Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580-1700

Daria Berg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136290213
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the works of key women writers within their cultural, artistic and socio-political contexts, this book considers changes in the perception of women in early modern China. The sixteenth century brought rapid developments in technology, commerce and the publishing industry that saw women emerging in new roles as both consumers and producers of culture. This book examines the place of women in the cultural elite and in society more generally, reconstructing examples of particular women's personal experiences, and retracing the changing roles of women from the late Ming to the early Qing era (1580-1700). Providing rich detail of exceptionally fine, interesting and engaging literary works, this book opens fascinating new windows onto the lives, dreams, nightmares, anxieties and desires of the authors and the world out of which they emerged.

1 Writing goddess

Virgin, venerators, literary vogues

On the Double Ninth Festival — the ninth day of the ninth month on the lunar calendar, or 17 October 1580 — an extraordinary story unfolds in Zhitang

village, Taicang

district, near the prosperous city of Suzhou in the Jiangnan, or Yangzi delta region. Over a hundred thousand people have gathered to witness how a twenty-one-year-old woman from an elite family ascends to heaven, undergoes transformation into a goddess and attains immortality. She is the ‘faithful maiden’ zhen nü

or virgin widow Wang Daozhen

(1558–80) — better known under her religious name Tanyangzi

or Master Tanyang — the daughter of Hanlin

Academician, President of the Board of Rites, Minister of Personnel and Grand Secretary Wang Xijue

(1534–1611, jin shi 1562), one of the highest ranking officials in the civil service of the Wanli emperor.

Tanyangzi comes to the shrine of her late fiancé whose widow she claims to be. Among her last acts she requests brush and ink and composes more than ten pages.¹ She bathes, dons a new outfit, pays her respects, takes leave of her relatives, instructs her disciples and enters the shrine.² She sends out her writings and a poem, four pages for her father and grandfather and one page for literatus Wang Shizhen (1526–90), while undergoing transformation into a goddess.³

This is how we — the modern reader, cultural critic, the historian whose task it is to make the dead speak — learn about Tanyangzi's story: through the voice of a Ming dynasty scholar-official and self-proclaimed eyewitness. The literary giant Wang Shizhen, a holder of the highest academic ‘Advanced Scholar’ (jin shi

) degree of 1547, gives testimony about the event in his Tanyang da shi zhuan

(Biography of Great Master Tanyang, 1580):⁴

I then followed all her disciples in bidding her farewell. Tears streaming down our faces, we swore an oath of allegiance. All of a sudden the sword in the Master's hand pointed upwards. She opened her eyes a little bit, made some indistinct movements above her shoulders, and then she was gone. All the onlookers trembled, terrified. I retreated and opened the envelope with the paper to find there were precepts and exhortations of over two hundred words written all over the page from top to bottom and left to right. … At that point one hundred thousand people had gathered on three sides around the outside of the palisade, some kowtowing, others kneeling, weeping, crying out to the Master and praising the Buddha's name. It was beyond description.⁵

Other literati later confirm these events in further biographies and writings about Tanyangzi, largely reiterating Wang Shizhen's version of the story.⁶

***

This chapter unravels two stories: first, the story of a woman who became a goddess in 1580 because she could read and write; and second, that of the literati who wrote her into being as a literary figure, inscribing the image of the writing woman as a new goddess in late Ming elite discourse. They invented her as a literary figure, shaping her image to express male perceptions of the rise of literary gentlewomen in early modern China's literary world. The story of Tanyangzi as told by her male observers provides a window on male reactions to the rise of female literacy, revealing the tensions in late Ming popular imagination produced by the new phenomenon of the writing gentlewoman.

Holy women perceived to have ascended to heaven feature in Daoist hagiog-raphy; a prominent example is Daoist Master Du Guangting's

(850–933) biographical collection Yong cheng ji xian lu

(Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City, 910).⁷ Daoist women who turned into goddesses were known as shenxian

(spirit-immortal), nüshen

(goddess) or nüxian

(female immortal).⁸ A prominent example of a gentlewoman said to have ascended to heaven and become a goddess is the archetypal female Daoist mystic, the revealer of holy scriptures Wei Huacun

(252–334), also known as Madame Wei from the Sacred Peak of the South (Nanyue Wei fu ren

), the daughter of Minister of Education Wei Shu

(209–90) of the Jin

dynasty (265–419).⁹ Wang Shizhen's Biography of Great Master Tanyang invokes thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Map of the Yangzi delta (Jiangnan) region in the late imperial period (Qing dynasty, 1644–1911).
• The rise of literary women: an introduction
• 1 Writing goddess: virgin, venerators, literary vogues
• 2 The child prodigy
• 3 Queen of the bordellos? The courtesan's quest
• 4 Miss Emotion: the drama of the new woman reader on the literary marketplace
• 5 Editing her story, rewriting hi/story: the art of female self-fashioning
• 6 Negotiating gentility: the Banana Garden Poetry Club
• Epilogue
• List of works cited
• Index