how edu-cation would change these conditions, and reconfi gured emancipation themes from abroad for application at home. As pedagogical tools in the newly devised education system, literary histories had therefore a signifi cant effect on the creation of a national imaginary and on the development of China’s new citizens.

Literary histories fi rst appeared in China at the turn of the twenti-eth century as the basis of the newly scientifi c study of literature in the universities.2 Emulating Japanese-written Chinese literary histories, Lin Chuanjia wrote textbooks for the Beijing Teacher’s College in 1904.3 Other literary histories, written to provide “the knowledge that citizens [guomin] should have,” also played prominent roles in the teaching of a national literature (guowen).4 Lydia H. Liu points out that the concept of national learning (guoxue) gave the Chinese “a theoretical language to talk about race, civilization, and national identity, and to deal with the contradiction of being Chinese in a modern world.”5 By the 1930s

2 In 1913 the Chinese Department of Education decreed that humanities stud-ies would be divided into philosophy, literature, history, and geography (Dai Yan, Wenxue shi de quanli [The Power of Literary History] [Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2002], 8).

3 In 1898 Sasakawa Rinpu (1870–1949) had coauthored Zhongguo wenxue shi (Chinese Literary History). Lin’s fi rst literary history was also titled Zhongguo wenxue shi (1910).

4 From Zhang Zhichun, Zhongguo wenxue shi (Chinese Literary History) (1915), quoted in Dai, 2.

5 Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 240.

Ferry Inventing Tradition in Modern China 301

the Chinese canonical literary tradition had been reformulated to grant vernacular fi ction, folk tales, women’s literature, marginal poetic forms, and literature produced since the turn of the century status equal with that of the orthodox poetic tradition. Combining elements of Chinese traditional and Western literary studies, the new literary his-tories adopted a linear progression of history to trace the development of a national essence (guocui) and to identify it as the adhesive binding together a new national collectivity.

Thanks to the pioneering work of present-day scholars on the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1911), we have access to texts that show how the collection and promotion of women’s literature constructed women as icons in premodern China. In the prefaces to and commentaries in anthologies of women’s literature and literary criticism that these scholars collected, the representation of women writers follows a tra-ditional pattern established since at least the sixteenth century. These works often point to the lack of attention paid to women authors and to the failure of the literary world to preserve their writings, which the anthologies had rescued from obscurity.6 Frequently, the sympathetic compilers make what they deem a necessary correction to women’s social marginalization by rectifying women’s absence from the canon. Despite social prejudices against women as artistic producers, they argue, women’s textual purity and emotional aesthetic expression merit consideration, and an anthology of their literature offers a unique per-spective on the world. Early-twentieth-century historians continued to view women’s cultural production in this vein.

6 See the essays in Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); as well as Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthol-ogy of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). The latter relies heavily on a bibliography of Chinese women’s texts, including several prefaces to anthologies and other collections of women’s writings throughout the centuries, that Hu Wenkai compiled in the 1940s and published in 1957 (Lidai funü zhuzuo kao [A Study of Women Writers of Past Dynasties] [rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuban-she, 1985]). Save one or two titles used by Tan Zhengbi, the works I examine in this essay make no reference to the collections that Hu cites, so I cannot determine if their authors had access to those collections or chose to omit them. In any event, my argument is predicated not on the infl uence of previous texts but on the ingrained cultural reading of women’s absence. The reliance of contemporary Ming and Qing scholars on Hu and their strategies for recuperating women writers are beyond the scope of this essay.


In this essay I examine paratextual elements (i.e., introductions and commentaries) in three literary histories of pre-Republican (pre-1911) texts: Xie Wuliang’s (1884–1964) History of Chinese Women’s Literature (Zhongguo funü wenxue shi; 1916), Tan’s Literary Lives of Chinese Women (1930), and Tao Qiuying’s Chinese Women and Literature (Zhongguo funü yu wenxue; 1933).7 I argue that the story of women’s absence is the driv-ing force behind Xie’s, Tan’s, and Tao’s textual narratives of modernity and national inclusion and that these narratives reconceive the female subject in the face of modernity. Instead of examining the twentieth-century readings of specifi c writers (which vary little from canonical interpretations), I focus on homogenizing narratives of female writing practice and, in turn, on the aestheticization of a literary feminine co-opted in the construction of Chinese modernity.

The introductions and commentaries I examine constitute only a portion of the texts that engaged China’s developing national con-sciousness and women’s sociopolitical status. My purpose is to illustrate one of the many ways of representing women in the early twentieth cen-tury, not to account for all literary histories written during this time.8 Like the Ming and Qing anthologies, these narratives pretended to draw women from the margins to the center. Although dealing with actual historical subjects, they represent women as abstract political entities capable of using their art to advance China’s nation-building project. Such women as Cai Yan (178–?), Xue Tao (768–834), Yu Xuanji (844–68), Zhu Shuzhen (1063–1106), and Li Qingzhao (1084–1151) were singled out as exemplars.9 These literary histories establish

7 Xie Wuliang, Zhongguo funü wenxue shi (1916; rpt. Beijing: Zhongjiu guji chu-banshe, 1992); Tao Qiuying, Zhongguo funü yu wenxue (1933; rpt. Taizhong: Landeng chubanshe, 1975).

8 Apart from the three works I study in this essay, Beijing Library’s Minguo shiqi zongshumu (1911–1949): Wenxue lilun, shijie wenxue, Zhongguo wenxue (General Catalog of the Republican Era, 1911–1949: Literary Theory, World Literature, Chinese Literature) (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1992) references two women’s literary histories pub-lished before 1927 and four between 1930 and 1935. It has sixteen entries for literary histories from 1910 to 1927. A Ying’s (Qian Xingcun) (1900–1977) 1936 edition of Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi (The Compendium of Modern Chinese Literature) covers publica-tions from 1917 to 1927 and includes some literary histories, but it does not cite a history of women’s literature. I would argue that women’s literature served a different political purpose after 1936. A Ying did, however, include two histories by the women authors and historians Chen Hengzhe and Feng Yuanjun.

9 Cai Yan was noted for her sacrifi ce to a barbarian tribe and her subsequent return; the courtesan Yu Xuanji, for her writings that recognized herself as a part of


a unique inheritance for modern women writers to embrace, but they also bind them to a tradition based on narratives of their historical oppression. Indeed, these histories subject women to a “new patriarchy” in the modern nationalist context.10 Despite the presumed revision of the Chinese literary canon, women’s literature still receives a largely traditional reading, and the histories privilege women’s symbolic value in the national consciousness rather than grant them broader agency in the culture.

Education, Gender Equality, and Morality

Literary histories written in the early twentieth century echo the tra-ditional Confucian interpretation that women’s morality is essential to their production of good literature. They value works that express a purity of emotions untainted by the desire for fame or fortune. In The History of Chinese Women’s Literature Xie Wuliang criticizes previous anthologies for their selection strategies, such as including poetry but not other belletristic genres (or vice versa) or admitting lascivious or otherwise questionable works.11 After the introduction he does not

humanity; and Li Qingzhao, for her command of language. Zhu Shuzhen, although perhaps apocryphal, was included nevertheless. All were touted for their literary talent. The histories examined in this essay all emphasize different aspects of these writers and their works. There is no consensus among the histories as to the selection of authors.

10 Partha Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Women,” in A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 252.

11 Xie mentions two anthologies specifi cally: Zhong Baijing, Mingyuan shigui (Ming Dynasty); and Wang Xijiao, Zhiji (Qing Dynasty). Xie’s own book, revised in 1931 and again in 1933, follows a classifi cation structure typical for its time in that it borrows from the Western periodization: Ancient (Zhou Dynasty to Warring States period, 1066–221 BCE), Middle Age (the Han Dynasties to the Five Dynasties, 206 BCE–960 CE), and Modern Age (Song to Ming Dynasty, 960–1644). Xie does not discuss the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), although he hopes to do so subsequently, despite the fact that much, he says, has already been published on the subject. The History of Chinese Women’s Literature divides eras into dynastic groupings and then into genres or specifi c authors. The dynastic groupings offer discussion on “Five Dynasties women’s literature” or “Song Dynasty women’s miscellaneous writings.” The genres include court literature, Shijing (Book of Songs), fi ve-word poetry, miscellaneous lit-erature, Music Bureau poetry, courtesan literature, ci poetry, and boudoir literature, among others. With each genre or historical era, Xie unites women’s literary partici-pation with a brief explanation of the evolution of literature up to that point.


quote from these or any Ming and Qing anthologies of women’s lit-erature, save excerpts from Zhang Xuecheng’s (1738–1801) Women’s Learning (Fuxue) that underscore how much more egalitarian his his-tory is than Zhang’s. Xie argues that in his elitism Zhang overlooked the artistic capabilities of women of the lower social classes.12 His occasional citations of Zhang’s orthodox interpretations function as a superfi cial counternarrative that pretends to smoothe out and treat as insignifi cant the class differences among women. For Xie, dismissing Zhang becomes a theoretical prop on which to build his own narrative of recovery. He regards women, on the whole, as members of a singular class who write from the heart.

As a leader in the reformulation of Chinese literary tradition in the modern context, Xie edited or authored several introductory books on the history of Chinese literature and on various traditional poetic forms. Published by Shanghai’s Zhonghua publishing house, which concentrated largely on textbooks, Xie’s histories went through several reprintings over the next two decades.13 They combined Western and Chinese literary traditions, refl ecting the desire of intellectuals to com-pare China with other nations and to defi ne a distinct Chinese identity. Xie’s histories consolidated a defi nition of literature that remains stan-dard today (see Dai, 9).14 His history of women’s literature should be read, then, as evidence of a strategy to legitimate China’s literary tradi-tion in a global forum by embracing a Western-inspired humanism.

Xie’s preface to The History of Chinese Women’s Literature equates China with the West by framing his history within an international context and by noting that both the East and the West emphasized gen-

12 See Susan Mann’s analysis in “Fuxue (Women’s Learning) by Zhang Xuech-eng (1738–1801): China’s First History of Women’s Culture,” Late Imperial China 13 (1992): 40–62.

13 Shixue zhinan (Guide to the Study of Poetry; 1918) was in its sixteenth edition by 1934; Pianwen zhinan (A Guidebook to Rhythmic Prose; 1918), in its tenth by 1931; and Cixue zhinan (A Guidebook to the Study of Ci Poetry; 1918), in its tenth by 1935. Xie’s Zhongguo dawenxue shi (The Great History of Chinese Literature; 1918) was in its sixteenth edition by 1921 and its eighteenth, under a different publisher, by 1940. The Zhong-hua publishing house was one of the largest in China at the time.

14 In the new literature movement of the early twentieth century, Chinese intel-lectuals combined the traditional concepts that “literature conveys the dao” (wen yi zai dao) and “poetry expresses the will” (shi yan zhi) with Western Romanticism’s belief that literature expresses emotions and ideas.


der equality, female education, and morality. In light of what he saw as a global trend to assert gender equality, Xie considered his discussion of it a step toward recovering a universal principle (gongli) of equal-ity. Rejecting a biological explanation for women’s social inferiority, he argues that gender inequality resulted from human social interac-tion, especially the practice of polygamy. Chinese social reformers in the late nineteenth century regarded polygamy as a threat to the vir-tue of sentiment because it undermined the moral foundation of the family.15 The relationship between marriage and the literary sphere was not exclusively a phenomenon of the nineteenth century, however, since women’s greater access to the literary world in earlier centuries had brought about a reevaluation of moral conduct then, too.16 Nev-ertheless, polygamy provided modern intellectuals with a reminder of China’s feudal past and precipitated their interest in other kinship for-mulations.

Xie’s references to gender equality and marital practices draw on discussions fi ltering in from the West that upheld Europe and the United States as model societies in which women could gain access to education and advocate for political equality through the vote. His his-torical reconstruction asserts that there is no difference in intelligence between men and women and none between China and the West.17 He comments that China’s current interest in gender equality could enable women to achieve the same conditions there that they enjoyed in other countries: “Nowadays women’s learning is gradually receiving attention in educational circles, and this should be encouraged. With each pass-ing year China becomes more comparable with the United States and

15 Haiyan Lee, “All the Feelings That Are Fit to Print: The Community of Senti-ment and the Literary Public Sphere in China, 1900–1918,” Modern China 27 (2001): 291–327.

16 Dorothy Ko shows how the privatization of cultural life in the seventeenth century (in the form of admittance to theater performances and scholarly exchanges in the home) granted women access to events that had previously taken place exclu-sively outside the home (Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994]). Moreover, this change led to a new confi guration of gender relationships based on “companionate mar-riages” (86–90, 179).

17 This sentiment refl ected a general trend among intellectuals of the time (Pra-senjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 128).


Europe. Men and women can fi nally reach equality. This is not just a literary phenomenon” (sec. 1, chap. 2, 2).18

Xie regards women’s social position and literary productivity dur-ing the Zhou Dynasty (1066–256 BCE) as exemplary precisely because women of the nobility were educated at that time by means of court protocols and rituals. Such an education enabled them to assume infl uential public roles, through which they participated in various forms of Chinese cultural production. A court lady (jiubin) oversaw female education, which consisted of womanly morality, speech, bear-ing, and work; a shamaness (nüzhu) instructed the queen in offering sacrifi ces to gods or ancestors (neijisi) and in praying in the temple (neidaoci); and a female scholar or historian (nüshi) supervised the eti-quette and deportment of the queen in relationship to the king and his wives and concubines.19 By reviewing these practices, Xie attempts to demonstrate how women at that time gave moral and social stability to Chinese society and thus participated in an egalitarian social system. Although he does not advocate a return to these rituals, the rest of his history emphasizes women’s morality and bemoans the advent of Con-fucianism, which, he argues, had made women’s social status decline. His assessment privileges a strict pre-Confucian hierarchical order, ignoring women’s participation in other forms of education and over-looking informal sociopolitical and socioeconomic practices through-out the centuries that extended beyond the rituals.20 Thus, while not redefi ning women’s roles and mores, he sought to relocate these moral standards in the modern nation.

Early in his history Xie underscores the political purposes of moral

18 Xie’s history is divided into sections and then chapters, with repeated pagi-nation. References to section, chapter, and page are given in this essay to prevent confusion.

19 The Zhou rites codifi ed standard comportment for gender relations. Leg-end attributes them to the Duke of Zhou, who devised them after overthrowing the Shang people. See Du Fangqin, “The Rise and Fall of the Zhou Rites: A Rational Foundation for the Gender Relationship Model,” in The Chalice and the Blade in Chi-nese Culture: Gender Relations and Social Models, ed. Jiayin Min (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1995), 169–225.

20 For a discussion of private women educators see Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).


21 Liu Xiang (77?–6? BCE) wrote the Lienü zhuan, and the other texts are canon-ical dynastic histories ranging from 770 BCE to 420 CE.

22 The biographies represent a certain female ideal, which included loyalty to the state, self-sacrifi ce for one’s family, and chastity (Patricia Buckley Ebrey, ed., Chi-nese Civilization and Society: A Sourcebook [New York: Free, 1981], 72).

23 These periods are widely considered the golden age of Chinese philosophical and political thought.

24 Scholars who passed the imperial examinations were awarded political posts. As women were not allowed to sit for these examinations, the xiucai and jinshi degrees conferred on them were indeed special. By anachronistically using a twentieth-century term to describe the Ming Dynasty as a nation, Xie reads the present time back into the past.

education by quoting extensively from such canonical texts as Biogra-phies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan), Annals of the Wu and Yue (Wu Yue chunqiu), Han History (Han shu), and Jin History (Jin shu).21 Most of the biographies selected from Biographies of Exemplary Women emphasize women’s formal contribution to politics and government, thus linking women’s morality to the welfare of the state and providing little of Xie’s own commentary.22 It appears that Xie’s interpretation differs little from the canonical views that had legitimated prejudice against women for centuries by confi ning them within codifi ed norms of behavior.

In stressing an orthodox interpretation of women’s political rela-tionship to the state, Xie creates a parallel between the past and the present. Interspersed throughout the history, his commentary argues that women’s moral stability exemplifi ed their patriotism. By applying the term patriotism (aiguo zhi zhi) anachronistically to women of the entire Zhou era, including the Spring and Autumn period (722–476 BCE) and the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), Xie reworks the past to satisfy the present need to view women as participants in the project of nation building.23 In addition to highlighting women’s patrio-tism throughout history, Xie recalls that a number of women received offi cial titles usually granted to those most loyal to the state. When dis-cussing the boudoir literature of the Ming Dynasty, he points out that the nation (guojia) rewarded women with the female xiucai and jinshi degrees, which he believes indicated that society at that time had evalu-ated women on the same basis as men.24 He argues that this recogni-tion of women as the literary equals of men spurred the circulation and preservation of women’s texts: “This is why so many [works from


this period] are still extant” (sec. 3, chap. 8, 38). Nevertheless, Xie regards these women as lacking the moral qualities of early women writers, whom he praises (sec. 3, chap. 8, 38). His equation of liter-ary talent with social morality signals that women writers should be granted a place in Chinese literary history only if their works exemplify the ancient moral values. By recontextualizing women’s historical posi-tion in the literary fi eld, Xie uses the same value judgment from which he wishes to distance himself. In this sense, the “gender equality” con-ferred through literary or political degrees lost its performative value, since it meant acknowledging women writers as cultural agents—that is, as active subjects in the state—but also rendering them dependent on state-sponsored identities. In other words, Xie’s search for universal equality in post-Zhou history predicated women’s literary value on the very literary and political structure he wished to eradicate.

This paradox becomes still more evident in Xie’s examination of the differences between courtesans’ and noblewomen’s writings. Echo-ing Zhang Xuecheng, Xie accepts the validity of courtesan literature, since courtesans, like noblewomen, understood the ancients and could transform expressions of longing between the sexes into political statements without being lewd. He also remarks that many courtesans had been noblewomen before weak husbands and dynastic rulership reduced them in circumstances (sec. 2, chap. 5, 33). In his discussion of women’s morality, patriotism, and social status, Xie portrays women’s writings as politically perceptive only to the extent that they are morally pure. The women who demonstrate loyalty to the state refl ect what Xie’s contemporaries hoped would help transform a Chinese society that was as nationalist as it was universalist and that was as constitutive of a new female citizenry as it was of a community of women that complemented rather than threatened a patriarchal notion of the state.25

Presumably to support his premise that the literature and women

25 See Rebecca E. Karl, “ ‘Slavery,’ Citizenship, and Gender in Late Qing China’s Global Context,” in Rethinking the 1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China, ed. Rebecca E. Karl and Peter Zarrow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 213–44; and Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torge-son, introduction to Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women’s Literature from the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1–38.


of China are the equals of those of other nations, Xie includes a com-parative discussion of several foreign writers. His history emerged at a time when intellectuals were deciding what constituted literary talent or value. The advent of translated foreign literary and social texts forced China to undergo a “major spatial and cultural reorientation” vis-à-vis the modern world (Liu, 81). The gendered foreign other, especially the “New Woman” in Western literature, helped China reimagine itself.26 Drawing attention to the fact that Chinese and foreign literatures inter-sected, especially through translations and exchanges of women’s litera-ture, as long ago as the Zhou period, Xie attributes this contact to the political meetings between female leaders of the Xi Wangmu state and the emperor Mu of Zhou. For Xie, the similarity of Xi Wangmu’s writ-ings to the canonical Guofeng (the “folk song” section of the Confucian anthology Shijing, or Book of Songs) gives evidence not only of China’s fi rst contact with foreign women’s poetry but of the fi rst translations of foreign literature into Chinese. Xie fi nds in Xi Wangmu’s writings and early Chinese women’s literature a propensity for the same lyrical form (geci), which he traces to the education that both foreign and Chinese women received in the arts (sec. 1, chap. 2, 10–11). Instead of presuming its inferiority, therefore, Xie places Chinese literature on an equal foot-ing with its foreign counterpart by asserting that ancient Chinese cul-ture had made contact with the other and successfully assimilated it.

Noting that during the Tang Dynasty foreign concubines of Chi-nese government offi cials wrote poetry, Xie includes them and other writings by foreign women authors who wrote in Chinese. He cites Xue Yao of the Dongming kingdom and also women from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and the Liao Dynasty (907–1125), in what is today Inner Mongolia and northeastern China. Xie concludes his book with a noted Korean writer, Xu Jingshen, criticized during the Ming Dynasty for her plagiarism of earlier Chinese poets.27 The inclusion of these foreign women without additional reference or explanation leaves unanswered questions bearing on Chinese colonialism, the domestication of for-eign writers, and the continued relegation of women writers to nonca-

26 Hu Ying, Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

27 See the criticism by Liu Rushi (1618–64) in Chang and Saussy, 698–700.


nonical status.28 The reference to Xi Wangmu further illustrates Xie’s use of women’s literature to defi ne China’s modern cultural context and China’s struggle with the “threefold predicament of nationalism, universalism, and gender equality” (Hu Ying, 10). His references to the fi rst infl ux of translated works by female foreigners contextualize the contemporary infl ux of translations into China as a corpus that the Chinese literary world eventually would domesticate or exoticize.

Women and the Nation

In a history written nearly fi fteen years after Xie’s, Tan Zhengbi casts women’s literature as the defi nitive emotional expression of women’s historical condition. That Tan asserts the essential sentimentality of women’s literature at a time when China confronted both Japanese imperialism and internal political struggles suggests a conscious attempt to remove women from the political, even though many women participated in political and social organizations by the late 1920s.29 Tan focuses on the personal and emotional—the apolitical—aspects of women’s lives and texts. Like Xie, he portrays women as stifl ed by the sociopolitical corruption around them. For him, they remain symbolic of a national essence, the spirit of the culture, well into the 1930s. Tan views the emotional outpourings of women as important gestures of resistance to their oppression, but this resistance does not represent a challenge to the patriarchal order.

Like other early-twentieth-century literary historians, Tan locates the emotional purity of women in a time that predated their social oppression: “In the matriarchal age, one’s bloodline was defi nitely pure. After the rise of the patriarchal age, marriage appeared as a form

28 The placement of women’s writings at the end, or in noncanonical sections, of literary anthologies, alongside the work of foreigners, monks, and other mar-ginalized persons, is discussed in Widmer and Chang, in Ko, and in Susan Mann, “Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, ed. Christina K. Gilmartin et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27–46.

29 Christina K. Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Com-munist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 134–35.


of seizure, then of commerce, and ultimately of matchmaking, all of which have a documented history up until the present day. Women suffered male domination during this long period. Their entire lives were fi lled with inequality, and they fell victim to all kinds of irratio-nal, brutal oppression” (5). Like Xie, Tan invokes a literary origin based not only on marital relations but on the equal partnership of the sexes.30 Echoing Xie’s appeal to ancient models, Tan considers the ori-gins of women’s literature music-based, because ancient women used music and song to celebrate their marriages. This assumption drives his discussion of women writing in various genres, mainly poetic ones, throughout history.31 Tan’s history not only fi lls the void of women’s perceived literary absence from the canon but constructs a female writ-ing tradition based solely on emotional reactions to experiences with men.32

Xie’s and Tan’s aesthetic of the authentic subject derives from the belief that women had once existed outside the Confucian patriarchy that had precipitated the crisis of modernity. This crisis—of linear his-torical continuity within China and of horizontal universality within the global—could be resolved only by the redemptive female subject that transcended it. This notion stemmed largely from the translated works of fi n de siècle European thinkers such as Georg Simmel, J. J. Bachofen, August Bebel, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who strived to fi nd in the guise of the “eternal feminine” a lost “truth” that modernity had clouded over.33 Discussions of women’s historical position in China at the turn of the century followed Bachofen’s argument that a matriar-chal civilization predated patriarchy. This argument provided a basis

30 Xie’s narrative begins with the mythical couple Fuxi and Nüwa.31 Tan equates literary expression with personal history in his investigations

of such genres as Han and Jin Dynasty classical poetry (shifu); Six Dynasties Music Bureau poetry; Sui, Tang, and Five Dynasties poetry; Song ci poetry; Ming and Qing writing; popular fi ction (tongsu xiaoshuo); and sung poetry (tanci).

32 Tan argues that women came late to writing novels because they were not permitted to read them until years after the works had been in circulation. Writing novels provided them with an emotional outlet and also a creative one, since they were kept from writing in other genres that bestowed intellectual recognition and political posts (388).

33 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 50.


for the historians’ nostalgic quest to locate a utopian authenticity for humanity. Like their Western counterparts, Chinese cultural reform-ers reworked both Enlightenment and Romantic worldviews of autono-mous individuals and equality as they tried to account for the passions and for ethnic, religious, or regional diversity. For these reformers, women, like the passions, transgressed the boundaries of the rational and constituted an originary, prerational state.

The association of purity, beauty, and emotion with the aesthetic female subject at the turn of the century refl ected a redefi nition of lit-erature that emphasized the personal and emotional aspects of human-ity. For Tan, literature was no longer the scholarly study of philosophy and history; it was an aesthetic principle. To free literature from the tethers of a Confucian moral tradition, Tan wrote in The History of the Evolution of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxue jinhua shi) that

if we use psychology to analyze the characteristics of all learning [xue-shu] in the world, we could say that philosophy belongs to the will, sci-ence to knowledge, and literature to emotion. Philosophy seeks what is good [shan]; science, what is true [zhen]; and literature, what is beautiful [mei]. Therefore, the nature of literature must be a beauti-ful emotion. So-called beautiful emotion is an aesthetic thing divorced from the right and wrong, good and bad, dichotomies of real life. It arouses in us a pleasant feeling, . . . even in times of suffering. . . . Dur-ing happy times, laughter is a pleasant emotion; during bitter times, a good cry that gives vent to the vast storehouse of hidden hatred also brings about a pleasant feeling. Why are mountains, water, fl owers, and the moon all literary topics? It is because they rise above the good and bad, right or wrong, of real life and readily give people a beautiful feel-ing. On the other hand, morality, money, and fame have all been cast aside as literary topics, because they contain the good and bad, right and wrong, of reality and make people feel hatred. So-called beauti-ful emotion is simply the uncritical, naive, and fl awless real feeling of humanity; it itself has only good intentions and possesses no bad real feelings. “Truth” and “goodness” are not the aims of literature, but if emotion departs from “truth” and “goodness,” it cannot be considered a beautiful emotion.34

34 Tan Zhengbi, Zhongguo wenxue jinhua shi (Shanghai: Guangming shuju, 1929), 6.


For Tan, literature must arouse one’s sympathy and incite one’s imagi-nation. He was so committed to redefi ning literature that he assigned it the feminine gender: “She [ta] moves and adjusts with the movements and changes of human life; she is forever together with human life, standing in front of the never-ceasing-to-be-created big road, forever restless, and without limits.35 This is what I call literature: what mod-ern people recognize as literature” (9). Tan justifi es the need for liter-ary histories to relocate women writers and posits himself as the one to instruct others about China’s transition into modernity: “[Literary history] narrates literature’s evolution and investigates the cause and effect of the vicissitudes of change in order to let subsequent writers know the trend of literature from today onward and set forth in a con-structive direction” (10–11).

By the time he wrote his Literary Lives, Tan was an established lit-erary historian, having already published two general Chinese liter-ary histories and histories of Chinese fi ction as teaching materials.36 Crediting his predecessors, including Xie, Tan offers in his introduc-tion a broad defi nition of literature, including fi ction (xiaoshuo) and a Qing Dynasty oral narrative form in which sung poetry (tanci) is the primary vehicle.37 He orients his discussion on women’s literature around the historical low social status and perceived physical and men-tal weaknesses of women. By drawing inspiration from the “women and literature” studies of his contemporaries Huiqun (n.d.) and Hu

35 In classical Chinese, a generic (masculine) ta stood for “he,” “she,” and “it.” By the early twentieth century, a feminine ta had come into vogue to distinguish the gender of people and certain objects. The two tas are pronounced the same, but “she” is composed with the “female” radical instead of the “person” radical.

36 Guangming Press published Zhongguo wenxue shi dagang (A General Historical Outline of Chinese Literature; 1925) as well as Zhongguo wenxue jinhua shi (see n. 34). Tan’s Zhongguo nüxing de wenxue shenghuo (see n. 1) was revised and republished in two volumes as Zhongguo nüxing wenxue shi (Chinese Women’s Literary History) in 1935. A new revision was published as Zhongguo nüxing wenxue shihua (Words on Chinese Wom-en’s Literary History) in 1984. Except for the prefaces, the content has remained largely unrevised.

37 Tan’s history begins with a general introduction of women’s relationship to literature, women’s lives, and Chinese women’s literature. The subsequent chapters, in which Tan examines selected writings by various writers, follow a dynastic progres-sion that equates each period with a specifi c literary genre (Song Dynasty ci poets, Ming and Qing aria [qu], etc.).


Yunyi (1906–65), as well as from Yang Zhihua’s (1900–1973) Outline of the Women’s Movement (Funü yundong gailun) and Chen Dongyuan’s (1902–?) History of the Lives of Chinese Women (Zhongguo funü shenghuo shi), Tan bridged canonical and early-twentieth-century representa-tions of women in an attempt to redeem women’s historical position in the nation.38 Like Xie, Tan purports that gender equality had existed in a prehistoric matriarchal society. Unlike Xie, however, he draws on contemporary social scientists’ research concerning the “woman ques-tion” to document society’s attempt to recover this equality. In his 1930 preface Tan writes that “so-called women’s literary history is an overall investigation of women’s efforts in literature, which addresses the liv-ing conditions of women in the past and is part of the examination of the woman question” (2). Yet Tan’s reading of women’s past equality, like Xie’s interpretation, perpetuates essentialist notions of women’s literary production.

According to Tan, women’s resistance to their oppression helps shape both the private and the literary spheres. Arguing that patriar-chy sprang from men’s desire to control women’s emotional power, he cites several works concerning the relationship between the sexes and women’s use of jealousy to combat polygamy.39 Women, he concluded, possessed a powerful, if not destructive, force that threatened male authority. Therefore men sought to control women, and one conse-quence of women’s oppression was their representation in literature either as passive subjects of patriarchy or as rebels against it (6).

To illustrate how women coped under the patriarchal system, Tan classifi es their behavior by degrees according to a schema of “rebellion” or “capitulation”: for example, “vigorous rebellion” manifested itself in

38 See Huiqun’s and Hu’s collected essays in Nüxing yu wenxue (Women and Litera-ture) (Shanghai: Qizhe shuju, 1934). For examples of the canonical works on which Tan’s history drew see Guo Maoqing, Yuefu shiji (The Music Bureau Collection; twelfth century); and Ye Yougong, Tangshi jishi (Records of Tang Poetry; Song Dynasty). One chapter of Zhongguo nüxing de wenxue shenghuo includes citations from two seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century anthologies of women’s writings, Zhou Shijie’s Gujin nüshi (History of Women, Ancient and Modern; 1628) and Lu Chang’s Lichao mingyuan shici (Poems of the Famous Women of Past Ages; 1773). Tan used both contemporary and classical studies.

39 These works include Tang Dynasty Han Wan’s Yushitai ji (Records of the Imperial Censor) and Qing Dynasty Zhang Guisheng’s Yiqiu ji (Collection of Everlasting Sadness).


jealousy, “passive rebellion” in vulgarity (yin); “vigorous capitulation” produced tolerance (rong), “passive capitulation” chastity (6). Tan’s taxonomy of women’s emotional responses to their interactions with men limits female agency and leaves no space for women’s political development. Tan favors women who rebel over those who capitulate to patriarchal demands. At the same time, rebellious women rely on their charms as their only means of resistance, which men eventually interpret as vulgarity (7–8). Tan describe women writers of the Ming and Qing Dynasties as seductresses who lured their male readers into their feminine world but who used literature to vent their resentment of men when the ploy failed (31).40 In general, Tan criticizes women writ-ers who employ their sexuality to protest men’s treatment of women. In other words, he disdains the very women who might break the Confucian paradigm, because their femininity exceeds his use for it. Although he views women who employ their charms in this way as more talented than those who “sing to the wind and play with the moon,” he remains deeply mistrustful of the seductive and affected sentimentality that betrays the essence of womanhood (33).

Tan’s understanding of women as emotional beings intersects with the late Ming equation of sentiment (qing) expressed between couples with loyalty shown to the state. In literature written by men of the late Ming, courtesans were considered both political and literary allies, whose emotions conferred on them a kind of gender equality.41 By the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals had recon-ceived this notion to echo eighteenth-century Western social thought, particularly that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who saw the emotional as integral with the rational, since the emotional empowered political and moral judgment and provided a way of understanding the world.

40 This sentiment refl ects that of John Stuart Mill, who was translated into Chi-nese in the 1920s and is credited with the statement that women writers wrote to seduce their male readers. Tan seems to have taken Mill’s words at face value.

41 Katherine Carlitz notes that some scholars during the Ming regarded qing as validating one’s fi delity and political loyalty. In their treatments of fi delity and loyalty, male literati emphasized women’s bodies, with the understanding that these bodies could also be sites of transgression. In this light, women symbolized the ebb and fl ow of loyalty (“The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienü Zhuan,” Late Imperial China 12 [1991]: 117–52).


Several leading Chinese thinkers formulated their own ideas on indi-vidual genius, self-identity, and resistance to the existing social order according to their interpretations of Rousseau. As Tan’s schema illus-trates, the tendency of women to express themselves emotionally and nonrationally renders them capable of subverting the social order. His literary history seeks to harness women’s power by deemphasizing their political activity and stressing their emotional energy. For Tan and oth-ers, women symbolized an opportunity to change from an imperialist system embedded in Confucian traditionalism to a universal humanist model. By highlighting their victimization under patriarchy, Tan posi-tions himself as the one who has recognized the true value of female emotional expression and its potential for transgression.

Tan’s criticism of the literary prominence and popularity of Ming and Qing women reveals discomfort with women’s increasing partici-pation in print media, that is, with the growing circulation of women’s images and texts as well as with their own commodifi cation.42 His nar-rative of female oppression seeks to redeem women’s humanity after centuries of subjugation, observing that as early as the Tang Dynasty women had been objectifi ed (wupinhua), inasmuch as the objects used to describe them had become symbolic of their identity (20). Yet he holds steadfastly to the notion that a woman’s literary talent can be measured by the hardship she endured to bring it to fruition and that this hardship is more purely channeled through emotion, which gives her writings value:

Occasionally, [women writers] broke out of their cages. Cai Yan’s and Wang Qiang’s village journeys, Li Ye’s and Xue Tao’s romantic social interchanges, Li Qingzhao’s and Zhu Shuzhen’s bitter wanderings—all strengthened their withering fates, augmented the development of their concealed talent, and gives them a position in Chinese literary history. As for other writers, if they did not live a cursed life, then while they also totter through the literary garden, they are mere parrots, or barking dogs that wag their tails. On the one hand, literature is wom-en’s diversion during leisure time; on the other, it is used to induce male writers to prostrate themselves below pomegranate-colored skirts and to encourage men to play with women. (28–29)

42 Joan Judge argues that such criticism stems from the anxiety that intellectuals since the 1898 reform era had felt about women as literary producers and inheritors (“Reforming the Feminine: Female Literacy and the Legacy of 1898,” in Karl and Zarrow, 158–79).


When hardship is absent from the texts, Tan concludes that their authors did not write sincerely but intended instead to chase fame or to seduce men. His aesthetic assumes that women uniformly experi-ence patriarchy as victims and thus that their textual production is per-petually unmodern and ahistorical. Women’s literary production gains value from the aesthetic space that their authors come to represent. What Tan and other literary historians ultimately value is the beauty of emotion that the feminine symbolizes, both as a product of oppression and as a language of representation.

Like many of his contemporaries, Tan does not distinguish the female literary character from the woman writer. He does not consider women’s literature apart from associative feminine qualities within literature. “Women’s literature,” therefore, stems from a tradition of “feminine fi ctions” in which the woman writer and her texts are caught in a web of feminine representations, both female- and male-created.43 Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains that the concept of femininity in nineteenth-century European modernity placed women in contra-dictory positions: “The feminine constitutes one of the nineteenth-century’s ‘original historic forms’ [urgeschichtlichen Formen], and origin [Ursprung] where a ‘prehistory’ and a ‘posthistory’ [Vor- und Nachge-schichte], the archaic and the modern, are dialectically articulated. The feminine becomes the inevitable sign of a new historic regime of see-ing and ‘not-seeing,’ of representable and unrepresentable” (221). The feminine and what it represents manifest themselves in two forms of modernity: a “Hegelian synthesis,” which positions cultural production as part of an evolutionary, linear history, and a Nietzschean fragmenta-tion of totality, which presents itself as “emptiness, a lack: the power of absence” (223).44 Both forms are constituted in the origin of history.

43 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, in discussing Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Proj-ect), recalls that Walter Benjamin saw modernity as made up of “feminine fi ctions” (“Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,” trans. Katharine Streip, in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 220–29).

44 For a discussion of Western philosophical infl uences on Chinese intellectuals see Marián Gálik, The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930), trans. Peter Tká (London: Curzon; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1980); and Bonnie S. McDougall, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China, 1919–1925 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971).


In the Chinese context, the contradiction between woman as historical being and woman as symbol complicated historians’ understanding of women’s literary legacy, and the proliferation of women writers in the early twentieth century threatened to disrupt the metaphor that histori-ans employed to retrieve the past. In discussing the advent of the mod-ern nation, Prasenjit Duara notes that the Chinese not only conceived of history as linear time but also recognized a subject of history at the nation’s “core” that remained unchanging.45 Early-twentieth-century lit-erary histories should be understood, then, as rereadings both of time and of space that recontextualized cultural aspects of Chinese society. While historians looked to the West for models, they felt compelled to re-create a Chinese identity from within China’s own tradition. By writ-ing sympathetically about the oppression of women and their aesthetic expressions of it, intellectuals revealed their paradoxical acceptance of time as an antihistorical aesthetic even as they regarded history as a linear progression through time.46 These literary histories marked the intersection of an ideal future and an idyllic past while containing women’s artistic and political agency in an invented history.

Tan predicts that the modern context, by rejecting patriarchal oppression, will introduce a new paradigm, but this idea in sociopoliti-cal terms remains vague at best. He does not address modern women writers in Literary Lives because he sees the contemporary context as separate from the rest of Chinese literary history. Marking a distinc-tion between acceptable and insidious imported ideas, he brands this period a “new territory” of cultural “pollution” from the West (34). Nevertheless, he believes that modern women writers possess artistic talent and refl ect the intellectual trends of modernity (34, 389). His

45 Prasenjit Duara, “Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Modern China,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 345.

46 For example, twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals chose to work in genres that seemed free of traditional conventions, such as fi ction, yet many contemporary literary histories rest on the foundation of fi ction in ancient history. Thus a sup-posedly convention-free genre found legitimacy and authority in its historicity. See Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May Fourth Movement,” in Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries, ed. Kenneth Lieberthal et al. (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 1991), 158–77.


response to foreign infl uences suggests precisely the confl icted nature of constructing a national identity. The problem may be that modern women writers, aware of the strategy of domestication, defy the con-fi nes of Tan’s narrative of femininity. Yet a search for authenticity, as we see in the commentaries running through his and other histories, leads to a new model of female citizenship based on a patriotic, though apolitical, subject.

Present-day studies on the relationship between woman and the nation demonstrate how the state regulates women’s citizenship by positing an ideal female fi gure who embodies a cultural or national authenticity: “Modern nation-states participate in the institutionaliza-tion of women’s subordination by means of regulatory processes, the discursive formations that construct and discipline citizen-subjects.”47 In early-twentieth-century China, authenticity derived from the notion that Confucianism oppressed women, who had once lived freely. Histo-rians made use of women’s subservience within this patriarchal order by citing their lack of equality as a reason for change. If their histories relocated the authenticity of Chinese female subjects within women’s literature, their project has had deep historiographical repercussions, especially since their work forms the basis of the “modernized” literary canon still taught in Chinese schools today.

That the historians equate women’s literature with purity under-scores a conservatism launched against changes in social values that were making room for female literary professionals. Both Xie and Tan uphold women’s literature as a product of a moral education that captures the spirit of a nation or a culture. They argue that women’s oppression started at the inception of recorded history; in their view, female agency can be located only in the prehistoric. But only ancient women’s literature—pre-Confucian and prepatriarchal literature,

47 Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem, introduction to Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State, ed. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 12. See also Marianne DeKoven, ed., Feminist Locations: Global and Local, The-ory and Practice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997).


ultimately prerecorded literature—possesses true purity. Within this invented literary tradition, literary historians attempt to contain not only women’s writings but also their personhood.

A Woman’s Perspective?

Tao Qiuying’s commentary on women’s literary history in Chinese Women differs from Xie’s and Tan’s criticism insofar as she does not equate women with the nation but confronts the sociopolitical conditions that oppressed and defi ned women throughout Chinese literary history. Rather than create genealogies, as others did, she concerns herself with equalizing gender relations. Although Tao at times essentializes women, she maneuvers within hegemonic spaces to contest the view that women lack modern characteristics. Tao criticizes the tendency of Chinese society to equate emotions with the feminine and institute an exclusionary reading that limits the defi nition of “woman.” She argues that one can evaluate women’s texts only after understanding their con-texts: “Before discussing Chinese women’s literature, we fi rst need to know Chinese women’s conditions exactly. What were their social infl u-ences? As a result of those social infl uences, what kind of moral train-ing and education did they receive? Furthermore, what was their inter-est in literature? Afterward we can ask about women’s texts. Only then can we ask about our hopes for women’s literature from today onward” (3). Tao was infl uenced by early-twentieth-century thinkers who called on women to awaken from thousands of years of feudal oppression and Confucian servitude.48 As a result, her book emphasizes women’s his-torical conditions, not literature’s evolution. For example, Tao presents an overview of Confucian normative thinking, labeling with section headings the different ways that social norms oppressed women, such as the marriage system and the prevailing views on chastity, femininity, virtue, and obedience. She identifi es the cumulative effect that various treatises on women had on the construction of Chinese female iden-tity since the Zhou Dynasty. Such texts altered women’s “personhood,

48 Tao taught at the Suzhou Girls’ School, but I cannot determine if her book was adopted in the curriculum. Unlike Xie and Tan, she does not seem to have been a well-established literary historian. She did, however, edit a collection of modern women’s letters in 1930, which was in its eleventh printing by 1936.


life, and social status” (86) and infl uenced the way women wrote litera-ture.

Tao demonstrates that without exception the aesthetic categories that stylized (fenghua) women’s literature and lives also turned women into funü. (This term incorporates biological in addition to social char-acteristics.) Thus the term funü was invested with a new sociopolitical meaning outside the Confucian defi nition of relationships (2).49 Tao gives a more complex picture of the evolution of women’s social posi-tion than Xie or Tan. She draws a distinction between a woman who upheld the virtues stressed in the Han Dynasty text Admonitions for Women (Nüjie), by Ban Zhao (45–120 BCE), and an immoral but artisti-cally talented Tang courtesan poet.50 Both types of women, according to Tao, contributed to women’s literary tradition.

Tao concludes that the difference in the educations received by men and women made possible male dominance of the literary sphere (302). Women’s education was responsible for the common notion that women’s talent could be developed only in domestic areas, such as embroidery. Like other literary historians examined in this essay, Tao assumes that historical oppression and inferior education hindered the realization of women’s full potential. In discussing genres, she further mentions the social structure that prevented women from writing in certain literary forms or that kept them from “leaving the home,” “hav-ing freedom of thought,” “wandering through the annals of history,” “traveling to historical mountains and streams,” or “meeting with gal-lant literati” (229). Women’s literature, she thinks, tends toward deca-dence and neurasthenia, not because of women’s biological identity but because of repressive defi nitions of female virtue (90). Tao’s narrative concerns itself with the ways that women constructed a community of writers. Women wrote for several reasons and in several styles: they

49 Tao uses this term to refer to women throughout Chinese history, not just in her own time. For a discussion of the new terms for women that emerged in the early twentieth century see Tani E. Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jia ting (Chinese Woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 253–89.

50 For centuries Ban Zhao’s text had been one of the canonical readings for women’s education.


wrote alone or with the help of male editors, and they wrote both for others and for themselves.

More than other historians’ remarks on the variety of women’s liter-ary production, Tao’s interpretations are based on the author’s social role. She views women writers whose identities were the faithful wife, the mother, and the obedient daughter-in-law as bound by rigid proto-cols. Moral constraints placed on them within the family, Tao argues, restricted their literary production. Courtesans had greater freedom to express themselves. Tao thinks, for example, that Yu Xuanji and Zhu Shuzhen were not subject to a Confucian ethical education (lijiao) (91) and that prostitutes (ji) enjoyed freedom as writers because they defi ed ethical norms. Ignoring the fact that courtesans depended on male patronage and thus remained situated within and regulated by a male-dominated social system, Tao argues that the Confucian and family kinship systems caused Chinese female oppression.

For Tao, the only distinction between men’s and women’s litera-tures lies in the authors’ motivations. Different social circumstances for men and women necessarily produce different kinds of literature. Yet Tao considers emotions the basis of all good literature, no matter how society classifi es the writer. That is, literary expression is presocial and expresses one’s spirit, encompassing all the emotional, social, and humane constructions of the “I.” Tao defi nes literature as the posses-sion of “innate ‘feel ings/sentiments’ [qinggan] and ‘thoughts/ideas/expectations’ [yixiang]. The performance of ‘feeling’ and ‘thought’ occurs in ‘beauty’ [mei], that is, ‘literature’ [wenxue]” (2). Her claim that literature is universal follows from the belief that time and space do not restrict it. Indeed, literature is “the spirit of the universe [yuzhou de linggui]” (1).

Tao’s narrative differs from Xie’s or Tan’s in that she does not assign literature and women a national identity but sees them constituted in a universal essence unbounded by borders, time, or aesthetic beliefs (2). If one argues that literature has no national borders or innate gender characteristics, she asks, “why discuss Chinese women’s literature?” Is it, she concludes, because Chinese women are indeed limited by territorial boundaries? Tao neither completely opposes the myths of femininity in circulation during her time nor willingly complies with their recycling.


She believes that all Chinese women have been oppressed throughout history (until the present era, when women’s education changed):

Look at Chinese women and literature! The situation can be clas-sifi ed in the following manner: First and foremost, the overthrow of the matriarchal society gradually gave men greater power. Because of men’s increasing power, various ethical codes oppressed women and eventually led to a system that abused them. Because of the incremen-tal development of various ethical codes, which oppressed women and created a system that abused them, literary production was gradually formalized and systematized. Along with this, women’s power declined. Because of a decline in their power, they became oppressed. In the blink of an eye, they had no choice but to utter a cry of appeal. Such is the origin of women’s literature. (301)

By noting that women have found ways to gain access to literature despite social restraints, Tao asserts female agency. Yet because these restraints have hindered women from escaping their environment, Tao thinks that their works cannot adopt an aggressive stance against wom-en’s oppression. She concedes that much women’s writing is beautiful and well written, but it “lacks a great, lively, bouncy air” (304–5): “But let us think about it! After having received such [social] infl uences, how can we be deeply critical? Under these various infl uences [women have made] a few achievements. Indeed, [women writers] really have a long-standing presence in literary history. Does this make us content?” (305). Tao’s dissatisfaction goes hand in hand with her activism, a trait that sets her apart from other historians who claim to be sympathetic toward women’s condition. Because their sympathy equates female biol-ogy with an aesthetic that sees women’s literature as lacking, they over-look the strengths in women’s literature.

Tao’s history avoids attributing to all Chinese women the character-istics of an ancient mode of behavior. It focuses instead on the emanci-pation of contemporary women writers, seeing their present condition in literature as right for “foster[ing] their feelings and newly abundant imagination” (305). Tao suggests that the increasing publication of women authors such as Lu Yin (1889–1934), Bing Xin (1900–1999), and Xie Bingying (1906–2000) indicates contemporary society’s grad-ual acceptance of gender equality. More optimistically, Tao observes that women had made advances in the previous twenty years, although


they still had no solid social foundation (291). Asserting that contem-porary women could develop literature as they liked, with a special rich-ness in emotions and aesthetics, Tao promotes a praxis of recovery that takes into account how China’s modernization has freed women from recurring social abuse (292). In her conclusion she calls on women not to accept any more shackles, not to speak falsely, not to be hypochondri-acs, but to work hard to develop a luminous literary world:

“Woman” [funü]—this is a humiliating name to call us. No! “Woman” is a part of humankind. You see, magazines sometimes especially bear the “woman” name. Daily newspapers sometimes bear the “woman” name. Societies and groups also sometimes bear the “woman” name. Various kinds of problems bear the “woman” name. What is the meaning of this? We have just invoked “woman” in discussing questions of literature. If this is how we think, how can we have no feelings? But reality tells us that the women’s world of the past was a special class. In reality, women, as part of humanity, necessitate a special invocation for discussion of their various questions. These questions cannot be avoided. Naturally, they [women] cannot be an exception to literary history. (306)

Tao hopes that “woman” will cease to connote a special problem, and she recognizes the need to dismantle society’s historical representation of women. Unlike Xie or Tan, Tao calls on women to assert their agency and change conditions themselves. Her history assists Chinese women in relinquishing their historical burden in order to participate in a world (not only a nation) distinguished by gender equality.

Conclusion

The narratives appearing in the introductions and commentaries in the literary histories examined in this essay reveal how the search for a female essence reinforced historically articulated hierarchies instead of overcoming them. The assertion of difference based on biological femaleness for the purpose of creating a new historical narrative results ultimately in the perception that women’s writings are not “different enough, that [they fail] to excise all traces of male infl uence” (Felski, 43). The construction of a separate female literary history, especially one that attempts to recover what was thought to be lost, forges a narra-tive of recovery that confi nes women “in a web of repressive defi nitions


of ‘femininity’ ” based on their perceived absence.51 Early-twentieth-century literary historians did not quote more extensively from the Ming and Qing anthologies of women writers, I believe, because wom-en’s value in the construction of modern China had more to do with what they symbolized than with their actual persons. To these histori-ans, women writers remained symbols of alterity based on their oppres-sion and sexual expression. The historians valued women of all classes who opposed their victimization and did not seek to produce art for its own sake. As long as historians employ biology to understand the nature of this alterity, women writers can escape or alter neither the conditions set for them nor the terms used to explicate them. In short, instead of liberating women writers from a marginalized history, biol-ogy and its presumptions contain them in a generalized notion of the “woman writer” who always threatens to be subversive. While it would be anachronistic to criticize early-twentieth-century Chinese literary historians for problems that the feminist movement still faces today, it is important to point out that the concerns at the turn of the twentieth century remain unresolved in contemporary China. The problem lies in equating women’s lived experience with their textual production. What is at stake is not necessarily women as historical subjects but gen-der and what it represents in the sociopolitical realm.

Xie Wuliang frames women’s literary history against the backdrop of a national essence in a pre-Confucian model of gender equality that grounded China’s unique historical character while asserting its own equality among nation-states, whereas Tan Zhengbi posits emotional expression as the locus of the “spirit of the nation” and sees all wom-en’s writings as conforming to that tradition. Both historians rework feminine subjectivity to characterize a new way of viewing the past. By contrast, Tao Qiuying questions the essentializing of women by moder-nity’s historicizing project and ponders the need to focus on women’s literary history and production. To varying degrees, all three histori-ans consider women victims of patriarchal oppression and suggest that conditions will change for them in time. Despite highlighting women’s literary contributions to Chinese culture, they confi ne women’s litera-

51 Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hop-kins University Press, 1993), 25.


ture within a narrow articulation of the nation, attempting to dismantle a tradition that had previously excluded women.

These historians construct a morally pure female self in order to found a new national identity and defi nition of citizenship. Yet by craft-ing a feminine aesthetic centered on women’s oppression, they create a subject that continues to be bound by Confucian ethical and patriar-chal codes even though they hinder national progress.52 Just as Chinese male poets of antiquity used the feminine voice to express their dissent over society’s underrecognition of them, modern writers appropriated women’s literature for a similar purpose. Sympathetic intellectuals in the modern era who included women in Chinese literary histories wrote against the paradigms that had excluded them, thus using the repre-sentation of women as historical fi gures to support a new reading of history. In the process, however, women were reifi ed as oppositional fi gures, used to support intellectuals’ position as cultural arbiters.

This new praxis of representation raises new questions about women’s sociopolitical agency and its reevaluation. How do women writers negotiate authority and authorship in a tradition whose critical parameters remain male-centered and national? The histories exam-ined in this essay bind women to either moral or aesthetic practices that uphold traditional notions of womanhood. They facilitate women’s political participation in China’s modern nation-building project, but with contradictory agendas. The pedagogical functions of these histo-ries were to educate readers about women’s place in China’s history and to reimagine China, but such projects had ramifi cations for contem-porary women writers, whose education straddled foreign infl uences and traditional notions of purity and virtue. While Western models legitimated Chinese women’s role in a universal humanity, traditional notions confi ned them to a national context. The emphasis on the modern female as both traditional and modern indicates an ambiguity in women’s social position, especially in the late 1920s and the 1930s, which has repercussions for evaluating women’s literary practices in the early twentieth century.

52 Modern Chinese intellectuals understood women to be underprivileged in a number of ways: economically, in social status, in education, and in personal devel-opment.


Recognition of women’s contribution to literature is deferred, therefore, to an indefi nite future when the questions of female oppres-sion and political position can be resolved. Women then become con-fi ned to a subaltern context in which the creation of the female subject demands intellectuals’ mediation. These histories function not only as pedagogical but also as commercial tools bought by eager young minds, who read not merely to be educated about the past but also to participate in the act of being modern.53 The female subject of the historical narrative paradoxically resides in two temporal spaces: a uto-pian, pre-Confucian, prepatriarchal past and an unattainable future. This paradox has repercussions for women’s literary legacy and for modern women writers in that it maintains women’s contribution to literary history as a symbolic gesture and thereby circumscribes their historical contribution to Chinese literature and culture.

Megan M. Ferry is Luce Junior Professor of East Asian Studies and assistant pro-fessor of Chinese at Union College. She is currently revising a manuscript on early-twentieth-century Chinese women writers.

53 Lest we consider the publications by and about women unique to this his-torical moment, we have to remember that there have been other times in China’s history when women’s literature entered the mainstream as part of a new confi gura-tion of morality and commerce. Carlitz points out that without the cultural attention focused on women’s virtue during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, one would not have seen an increase in published books by and about women (141). As much as these literary histories are about reconfi guring China’s historical narrative, they are also commercial products of a print culture.

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women's literary history: inventing tradition in modern china

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