Intimate Memory

Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China

Martin W. Huang

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469003, 9781438468990
• eBook ISBN: 9781438469010
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

CHAPTER 1

THE SECULARIZATION OF MEMORY

Remembering the deceased is an integral part of the mourning process. In late imperial China, such an act of remembrance was often performed through writing thanks in part to the unwavering faith in the power of a written text, either on paper or carved on stone, to perpetuate memory in defiance of time and death. A son, if from a respected or well-connected family, was expected to seek out someone of high social standing to write an epitaph for his deceased father, often based on the materials he himself provided, as a demonstration of his Confucian filial piety.

However, writing about the life of a deceased woman was an undertaking much more problematic. A woman usually required more justification and more scrutiny than a man in order to be deemed worthy of the honor of an epitaph or a biography, since Confucian biographical standards emphasized the public exemplariness of a person, whereas a woman was supposed to belong to the realm of the inner and the private. The seventeenth-century writer and scholar-official, Wang Wan 汪琬 (1624–1690) echoed this view when he wrote:

Ancient people wrote biographical sketches (xingzhuang 行狀; more literally, accounts of deeds) not for the purpose of providing materials for the writing of epitaphs (zhiming 誌銘) but for the purpose of submitting them to the Grand Scribe (taishi 太史) and the Chamberlain for Ceremonials (taichang 太常). People submitted them to the Grand Scribe so that he could come up with biographies and to the Chamberlain for Ceremonials so that posthumous titles could be bestowed. Although people have stopped this practice, we should follow the intention of the ancients. Women are not supposed to have biographies and they are not given posthumous titles. Then why should people write biographical sketches for them? A deceased woman merits a separate epitaph only in the following situations: she is not buried together with her husband, and she performed extraordinary deeds of chastity martyrdom; she is buried while her husband is still alive or her husband has died long before she does and his burial takes place a long time ago thus an account of her life cannot be appended to her husband’s epitaph. … This is why I have refused to write biographical sketches for women. I want to follow the rules of the ancients.1

Wang Wan declared that he refused to write any biographical sketches for women because he subscribed to the orthodox view that people should not write biographies for women and that they should write brief epitaphs for them only in exceptional situations, although he did not object to the short account of a woman’s life being appended to the epitaph of her husband.

This was a view seemingly shared by a significant group of educated men of the time, including Wang Wan’s more famous contemporary, the neo-Confucian savant, Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610–1695). After his wife passed away, when his son presented him with a copy of her biographical sketch, Huang Zongxi insisted that it was not necessary, because, he was convinced, according to the practices of the ancients, no biographical sketch should be written for a woman.2

Such apprehension about women as appropriate biographical or epitaphic subjects can also be found in the early Qing essayist, Fang Bao. Three years after writing an epitaph for a friend’s deceased father, Fang Bao was asked again by that same friend to write another one for his recently deceased mother. This time, however, Fang Bao was inclined to turn down the request. Part of the reason for his reluctance was his belief that the mother’s life had been relatively easy, so her virtues were not extraordinary enough. Different from the case of a man, a woman, Fang Bao appeared to insist, needed to have demonstrated extraordinary virtues in a difficult life to be considered worthy of an epitaph upon her death.3

What is even more significant for the purpose of our discussion here, however, is not so much Fang Bao’s initial reservations as the fact that, despite his reluctance, he eventually did agree to write the epitaph for his friend’s deceased mother, as requested. In fact, this became a pattern for him and many others: a literatus would repeatedly comply with such requests from others even though he might believe that he should not.4 The same is true of Huang Zongxi. Despite his adamant insistence that his son should not write a biographical sketch for his mother, Huang Zongxi wrote a quite long one for his own mother.5 Furthermore, Huang wrote a dozen elegiac pieces for other women, many of which are in the form of epitaph and biographies. Several of them do not have exemplar tagging words, such as jie 節 (chastity) or lie 烈 (martyrdom), in their titles, suggesting that these female biographical subjects did not necessarily demonstrate extraordinary virtues in their lives.

Cases like these are a testament to the enormous and ever-increasing demand for memorial writings to honor one’s female relatives during the late imperial period. Now many, though some of them with reluctance, were simply accepting the reality that women, even when they were not considered extraordinarily virtuous, were being immortalized in written texts, just as it had been the case with men for a much longer period of time, in spite of the traditional Confucian insistence on exemplariness as the sole legitimate justification for the privilege of an epitaph or a biography and the even closer Confucian scrutiny of women as biographical and epitaphic subjects.6

This development was part of a wider secularization trend associated with memorial writings in general that began to pick up momentum around the early sixteenth century when more and more seemingly unworthy men and women, sometimes from lower social strata, were becoming epitaphic or biographical subjects. The neo-Confucian essayist and scholar-official, Tang Shunzhi 唐順之 (1507–1560), complained not without bitterness:

People even as low as those in the business of butchering pigs and peddling wine, so long as they could afford a bowl of rice, would want epitaphs written in their honor. From prominent officials to those who have passed provincial examinations, everyone would have a collection of his writings published after his death. This has become as necessary as a person needs to have food when alive and to be buried in a coffin after death. This never happened in the period of the Three Epochs and [was] still absolutely rare even before the Han and Tang dynasties. Fortunately, most of these epitaphs and collected works usually go to oblivion pretty soon. Even though many books published in the past are no longer extant, those that do survive are still too numerous. Had all published books been kept, there would not be enough space to shelve them even if the earth could be used as a giant bookshelf.7

It is interesting to note that Tang Shunzhi deplored these two phenomena in tandem: first, the popularity of epitaphs, and second the increasingly common phenomenon of having one’s collected writings published, as these two were closely related, in that biographical writings in printed form such as epitaphs were able to reach a much larger audience. This was largely because they were often circulated as part of the collected writings (wenji) by their authors; the publication of such collected writings was greatly facilitated by the rapid expansion of private printing during the Ming.8

Now the honor of being immortalized in memorial writings, traditionally reserved for the few, was becoming increasingly available to a significantly larger segment of the society, and women were an important part of that segment.9 Some women were even beginning to explicitly insist that they absolutely deserved such an honor, requesting in advance that epitaphs be written by skillful writers before they died. The dying wife of an imperial university student pleaded to her husband in this way: “I have devoted my whole life to your family. Don’t spend too much for my funeral. However, I would be quite content if you could find a good writer to compose an epitaph to be carved on a piece of stone to be placed in my grave.”10 Before her death, the sister of Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1529–1590), one of the best-known sixteenth-century literary figures, requested him to write an epitaph for her, partly because of her brother’s literary fame (more on Wang’s epitaph on this sister in chapter 8).11

By the seventeenth century, it was also becoming increasingly common for a mourning husband to commission a biography, in addition to an epitaph, for his deceased wife. The well-known early Qing poet and scholar-official Wang Shizhen 王士禛 (1634–1711) had two biographies written for his deceased wife by two of his friends, Zhu Yizun 朱彝尊 (1629–1708) and Wang Maolin 汪懋麟 (1640–1688).12 His contemporary, the scholar-official Fang Xiangying 方象瑛 (1632–1685) also asked his friend, You Tong, to write a biography for his late wife.13 At the same time, some grieving husbands even began to author biographies themselves for their deceased wives, as in the case of the poet and scholar Ye Shaoyuan 葉紹袁 (1589–1646) and the neo-Confucian thinker, Chen Que 陳確 (1604–1677).14 The early eighteenth-century poet Chen Zi 陳梓 (1683–1759) was so eager to produce a biography for his wife that he decided to write it while she was still alive. He felt particularly proud of himself for writing a biography for a living woman.15 This was significant because, while it was already somewhat common by that time for an epitaph to be written for a deceased woman, a biography was much less common, and a biography for a living woman written by her husband was rare indeed. Unlike an epitaph, which fulfilled the practical function of being a component of the grave, a biography usually required extra justification in terms of the worthiness of its subject (as implicitly suggested by Wang Wan, discussed above).16

This secularization process was significant not only as a phenomenon of plebeianization, as more commoners, especially women, were beginning to enjoy the honor of being biographical or epitaphic subjects, it also started to reshape the way in which a woman was remembered and represented in a memorial text, as her image became less “saint-like” and less dictated by the Confucian biographical rhetoric of the exemplary, with more attention being shifted to the mundane details in her life.

Whereas virtue continued to be an important quality touted in such writings on a woman, what specifically constituted female virtues worthy of the honor of an epitaph or biography was now being deliberately redefined with much more flexibility. The scholar-official Sun Cheng’en 孫承恩 (1485–1565), for example, defended the epitaphs he wrote for many women by contending that a woman was entitled to the honor of an epitaph even if her virtues were not extraordinary and even if she had performed only ordinary deeds (yongxing 庸行), believing that average women of mundane virtues nevertheless deserved epitaphs.17 In an epitaph for the wife of one of his close friends, the influential poet Li Panlong 李攀龍 (1514–1570) offered a spirited defense of her perceived “shrewishness” (han 悍) and strong personality as necessary “virtues” of a wife who had to manage the household and advise her husband in various difficult and challenging situations.18 What had traditionally been viewed as personality flaws in a woman could now be defended even as signs of female virtues

Moreover, virtue was no longer the sole factor acknowledged to have shaped one’s memories of a deceased woman. Many other factors, such as her intellectual capability, were also being taken into consideration. The writer and poet Xie Zhaozhe 謝肇淛 (1567–1624) insisted that it was unfair for contemporary historians to apply a different standard when it came to the writing of a woman’s biography. According to him, besides moral exemplariness, other factors, such as talent and literary skills, should be taken into consideration when deciding whether a woman merited a biography, just as had always been the case with men’s biographies.19 Circumventing the Confucian biographical imperative on moral exemplariness, many male authors resorted to expanding the notion of “wifely virtue” to include qualities usually not associated with a model Confucian wife, such as intellectual wisdom, literary talent, and even physical beauty. Ye Shaoyuan offered an even bolder and more elaborate theory about the need to take into consideration these other factors in defining womanhood when he mourned and wrote about his deceased wife and daughters (see chapter 2).20

As part of a general secularizing trend in biographical and memorial writings, this new enthusiasm for biographies and epitaphs on women was also an important factor contributing to the acceleration of this trend. As some of the authors at that time acknowledged, unlike writing about men, who were more likely to have public careers, when writing about women, biographers and epitaph writers usually had to concentrate on the women’s private lives, including seemingly insignificant details of daily life. Expressing his admiration for the famous essayist Gui Youguang’s 歸有光 (1507–1571) special ability to convey deep feelings in his writings on women by focusing on the small details in their lives, Huang Zongxi observed that when writing an epitaph for a man, the focus was usually on “important events” (dashi 大事), whereas, in the case of a woman, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Secularization of Memory
• 2 Survivor’s Guilt
• 3 Hagiographical Memory
• 4 Wounded Manhood
• 5 Fragments of Anxiety
• 6 Remembering Concubines
• 7 Circulating Grief
• 8 Remembering Sisters
• Epilogue: A Wife’s Remembrances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover