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Enchantment, Charming, and the Notion of the Femme Fatale in Early Chinese Historiography

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Enchantment, Charming, and the Notion of the Femme Fatale in Early Chinese Historiography asian medicine 8 (�0�3) �49–�94 brill.com/asme Enchantment, Charming, and the Notion of the Femme Fatale in Early Chinese Historiography Hanmo Zhang State University of New York, New Platz [email protected] Abstract In a number of well-framed speeches recorded in the Zuozhuan, women, especially beautiful women, are viewed as the femmes fatales, or women who cause calamities. Among these speeches is a rare record of a famous doctor’s diagnosis of a Spring-and- Autumn-period hegemon’s illness. How could illness be connected with the notion of the femme fatale? In examining the correlations between this Zuozhuan account and related information in some newly excavated manuscripts, I argue that as far as the medical approach is concerned, both the Zuozhuan and the excavated texts share a common cultural basis at least partly retained in the extant texts after a long course of oral and written transmission. Based on the similarities between those transmitted and newly excavated texts, the illness from which the local ruler suffered can be identi- fied as a kind of sexual disease caused in the lord’s bedchamber. This evidence, and the high ratio of sex-related illnesses reflected in the Western Han doctor Chunyu Yi’s biographical account, further suggests that the Spring-and-Autumn-period hegemon’s illness was not a single isolated case, but rather represented a broader common prob- lem of the patriarch’s sexual excess in early Chinese polygamous families. Some of the Zuozhuan accounts of ritual and medical principles are also closely related. This leads me to further suggest that the Zuozhuan historiographers, who knew well both medical knowledge and problems taking place in their contemporaries’ bedchambers, chose to condemn the femmes fatales under an abstract principle, that of ritual propriety, as the solution to sex-related diseases in early Chinese polygamous families. * In this paper the terms enchantment, charming, and femme fatale are used approximately interchangeably with the words gu 蠱, mei 媚, and nühuo 女祸, respectively. Both gu and mei are more extensively discussed in the main text of this paper. The term nühuo refers to calamities more often than not caused by beautiful women. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�5734��8-��34�Downloaded3�7 from Brill.com09/30/2021 03:38:45AM via free access 250 Zhang Keywords Enchantment – gu 蠱 – art of charming – mei 媚 – femme fatale – Zuozhuan – ritual propriety Compared to other aspects like the political and military life of the Eastern Zhou 東周 (770–221 BCE), the gender issues of the Zuozhuan 左傳 (Zuo Commentaries), though noticed for a long time, have not been sufficiently studied.1 The idea of the femme fatale, however, is frequently touched upon from different points of view since it is embedded in a number of well-crafted Zuozhuan speeches hard to ignore. It seems to be a truism in the Zuozhuan that, in most cases when mentioned, physical female beauty as the source of sensual pleasure is also a sign of danger, both familial and political. How could such a notion come into being? There are different approaches to this question. Wai-yee Li offers an explanation of female beauty as a sign in the sign-causality explanatory scheme, according to which, the idea of the femme fatale ‘is more self-consciously, sometimes even willfully and arbitrarily, established, as she [the woman] is made to explain what otherwise seems incomprehensible’.2 In other words, with the invention of the idea of the femme fatale, which does not necessarily contain any causal relationship with the downfall of men, the Zuozhuan historiographers make those discrete historical events readable and, thus, inject meaning into history. Another explanation is that the Zuozhuan narrative conveys the historiog- raphers’ ritual-oriented judgment that views extreme beauty similar to the impropriate display of clothing, music, and other things exposing the owner’s moral weakness and that impropriate pleasure always goes with disastrous consequences. This is why female beauty, represented as impropriate visual pleasure for men, is portrayed negatively in the Zuozhuan historiography’s 1 Needless to say, this statement is not meant to deny the fact that gender issue has attracted scholarly attention and been intensively written about in recent years. For instance, among many others, Lisa Raphals’s Sharing the Light 1998 and Charlotte Furth’s A Flourishing Yin 1999 exemplify this scholarly trend. For more references related to this trend, see also Holmgren 1981, Teng 1996, Zhou Yiqun 2003 and 2013, and passim. What this statement really means to convey, as it says, is the lack of sufficient scholarship focusing on the Zuozhuan as the back- bone in reconstructing women’s history in the Eastern Zhou, especially in comparison with its social, political, and military aspects. This article is a modest attempt—one of the many possible meaningful approaches to this issue—in this regard. 2 Li Wai-yee 2007, p. 160. For Li’s reading of female beauty as signs in the sign-causality scheme, see pp. 147–60. asian medicineDownloaded from 8 Brill.com09/30/2021(2013) 249–294 03:38:45AM via free access Enchantment, Charming, and the Notion of the Femme Fatale 251 hermeneutics ‘yoked to a philosophical program that represents pleasures as a potential means to the revival of Zhou values’.3 The long-playing denigration of women’s image, especially when women played their roles in sex, can, however, be deconstructed by the candid admis- sion of men’s moral weakness accompanying the negative portrayal of women in early Chinese texts. The appearance of descriptions on the morally persua- sive power of virtuous female figures passim in the Zuozhuan and other early Chinese texts makes Paul Goldin suspect that the writers do not really mean it when they depict women as sexually licentious and morally degraded crea- tures; he believes that behind the veil of such negative depictions of women is virtually the authors’ intentions to criticize the dissolute men who take delight in sexual pleasure.4 Another line of argument emphasizes the inequality of the social status between men and women. A generally held assumption is that in a patriar- chal society like early China, women were relatively powerless and usually voiceless due to the dominating position of men. The denigration of women betrays men’s attempt to hide their wrong doings by taking female beauty as the cause of their trouble.5 Under the same assumption, the negative depic- tions of women are also taken as evidence of women’s desire for power in an abnormal yet understandable way, that is, to manipulate their relations with those–usually men–who control power.6 Based on this understanding, the accusation of the demoralization of the Zuozhuan women becomes ground- less, since the moral standard as later perceived might have not been applied to the periods reflected in the Zuozhuan. This is what Yang Yunru 楊筠如 tries to prove through a close reading of relevant cases recorded in the Zuozhuan. He argues that the interposed Confucius’ or Gentleman’s ( junzi 君子) highly moral comments, in contradicting the Zuozhuan accounts in regard to moral taboos and rules being frequently violated, merely reflect the moral stance of the Zuozhuan historiographers who followed Confucius’ teachings. These were later raised to be pervasive, highly respected moral standards dominating such major Confucian work as the Xunzi.7 In this sense, the judgment of the histori- ographers differs from the values reflected in those Zuozhuan accounts. Inspired by the above suggestions in one way or another, this paper, in focusing on the discussion of a well-preserved Zuozhuan medical account, 3 Schaberg 2001, pp. 222–55. 4 Goldin 2002, pp. 64–5. 5 Liu Yongcong 1998; Guisso 1981. 6 Wang Xiaojian 2007, pp. 11–15. 7 Yang Yunru 1988. asian medicine 8 (2013) 249–294 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 03:38:45AM via free access 252 Zhang attempts to offer a different reading of the idea of the femme fatale presented in the Zuozhuan in the light of such newly discovered texts as the Mawangdui medical manuscripts and Shuihudi almanac books (rishu 日書, or literally the ‘daybooks’).8 I argue that the illness from which Lord Ping of Jin 晉平公 (r. 557–532 BCE) had suffered belonged to a sex-related disease caused in the lord’s bedchamber and that this diagnosis reflected a common problem indi- cating the typical sort of tension in early Chinese polygamous families where women tended to attract and control their men though sex-related skills then called ‘the art of charming’ (meidao 媚道). Knowing well both current medical knowledge and the stories taking place in their contemporaries’ bedchambers, the Zuozhuan historiographers chose to condemn the femmes fatales under an abstract principle, that is, the principle of ritual propriety, to address their concerns of, and solutions to, the issues regarding sex, men’s health, as well as the social order within and outside of individual families. This analysis thus begins with the discussion of Doctor He’s ( yi He 醫和) diagnosis of Lord Ping of Jin’s illness recorded in the Zuozhuan, a work that has achieved canonical status and has been characterized as mainly the reflec- tion of early Chinese court culture. But by also examining the newly archaeo- logically discovered Mawangdui medical manuscripts and Shuihudi almanac writings, which are generally categorized as the descriptions of non-elite think- ing and practice, I attempt to extend the discussion to a more popular level 8 The fourteen Mawangdui medical texts were originally written on cloth and bamboo strips excavated from Mawangdui Tomb 3 located in present-day Changsha of Hunan Province.
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