Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2012, vol . 7

Trans-Eurasian Convergences in Early Modern Women’s Writing David Porter

n this essay, I’d like to use the rubric of early modern women’s writ- Iing to put some pressure on the implicit Eurocentrism of the category of early modernity. When we speak of the “early modern,” we generally imply a European context. The historical developments we associate with modernity, after all, first appear in Europe, and so we quite sensibly tend to assume that the preconditions and precursors to these developments are likewise to be sought within the same cultural sphere. The often unspo- ken exceptionalist correlatives to this assumption, however—namely, that modernity is a uniquely European phenomenon and that its cultural roots are to be found uniquely in Europe—are far less defensible in either logi- cal or historical terms. How often do we read claims that this or that text (by Shakespeare or Locke or Defoe), or genre (the novel, the periodical essay, the romantic lyric), or historical development (paper currency, coffee shops, consumer culture) in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century England heralds “the birth of the modern subject” or even “the birth of modernity” tout court? And how often is it implied in such claims that these phenom- ena are, in one sense or another, the distinctive products of England’s idiosyncratic cultural brew of Protestantism, imperial ambition, mercantile industriousness, empiricist outlook, love of liberty, and literary genius? We need look no further for the origins of modernity than our own delight- fully verdant back yard, one might be forgiven for imagining, as this is where it all happened first.

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The Chinese have a proverb, 井底之蛙 (jing di zhi wa), that asks us to reflect on the situation of a frog living at the bottom of a well, complacent in his assumption that the patch of sky he glimpses overhead is the extent of the known universe. The proverb’s implications resonate with Johannes Fabian’s trenchant critique of the pervasive “denial of co-evalness” in the study of culture, which leads anthropologists and historians alike, entan- gled as they are within the Whiggish teleologies of modernity, to relegate the experience of non-Western societies to a distant and static “traditional” past. Fabian calls upon us to abandon comfortable assumptions of exem- plarity, to resituate Europe and its history within an expansively global context, and even to seek out potential analogues to what we think of as characteristically “early modern” developments outside of Europe.1 A soci- ety’s discursive construction and deployment of gender is often deployed as a critical index of modernity, and I appreciate the opportunity this forum affords briefly to consider what early modern European women writers might look like against the backdrop of a cosmopolitan cultural history of the period. China offers a rich set of parallels to many characteristically “early modern” developments in the cultural history of England, in particular. The two seemingly disparate contexts invite comparison if only for the curious alignment of their political histories. In both China and England, widespread rebellions in the 1630s led first to civil war and eventually to a dynastic revolution in the 1640s, which was followed in turn, in both locations, by a period of imperial consolidation and expansion through the eighteenth century. Historians of both countries date to this same period a dramatic increase in commercial activity, the proliferation and growth of urban trade centers, the wide circulation and conspicuous consumption of new classes of luxury goods, and a notable fascination among the elite with the imitation of foreign arts and architecture, so that we find the Chinese Pagoda at Kew Gardens being erected, for example, within a few years of the European-inspired pleasure palaces at Yuanmingyuan. This expansion of commerce was predictably linked in both contexts to increasing social

1 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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mobility and corresponding anxieties over social promiscuity, debates on the moral effects of luxury, and the reification of taste as a means of adjudicating competing forms of consumption for the purpose of class differentiation. While causal connections become difficult to discern when it comes to matters of personal belief, it is striking to note as well that an increasingly humanist orientation in religion and philosophy led, in both China and England, to a greater emphasis on personal responsibility for self-cultivation through individual interpretation of canonical texts and the careful scrutiny and recording of one’s own behavior. This pattern of broad resonances extends, remarkably, even to the literary domain, where we might typically expect the productions of such disparate locations to be relatively idiosyncratic. Both China and England witnessed during this period a dramatic expansion in commercial publica- tion. New audiences gave rise to new genres, and we find in both contexts a flourishing of newspapers, travel accounts, conduct guides, and manuals of taste. Vernacular fictions, increasingly concerned with depicting, in a widely accessible language, the lives of ordinary people in ordinary settings, proliferated in both places, spawning similar sets of sub-genres along the way, including fictions in the amatory, criminal, sentimental, domestic, and pornographic modes. The novel comes into its own as a dominant and increasingly legitimate popular form at roughly the same time in China and England through an appeal to audiences who apparently shared some comparable tastes and desires. The Dream of the Red Chamber was composed in the mid-eighteenth century and first printed in the 1790s, making it contemporary with the similarly elaborate and psychologically astute feminocentric fictions of Richardson and Jane Austen. Increasingly vocal social criticism found an outlet in the new genre of the satirical- realist novel, whose most important early Chinese exemplar, The Scholars (儒林外史; Rulinwaishi) by Wu Jingzi, was completed in 1750, within two decades of the similarly barbed Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742), Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (1761), and Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1766). For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on another unexpected literary parallel: namely, the early modern efflorescence, in both China and England, of elite women’s literary activity. Recent scholarship on women’s

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reading and writing practices has established the centrality of female author- ship and literacy to the shifting cultural landscapes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both societies. In spite of the striking facts that women writers in both countries began to enter the literary profession in record numbers in the eighteenth century and that the corresponding growth in literacy and literary production increasingly gave marginalized women a new sense of agency and a powerful vehicle for exploring issues of authority, subjectivity, and self-fulfillment, very little work has been done by Europeanists to re-think the category of early modernity from a comparative gender-studies perspective.2 The publication, within the past twenty years, of several translated anthologies of Chinese women’s writ- ings and the emergence of a critical mass of high-quality English-language scholarship concerned with contexts and interpretations of these writings have made the linguistic barriers to comparative efforts far less daunting and the imperatives for a more cosmopolitan outlook in early modern studies more difficult to ignore.3 An occasion for a comparative thought experiment along these lines is provided by a striking decorative motif that enjoyed considerable popu- larity in both China and England in the second half of the seventeenth century. The so-called transitional ware porcelains produced in China for wealthy southern merchants in this period often feature clusters of

2 See the two essays Kang-I Sun Chang, “Gender and Canonicity: Ming-Qing Women Poets in the Eyes of the Male Literati,” and Grace Fong, “Writing from a Side Room of her Own: The Literary Vocation of Concubines in Ming-Qing China,” in Grace Fong, ed., Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry, (Montreal: McGill University, 2001), 1–18 and 41–63, respectively. 3 See, for example, Peng-hsiang Chen and Whitney Crothers, eds., Feminism / Femininity in Chinese Literature, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); Kang-I Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Press, 1999); W. L. Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge: Asia Center, 2004); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth-Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Ellen Widemer and Kang-I Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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Figure 1. Porcelain Vase, Chinese, mid-17th century. Author’s photograph.

elegantly attired women, lolling about in small groups in garden-like set- tings adapted from the woodblock illustrations of popular romances and plays (Fig. 1). They might be depicted burning incense and making music or admiring paintings and playing board games. They seem invariably at leisure and appear tranquil and content. Their gracefully flowing robes conceal their forms, often giving them, to the jaded Western eye, a curi- ously asexual or even androgynous appearance, and effectively warding off a habitual male gaze reared on Botticelli, Titian, and Boucher. Judging from the frequent appearance of such motifs on the porcelain jars and vases that adorn museum cases and the sitting rooms of English country houses furnished with the bounty of the East India trade, they appealed to wealthy collectors in both China and England.4

4 This motif and its significance for transcultural readings is explored at greater length in David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:

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Such a coincidence in fashionable taste would be little more than a curiosity were it not for the fact that the popularity of this motif of female sociability coincided in both contexts with a notable expansion in women’s literary activity. In England, the resulting body of poems, plays, fictions, and essays included many that quite explicitly thematized a topos of uto- pian female space that resonates closely with the scenes depicted by these porcelains. We find, for example, the recurring motif of the female academy or utopian community developed in several plays by Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell’s anti-matrimonial Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694–97), and Sarah Scott’s reform-minded Millennium Hall (1762), among many other works. Closely related to this trend is the substantial body of female friendship poetry that first flourished in the late seventeenth century and is most frequently associated with Katherine Philips — described by one critic as the “founding mother of female love poetry” — and several of her followers, including Lady Mary Chudleigh, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch.5 The very title of Valerie Traub’s masterful recent study, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, alludes to both the novelty and cen- trality of such developments within the English context. In China, too, the later seventeenth century saw a marked increase in women’s literary production, as well as vibrant communities of women who created fulfilling bonds of friendship and poetry within and across Chinese garden walls. As Dorothy Ko argues in her pathbreaking study, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, the persistent and simplistic association of women in traditional China with “backwardness and dependency” obscures the historical diversity and richness of women’s culture even as it reifies the nationalist historiography of the May Fourth movement and the Chinese Communist Party.6 Ko complicates this picture by exploring the various forms of domestic, social, and public female communities that thrived in seventeenth-century Jiangnan (the prosperous region of present-

Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 4. Portions of the next several paragraphs are adapted from this chapter. 5 Emma Donoghue, Poems between Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xxvi. 6 Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 1–3.

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day Shanghai) by deploying highly developed literacy in the “extension of an intimacy between women” based on “expressions of the emotional and intellectual concerns of their members as women.” 7 The women of the Banana Garden in late seventeenth-century Hangzhou, for example, gained considerable fame for regular gatherings in their villas dedicated to drink, poetry, and painting. The wife of a government official in Suzhou composed and published admiring poems for the attractive local courte- sans and singing girls with whom she regularly socialized.8 The centrality of literary pursuits to such groups is vividly illustrated by the description left by a gentry wife of her household’s reception of a popular play in the early Qing dynasty:

Ladies in the boudoir all collect the latest embroidery patterns and keep them pressed between the leaves of a book. In between cutting patterns, all our eyes are fixed onto the pages of The Peony Pavilion. . . . Once we read The Peony Pavilion, all of us are lured into the ocean of Classics and histories and are absorbed in poems and songs.9

At least some of these readings in the women’s quarters may have valorized women’s affection for one another. A play called Lian Xiangban (憐香伴, The Love of the Perfumed Partner, ca. 1650), by the prominent seventeenth- century writer Li Yu, centers on the impassioned attachment between two women who not only fall in love but contrive, in the end, to live together happily ever after. A short story in the famous collection Liaoshzai Zhiyi (聊 斋志异, Strange Stories from the Willow Cottage, ca. 1679) by Li Yu’s con- temporary Pu Songling tells the moving story of two beauties who become infatuated with each other and enjoy four months of love-making before their discovery and its tragic aftermath.10 As in Restoration England, then, elite women in late seventeenth-century Jiangnan sought out the company

7 Ibid., 16. 8 Ibid., 234, 267–68. 9 Ibid., 82. 10 L. C. P. Bertholet, Dreams of Spring: Erotic Art in China (North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 1997), 177. For a detailed discussion of the literary history and social context of

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of other talented women. As in England, they dedicated poetry to each other and saw the publication of their work during their own lifetimes. As in England, they explored a full range of intimacies on the friendship-love continuum, from the platonic and intellectual to the erotic and sensual.11 In China as in England, in other words, women imagined, read about, created, and drew sustenance from exclusively female communities that prospered within or alongside traditional patriarchal structures. The unexpected parallels between the Chinese and English contexts extend beyond patterns of female sociability to broader literary historical trends. In both countries, women’s literary (and especially poetic) pro- duction was increasingly admired and supported by male patrons and encouraged at least some male writers (Richardson and Cao Xueqin come to mind) to identify themselves with women in their writings.12 In both countries, the unprecedented visibility of women’s writing challenged traditional associations between literary knowledge and moral deprav- ity along with strictures that had condemned the publication of women’s works as a transgressive act. The appearance of transgression was some- what mitigated in both contexts by the fact that women’s writing generally followed the contours of the elite male literary culture and drew legitimacy from self-conscious associations with classical traditions. Women’s writing responded in both locations to a general shift, over a hundred-year period, from a more permissive mode associated with courtesan writers in China and Restoration figures such as Aphra Behn to the increasing moral con- servatism we find reflected in mid-Qing gentry-class writers and in, say, the works of Sarah Scott or the later novels of Eliza Haywood. Perhaps most strikingly, the rapid incursions of women writers into the literary spheres of both societies led not only to occasionally essentialized conceptions of a “feminine” voice, but also a broad-based valorization of certain attributes of that voice associated with authentic emotional experience. While it

these themes in the Ming-Qing period, see Tze-lan Song, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: Press, 2003), 2–95. 11 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 91, 215, 266–74. 12 Kang-i Sun Chang, “Ming-Qing Women Poets and Cultural Androgyny,” Feminism / Femininity, ed. Chen and Crothers, 21–31.

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was by no means associated exclusively with women, it is worth noting, in connection with these developments, that the cult of sentiment in mid- eighteenth-century England finds a close analogue in the cult of qing (情), similarly concerned with intense feelings of sympathy and affection, in the literary culture of early Qing dynasty China. I find such parallels as provocative as they are unexpected. Expanding networks of cultural and commercial exchange between China and Europe notwithstanding, there is no evidence of mutual awareness between women writers in England and China, let alone reciprocal influence. As is well known, the realms of religion, political philosophy, the visual arts, mathematics, and science saw lively and productive circuits of cross- cultural negotiation between China and Europe emerge over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While a handful of literary works were translated in both directions, there is scant reason to believe that the celebrated cross-cultural contact zone established by missionar- ies and merchants extended to the literary sphere. This is not to suggest that literary developments in the two countries were entirely unrelated or that the many analogies that a trans-Eurasian perspective brings into view are purely coincidental. Both regions, after all, were deeply embedded in expansive global trade networks from the sixteenth century onward, and the massive influx of Mexican and Bolivian silver into Asian and European economies likely contributed, in some comparable ways, not only to increasing prosperity, population growth, urbanization, and social mobility, but also, through an indirect process closely related to such socio- economic developments, to rising literacy rates for men and women, ver- nacularization, and more widespread access to literary activity as a source of pleasure, personal fulfillment, and cultural capital. Regardless of the precise origins of these parallel (or at least analo- gous) developments in China and England, their historical simultaneity and basic structural commensurability suggest two productive lines of comparative research. To the—still, I fear, considerable—extent that the study of English literary and cultural history retains vestiges of the excep- tionalism that marked its disciplinary origins in the nineteenth century, an awareness of closely commensurable developments at the other end of the Eurasian landmass may be helpful in dislodging assumptions about

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the uniqueness and exemplarity of England’s trajectory and in recognizing certain allegedly distinctive components of European modernity as in fact belonging to more generalizable historical patterns. Specifically, the avail- ability of a comparable flowering of women’s writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China makes it possible, as we consider the trajectories of women’s literary history in early modern England, to begin to distin- guish the local and particular components of this history from those that it might share with other histories, and thereby to avoid mistaking the contingent for the universal. At the same time, however, it requires that we complicate some of our more familiar explanatory hypotheses. In the presence of such commensu- rate data sets, we can no longer justify seeking historical causes or literary antecedents for particular developments in women’s literature solely within the borders of a single nation. Rather, we need increasingly to complement the analysis of local dynamics with a recognition of broader macro-his- torical trends that might have contributed to particular outcomes, at least on an aggregate scale. Globally minded political and economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Victor Lieberman have argued persuasively that the clear patterns that emerge from a trans-regional perspective on early modernity usefully complement the analysis of local developments in a particular region.13 While the applicability of such methodologies to the more finely textured treatments of the past often favored within humanities fields is certainly open to debate, the increasing currency of a globalizing perspective within literary studies and cultural history suggests that this might well be a debate worth having. A second avenue of research suggested by these comparisons would involve at once exposing and subverting the persistent Eurocentric biases of early modern studies by strategically adopting categories and paradigms that have emerged through the study of Chinese women’s writing of this

13 Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c . 800– 1830, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

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period in order to reconsider aspects of the English tradition through the lenses they provide. It is not uncommon for feminist sinologists, most of whom were trained in the West, to deploy models from European women’s history in assessing its counterparts elsewhere in the world. It is far less common, and potentially much more constructive, to think about how women’s history might look, as it were, through the other end of the tele- scope, refracted through a subtly different set of normative expectations and conceptual schemas. What would happen, for example, if we read seventeenth-century English women’s poetry through the contemporary Chinese expectation that women’s poetry is characterized by an aesthetic purity and naturalness that marks its separation from the bureaucratic world of the male literati?14 Or through the contemporary Chinese under- standing of a fundamental opposition in women’s writing between cai (才), or talent, and de (德), or moral righteousness? The well-known eighteenth- century debate between Yuan Mei and Zhang Xuecheng on the nature of women’s poetry explicitly foregrounds a tension between aesthetic and didactic expectations in ways that might help to illuminate some of the conflicting imperatives negotiated by English women writers in a period characterized, as it was in China, by the rapid and (for some observers) unsettling growth of literacy, printing, urbanization, commerce, and com- panionate marriage.15 One way in which such seemingly preposterous gestures might prove salutary would be in helping us think beyond the teleological blinkers that too frequently distort our understanding of the lived and inscribed experi- ence of early modern subjects, and in particular early modern women. We are probably all subject to a tendency to seek out historical antecedents for cultural developments with which we closely identify. Scholars of a strongly progressive orientation are, one might venture, considerably more likely to develop an interest in and assert the historical importance of, say,

14 Chang, “Gender and Canonicity,” Hsiang Lectures on Chinese Poetry, ed. Fong. 15 Kang-I Sun Chang, “Ming-Qing Women Poets and the Notions of ‘Talent’ and ‘Morality’,” in Theodore Huters, Roy Bin Wong, and Pauline Yu, eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 236–58.

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the leading figures in the radical enlightenment than their more conserva- tive peers. Likewise, in contemplating the sexual politics of earlier periods, many of us seek out, whether through archival excavation or close reading, evidence of proto-feminist orientations and signs of alienation from or resistance to patriarchal norms. It is a perennial challenge to square such expectations and desires with the sober recognition that the past is very much a foreign country in which our favored categories of analysis may turn out to have very little relevance. A pan-Eurasian perspective can be potentially useful here in enabling us to compensate for the distortions of teleology and wishful thinking by introducing a synchronic framework for comparison. Precisely because we are not burdened with the expectation that seventeenth-century Chinese women were on their way, over the next two centuries, to becoming modern, studying their lives and writings might well, in some respects, provide a more useful vantage point from which to approach their counterparts in England than the one we inhabit in twenty-first-century America. And indeed there is a strong consensus among scholars of early Qing women’s literature that while it clearly offers instances of self-empowerment, it cannot and should not be read primar- ily as a site of autonomy, resistance, or even distinct female subjectivity: women writers in China, who were by definition an elite group, tended not to question the underpinnings of the patriarchal social order that provided them with their privileges and status, but rather were likely to uphold traditional Confucian ideals of chastity, filial piety, and the like.16 Chinese women’s literature presents an extraordinarily rich tradition, and one whose remarkable convergences with more familiar literary histories have the potential usefully to unsettle geographically challenged concep- tions of the early modern.

16 See, for example, Maram Epstein, “Bound by Convention: Women’s Writing and the Feminine Voice in Eighteenth-Century China,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26.1 (2007): 97–105; Marie-Florine Bruneau, “Learned and Literary Women in Late Imperial China and Early Modern Europe,” Late Imperial China 13.1 (June 1992), 156–72; and Susan Mann, “Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century,” in Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White, eds., Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 27–46.

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