Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood

Susan Mann

The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4. (Nov., 2000), pp. 835-862.

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http://www.jstor.org Wed Apr 2 17:51:12 2008 Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood

SUSAN MANN

SALMANRUSHDIE CALLS MYTHOLOGY "the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing {its) . . . future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles" (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, "the waking dreams our societies permit" that celebrate "the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks" (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood-an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia. Scholars who study myth will doubtless find my use of the term here overly broad. The myths I discuss are stories that many scholars of comparative mythology would not consider myths at all, but rather "histories" or, perhaps, legends, that conceal, distort, obscure, or otherwise overwrite the remnants of archaic plots and characters that form the stuff of true myth.' Embedded as they are in historical and cultural context, though, Chinese myths of womanhood yield unexpected insights into historical consciousness about women, and among women, in Chinese history. So whereas the subject of this address has an intellectual debt to a past president, Wendy

Susan Mann is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. This article was originally presented as the Presidential Address to the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, 10 March 2000. The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Weijing Lu and Baomin Ye, and the support of the committee on Research of the Academic Senate, University of California, Davis. For generous advice, assistance, and criticism I am also indebted to Beverly Bossler, Joan Cadden, Sherman Cochran, Catherine Kudlick, Ellen Johnston Laing, Weijing Lu, P. Steven Sangren, and G. William Skinner. 'As Anne Birrell (1991) points out, a big problem for everyone interested in myth is that all true myths are overlain with thousands of years of historicization. Birrell also draws a clear line between myths and what she calls "the literary tradition," which "express[es) religious, ritual, and imaginative verities" (161). TheJournal of Asian Stadies 59, no. 4 (November 2000):815-862. O 2000 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 836 SUSAN MANN

Doniger, its slant is peculiar to historian^.^ And it plays (not without irony) on the widespread myths that surround "Asian" women in the media and in popular consciousness in the United States (Manderson and Jolly 1777). I can hardly touch on most of the myths of Asian womanhood this afternoon. Rather, I focus on Chinese myths, with passing (though I hope not frivolous) allusions to myths in other parts of what is called Asia. Among those Chinese myths, I single out two-not necessarily the ones most familiar even to this erudite audience (although yes, Mulan is one of them). Conspicuous by its absence will be one of the great Euro-North American myths about Chinese women, the myth of submission, oppression, and the bound foot, a subject that will make a very belated appearance in the coda, where-as Professor Doniger would note-it will become clear that "often when we think we are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative of the other" (Doniger 1998, 11). In Japan and Korea, as in South Asia and Southeast Asia, women as well as men figure in the myths of history and civilization, and they are narrated in forms every bit as diverse as those we find in China. But myths of Asian womanhood outside of China lean heavily toward goddesses, female deities, powerful ghosts, and their occasional this-worldly manifestations and appearances as character types, often represented in puppet plays, folktales and rituals, and temple art or home decoration. One thinks, for example, of the Javanese puppet known as kethopruk, which is especially popular among women;3 or Balinese exorcism rites celebrating the demonic Durga, or rice rituals devoted to the divine Dewi Sri.4 In South Asia, female myths are based on figures from the Riimiiyana and the Mahiibhiirata (Majumdar 1753). And in Indian folk art, images of the goddess Lakshmi adorn the walls of houses painted

20neof the unsung perks of serving as the president of the Association for Asian Studies is the opportunity to spend time with a past-president and get acquainted with the person and the mind, and it was reading the work of my predecessor, Wendy Doniger, that inspired me to think about old problems in new ways. Like Doniger, I am interested in myths as "all the various forms of narrations of an experience," forms that function in two zones: they can be highly individualized and specific to a particular person, and yet at the same time they can be universalized to an abstract or ideal type, such that the same story could happen to anyone (Doniger 1998, 1-3, quotation on p. 7). As readers will see, however, in this address I speak as a historian, not as a student of myth and religion. My perspective differs from Doniger's in ways that become clear as the address proceeds. 3Barbara Hatley (1990, 192) discusses the Javanese puppet theater known as kethoprak, which was especially popular among women. The plots of these puppet plays, whether his- torical or legendary, often feature a female type (branyaklkenis) who is strong-minded, loqua- cious, outgoing, and assertive: "Her behavior is explicitly contrasted with the submissiveness and decorum traditionally expected of a Javanese woman." 4James Boon (1990, 212) remarks: "Balinese images of women and men do not simply complement a stratified rank of male over female. Stereotypes of demonesses from folktales and ritual coexist with those of female deities; whereas Balinese exorcisms celebrate demonic Durga, rice rituals are devoted to divine Dewi Sri. Many ills, particularly in the realm of marriage, are attributed to male Rakshasas and other goblins. Most germane for present pur- poses, Tantric-Siwaic values of puritylpollution reversals abound. . . . And these complexities connect Bali's Indic components to Indo-European variations on gender-inflected symbols and systems. . . .[I)n the institutions and rituals that concern us here, the category 'female' will be shown to remain symbolically double, even where wives do not necessarily link opposable social units. Wives in their various resonances and valences represent an encompassing mediator not just in exogamous kinship systems but in what we might call endogamous 'twinship systems' too. Here the accent falls not only on wives or wives-become-mothers, but also on sister-wives-become-ancestresses, and superior ancestresses at that." PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS OF ASIAN WOMANHOOD 837 by women in the co~ntryside.~None of these resemble the historicized myths of women that fill China's written records. The exceptions in Asia are Korea and Vietnam, where Chinese influence after the twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced discourses on women similar to those found in China, though on a far smaller scale. A Vietnamese text composed in classical Chinese in 1327 to celebrate the successful resistance to Mongol invasion (attributed in Vietnam, as in Japan, to the protection of divine powers), includes three records of the lives of female sovereigns whose stories follow closely Chinese models of exemplary womanhood, especially the ideal of the woman warrior. The Departed Spirits of the Viet Realm presents biographies of the Trung sisters, Trac and Nhi. Trac leads an army of the people to avenge a wrong against her husband by the local prefect, a corrupt official ruling as an agent of Han imperial power. With the support of her younger sister, she musters a force so fierce that they seize the entire circuit, inspiring riots elsewhere that lead to the ouster of Han rule. The sisters eventually install themselves as "Queens of Viet" and take a surname of their own (Trung). Meanwhile the Chinese emperor, enraged, sends an army led by Ma Yuan to defeat the sisters. Many bloody battles later, the Truong troops are routed and the two sisters killed in the fighting. A temple built to honor their memory is revived as a sacred site when prayers for rain there are successful, and the spirits of the two women appear in a dream to the ruling Vietnamese emperor during the twelfth century. Other temples dedicated to the sisters were built elsewhere, and the emperor later bestowed on them the obviously Chinese-style title "Chaste Divine Ladies," the first of many such honor^.^ By the nineteenth century, the tale of Trung Trac had been feminized and romanticized to focus on her marriage to her husband, Thi Sach, and the trope of a woman fighting for her country while mourning the battlefield death of her husband has had enduring appeal in Vietnam in recent years (Taylor 1783, 335), though these later romanticized versions should not distract our attention from the message of the early tales. A second, shorter tale in the same Vietnamese collection concerns a woman of Champa named My E, who was married to the king of that country. She was captured by the Vietnamese ruler after her husband was killed in battle, but she committed suicide on the way to the capital at Hanoi by leaping into the river and drowning. Local villagers, awed by the continued sounds of a woman's cries from the spot where she drowned, built a temple to honor her and to placate the spirit. When the emperor himself passed by the site later and heard the story, he had a vision in which a woman appeared to him saying: "I have heard that a woman follows only one man, and faithfully so. . . . {Now) I have reached the golden springs and met my husband. My hopes have been fulfilled. . . ." The emperor, awed, bestowed upon her the title Woman According with Orthodoxy.

5F~rimages of the goddess Lakshmi in Indian women's folk art, particularly house and wall paintings in the countryside, see the exquisite illustrations in Huyler 1994. 'According to Keith Taylor, later Vietnamese historians (e.g, in the thirteenth and fif- teenth centuries) bemoaned the fact that women, not men, were the only ones strong enough to stand up to Chinese invaders. On the other hand, the Song poet Huang Tingjian (1054- 1105), "celebrating the exploits of heroes on the southern frontier, compared Trung Trac with Lu Jia, who resisted Han Wu Di's armies in the name of Nan Yue in 111 BCE. . . " (Taylor 1983, 335). A commentary on the Trung sisters written by a Vietnamese scholar in 17 15 contrasts their patriotism and their defense and strengthening of the court of the Lac lords with the "conspiratorial" women of China, naming Empress Lu of Han and Empress Wu of Tang. And the commentary concludes: "Now, in these days, there are the Chaste Widow of Trao-nha and the Pure Wife of Ty-ba who are unanimously acclaimed for their uprightness and for whom the whole nation laments! It was the same kind of resolute appeal that pushed out the borders of the Trung queens' territory. . . ." (translated in Taylor 1983, 337). 838 SUSAN MANN

Other titles followed, in 1285, 1288, and 1313 (Ostrowski and Zottoli 1999, 22- 23, quotation on p. 23; see also Taylor 1983, 334-39). Both of these Vietnamese myths, and the bestowing of titles on the virtuous women celebrated in them (not to mention the construction of a local temple to honor a virtuous woman's suicide) closely follow templates familiar in classical Chinese texts of the same period. The upsurge of interest in stories of virtuous Vietnamese women in the period coinciding with the Mongol invasions suggests other interesting parallels with the Chinese case. For example, the myth of the Trung sisters, echoed elsewhere in Southeast Asia,7 recalls an archaic myth of heroic sisterhood in China, as we shall see. Turning to the other Asian society where myths of womanhood figure prominently, namely Korea after the twelfth century, we find a courtly tradition of compiling the biographies of exemplary women that closely followed Chinese historiographical precedents. Martina Deuchler has found stories of female martyrs like the Chinese lienii, or exemplary women, in Korean local gazetteer^,^ even though indigenous traditions of recording women's lives are la~king.~But apart from these Vietnamese and Korean examples-most of which bear the unmistakable stamp of Chinese influence-it is in China alone, among all the societies in Asia, that we find a singularly voluminous record of legendary female figures whose narrated lives fill tome after tome, dynasty after dynasty, from earliest recorded history right up to the present. These stories mostly take the form of the infamous "biographies of exemplary women" or lienii zhzlun-especially female martyrs and models of fidelity and moral determination. By Ming and Qing times, collecting stories of legendary women's lives had become a publishing craze, with illustrated books depicting the "100 beautiful persons" (bui mei~en)'~-an eclectic assortment of female legends ranging from the

7Anthony Reid (1988, 167) offers a Thai account of "two sisters who led the successful defence of Phuket in 1785: Queen Suriyothai, who was killed defending Ayutthaya in 1564; and Lady Mo, who rescued Khorat in 1826 after leading an escape by several hundred captive women." He goes on to say that "If such militant heroines played a larger role in Southeast Asia than elsewhere, it is probably because status was more prominent than gender, and women were not excluded from taking the lead if the occasion required it." 'Martina Deuchler, personal communication, 24 February 2000. In a forthcoming article, Deuchler characterizes these stories and notes that the influence of Chinese Neo-Confucian thought on other aspects of literary women's lives is apparent after the sixteenth century. For instance, according to Deuchler, although few women's writings from the Chos6n period survive, a notable literary collection by the female classical scholar Yunjidang (1721-1793) expresses views commonly held by her peers in China at the time, namely that "although what men and women do differs, the human properties bestowed by Heaven are at first not different at all. Thus, when I studied the classics and had questions about their meaning, my elder brother instructed me in a caring manner until I came to a complete understanding." Trans- lation from Deuchler, forthcoming. 'At the time of writing, what little work had been done on these sources was published in Korean (Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush, personal communication, 17 February 2000). loon the genre "meiren," see Wu Hung 1997, 323-30. Wu dates the earliest of these texts to the late Ming. In Qing times, he describes a trend of "compiling sets of twelve identifiable, historical women" (331). One in particular, captioned with a series of poems by Wu Weiye (1607-1671), "mixes famous beauties (such as Xishi), literary women (such as Cai Wenji), and martial women (such as Hongxian). . . " (331). Wu Hung points out that the Manchu emperors' fascination with and taste for Chinese female beauty made them enthusiastic patrons of this genre; the Qianlong Emperor, in one painting, had himself portrayed relaxing while looking down on five young women dressed in Chinese clothing, and complimenting himself that he had reversed the story of Wang Zhaojun-instead of a Han Chinese lady moving north to join the foreign ruler, he (the foreign ruler) had now arrived in China to sublime to the distinctly frivolous-serving as a kind of tea-table classic that was mimicked in books by connoisseurs of courtesans who listed and ranked their virtues in handbooks resembling mail order catalogues. Legendary women, their stories elaborately visualized in illustrations, paintings, and performances, were "a thing" in Chinese culture, as nowhere else." Yves Bonnefoy made this discovery while treating the Chinese case in his sweeping survey of Asian mythologies. He finally dealt with the sheer volume of myths about women in China by creating a special section titled "Ancient Chinese Goddesses and Grandmothers," in which he remarked with evident confusion that "{alncient Chinese mythology includes several female figures who play a more important role in its beliefs than one would have expected from such a patriarchal society." Seeking to explain this anomaly, Bonnefoy attributed the unusual prominence of female characters in China's earliest myths to an evolutionary stage of Chinese civilization's development when (in his words) "women had a much more important position" (Bonnefoy 1991, 241). Bonnefoy's gesture toward Engels' (and Morgan's) notion of a stage of primal matriarchy is a myth all its own that has been widely circulated in China among Marxist historians,12 though few scholars these days find it persuasive. David Keightley has shown that by the time Chinese civilization enters the written historical record, one finds nary a trace of matriarchal power, at least if we are to depend for evidence on elite burial practices and recorded religious beliefs. Keightley writes dismissively: "From at least the Late Neolithic until the Late Shang, the political and economic status of most women in China . . . was inferior to that of most men" (Keightley 1999, 53). Of course, the fact that women occupied low political and economic status in early China may not tell us the whole story about their power in society. Anne Birrell, studying the archaic myths of China that preceded the reconstructed, historicized myths comprising most of the stories in Bonnefoy's collection, has noted that even though male deities predominate in classical Chinese myths about gods and goddesses, it is the female ones who are "often more mythologically significant in terms of their function and role." How so? Well, Birrell notes, it is women whose stories figure in accounts of "creation, the motion of celestial bodies, nature spiritrs), local tutelary spirit{s), motherrs1 of a god, consort[s} of a demigod or a god, harbingerls) of disaster, donorrs} of immortality, bringerrs1 of punishment, and dynastic foundation" (Birrell 1993, 163)-not a bad list, on anyone's measure of significance. P. Steven Sangren's recent research, drawing on work by Glen Dudbridge and other students of myth, has stressed that mythic tales "may provide insights into Chinese culture repressed become its master (357). Wu concludes that the portraits of Chinese women favored by the Manchu emperors "symbolized. . . a defeated nation that was given an image of an extended feminine space with all its charm, exoticism, and vulnerability" (363), leading to an exagger- ated reinvention of the genre stressing multiplicity and passivity. "On visual representations of women in Chinese portraiture, drama, and published illus- trated texts, see Vinograd 1992, 15-18; Clunas 1997, 33, 90-91; Hegel 1998, 168, 172ff. See also Wu Hung's discussion of "dangerous screens," from which women emerged to haunt or seduce their male victims, in his analysis of the Screen of Ladies zlnder Trees, a late-eighth- century tomb mural (Wu Hung 1996, 95, 104). Wu also describes (121-22) a screen painting associated with the legends surrounding the life of Yang Guifei. 12Min (1995) includes several articles that present evidence for archaic matriarchies and goddess worship in China, arguing that elements of these survive in the practices of minority peoples throughout China, though they disappeared in the dominant culture beginning about 3000 BCE, following invasions by patriarchal warriors and, later, the rise of Han Chinese culture and government. by normative convention in the more self-conscious self-representations of Chinese culture familiar to us in Chinese philosophy and elite literat~re."'~ A few of the women who figure in these archaic myths of Chinese civilization even make it recognizably into the historicized versions-perhaps we should call them legends-that are the focus of this address. The two daughters of the sage-emperor Yao who married the sage-emperor-to-be Shun belong to the narratives of archaic myth that predate textual records, offering faint echoes of the sister myths found in southeast Asia.14 Their story leads off the first chapter of Liu Xiang's classic collection of historical female biographies, the Lienii zhuan. The Xiang Queens, as they were known (because they were buried by the Xiang River, where they drowned themselves following the death of their husband), counseled their husband Shun as he struggled to serve his evil father as a filial son, knowing full well that his father had conspired with his younger brother to kill Shun. At his father's command, and in testimony to his filial piety, Shun undergoes three trials, in each of which he is saved by the advice of his wives. In the first trial, his father commands him to repair the walls of a granary, only to set it afire while Shun is at work on it. Shun, advised ahead of time by his wives to wear bamboo rain coverings, leaps from the roof of the granary with his ersatz parachute and escapes. Next, his father orders him to dig deeper a well that has run dry. This time his wives caution him to prepare a tunnel as an escape route, sparing his life once again when the evil father begins filling the well to bury Shun alive. In a final plot foiled, the Xiang Queens give Shun medicine to drink so that when his father plies him with liquor, he will not die of alcohol poisoning. Shun's virtue as a filial son, his survival in these moments of great peril, and even his accession to the throne, all depend upon the sage advice of his wives. During the Ming dynasty another legend was added to the story of the two sisters, who were linked to a species of bamboo that grows near Lake Dongting where they died. According to the story, the sisters caused the bamboo to become speckled "like tear stains," as they wept upon it while mourning the passing of Shun (Birrell 1993, 167-69). An eighteenth- century commentary on this text, written by the female scholar Wang Zhaoyuan, embellishes the original Liu Xiang version with this telling comment on the advice of the sisters: "The two daughters [of Yao] taught Shun the skill of a bird to go up into the granary and the art of a dragon to go into the well" (see O'Hara 1945, 13- 17, quotation in n.9, p. 15). Such myths of archaic sisterhood have been deeply suppressed in China, as Edward Schafer noted: "A few traces of the old goddesses can be detected in T'ang unofficial

13See Sangren 1993, 4, citing Dudbridge 1978 and his study of the Guanyin myth (a filial daughter's conflicts with her father arising out of her refusal to marry). See also Sangren 1997. 14The propitious stories of the Trung sisters and the Xiang Queens contain overlapping elements that caused their tales to be confused by later mythmakers. According to Taylor (1983, 335), there is evidence that the Trung sisters became cultic figures in parts of China in later centuries. A fifteenth-century Vietnamese source mentions a shrine to them at Canton, and a Vietnamese envoy to China in 1793 reported seeing a similar shrine in Hunan on the south shore of Lake Dongting, though Taylor thinks this might have been a confusion with a shrine to the twin goddesses of the Xiang, the legendary consorts of Shun, whose cult was established in the same place. Taylor cites Schafer (1980, 38-42, 57-69, 93-103, 13745). Birrell (1993), who discusses this myth at some length, notes that the sisters were historicized as Yao's daughters very late (sixth century CE), but that they are mentioned first in the Shang shu, which is a late Zhou text, and they may have originated in the South, since they are associated with the Xiang River (the site of their joint suicide), a tributary of the Yangzi (160- 161). PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS OF ASIAN WOMANHOOD 841

Figure 1. The Xiang queens bring food to Shun, in this civilized rendering of the mythic sisters as model wives. Note bamboo raincoat in rear. From Luo Wenchao @*B, Lidai nzingyuun tushuo @!f&@H3, (Illustrated stories of noted women through the ages). Shenbao guan, Shenchang shuhuashi, Dianshizhai facsimile reprint, [I7791 1879, vol. 1:la. cult and popular lore, . . . [but} they are so insignificant as to be hardly worth mentioning" (Schafer 1980, 59). Even so, other archaic myths of womanhood remain close to the surface of historicized legends in the Chinese written record. The theme of undying or eternal love (Birrell 1993, 210-ll), the drama of female sacrifice through suicide (222-23 et pussim), and especially the storied "Country of Women" (248-49), where women do everything men can do, and without their help-all are archaic forms thar survive beneath the textual and visual surface of later Chinese historical legends about women. Archaic myth and historicized legend are starkly juxtaposed in the Han dynasty Wu Liang Shrines, where the primal goddess Nii Gua and her consort Fu Xi appear snakelike and intertwined right alongside such civilized models of Confucian womanhood as the mother of Zengzi weaving while her filial son kneels at her feer.15 Two legacies of archaic myth thar appear as traces in later historicized myths of Chinese womanhood form the focus of this address. The first is a trace from the myth of the country of women, which recurs in tales of women warriors, cross-dressed like Hua Mulan; women scholars, cross-dressed or straight, like the female historian Ban

''On Nii Gua, see Birrell 1991, 33-35, 69-71, 163-64 et passim; also Cai 1995. Zhao; and even the Iron Girls of the Cultural Revolution. This mythic legacy, enduring and reinvented continually through Chinese history, proves over and over again that women can do anything men can do. The second trace taps archaic tales of water maidens and dragon ladies retrieved by Schafer from the mythic past: Yang Guifei is heir to the myth of the snake or dragon who saps the vitality of her lover through the seductive power of her beauty. To explore these two legacies we shall consider two myths of Chinese womanhood-the myth of the woman warrior and the myth of the seductive young girl and her powerful patron. (The myth of the female scholar, or cainii, makes a brief cameo appearance in the conclusion.) All of these myths of womanhood are products of a civilizing process in which archaic myth was overwritten by history, literature, and the arts of popular culture. All belong to the domain where myth grows and thrives: in the ubiquitous reading and viewing audiences of the marketplaces, temple fairs, and domiciles of China's late empire. All of these myths were deployed with the express purpose of displaying some version of the Confucian moral agenda that dominates the written record. But this does not make them any less interesting as myths, especially if our goal is to show why that Chinese moral agenda found it (and still finds it) necessary to foreground women. As we shall see, these legendary women, through their enduring and continually elaborated myths, become logically constituted elements of what we have been pleased to call China's patriarchal society: integral, if paradoxical and confusing (as befits a good myth), parts of the story of how that proper patriarchy should work. That is, narrating the values of patriarchy in Chinese culture depended on and celebrated powerful women.

Myths in China's Historical Narratives

To find the reasons why female figures play so grandly in the myths on China's historical stage, we must look not to ancient matriarchies or ancient dragon and water myths, but to beliefs and structures embedded in the very "patriarchal" systems that most of us, like Bonnefoy, consider structures of women's oppression. Our goal is to understand the elements in the civilizing process in China that made it necessary to foreground women and their stories. Here Bonnefoy himself is helpful, because he has identified two of the key figures or character types who define the earliest Confucian myths of womanhood: empress dowagers and widows. Both roles empower women in earliest Chinese narratives, helping us to see how-as Margery Wolf so brilliantly showed many years ago (1972)-motherhood and widowhood force women to the foreground of the power politics of China's patriarchal system. In particular, empresses exercise unusual control over their sons, placing them at the center of palace intrigues and imperial matchmaking, thanks to the power of mothers in the Chinese family system.16 And widows are the trustees of their male progeny, making tales of assertive female fidelity among the most popular tomb decorations for Han aristocrats. Some of the earliest evidence for the ways in which myths of womanhood were woven into the narrative fabric of China's history comes from tomb paintings of the Han. Wu Hung has shown how tomb art can be understood as a narrative commentary on the life and values of the deceased, selected and composed by the deceased himself prior to his own death, as part of his planning for the proper representation of his

''See Yang 1960-61.Yang stresses the long-term importance of empress dowagers in Chinese history-the result of the power of mothers in the Chinese family system. PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS OF ASIAN WOMANHOOD 843 own life as well as his family's welfare (Wu 1995). On the wall of the tomb, the narrator positions himself in a symbolic moral pose at the end of the pictorial sequence, just as the historian offers a moral comment of his own at the conclusion of a historical treatise. Referring specifically to the use of women's images as part of the repertoire of narrative images in the Han dynasty Wu Liang Shrine, Wu notes that the female figures all derive from stories in Liu Xiang's Lienii zhzlan and that, significantly, "None . . . are chosen from Liu Xiang's categories of 'reasoning and understanding,' 'virtuous and wise,' and 'benevolent and wise.' All are from the two domestic types: 'chaste and obedient' and 'chaste and righteous' " (213). Wu interprets this to mean that Wu Liang wanted to send a powerful message to his own widow about her charge after his death: "These pictures seemed to have been aimed at a particular audience- namely, Wu Liang's widow and orphaned sons-advising them to maintain harmonious relationships in the household and to be loyal and filial toward their deceased husband and father" (232). (In fact, as Wu Hung shows, the painters of the tomb figures even changed the sex of key figures in some of the stories of famous filial sons to cast them as the filial sons of widows.) A stellar example of the power in a widow's image is the carving of Liang the Excellent from the Wu Liang Shrine (21 1). Liang is shown cutting off her nose to signal her determination never to remarry, even when wooed by the emissary of a wealthy and powerful king. Admonishing a surviving spouse, this painting shows us the ideal widow in her dead husband's eyes. Such practical, embedded, earthly myths of widowhood, lodged securely in the time-and-space-bound structures of state and family, make it clear how far from early myth the Han era takes us, despite the presence in the Wu Liang Shrine of Nii Gua and Fu Xi (Birrell 1993, 70). And they show us the immediate slippage between myths of womanhood and the family system in which those myths became embedded in the earliest centuries of Chinese history. But they do not explain why stories about women must figure in historical narratives. To understand women's visibility in both picture and text in Chinese history, we must take account of multiple interacting factors in the Chinese civilizing process that papered over archaic myths. These factors are far too complex to treat fully in a short essay of this kind. But they may be briefly noted as the unique constituent cultural forms that make China the only Asian civilization to foreground stories of women in this manner. These factors are: first, yin and yang cosmologies; second, voice and narrative style in literature; third, the integral relationship between pictorial and written narratives; and, perhaps most important, the social formations that express and "reembroider" cosmological, linguistic, and performative imperatives. The social formations to which I refer are: China's massive bureaucratic state with its enormous power to collect and disseminate information; an obsessively detailed written record of the past; highly ritualized family and community systems; and an immense audience that was open and constantly expanding with the market. Limitations of space prevent a detailed investigation of the ways in which the social formations of the bureaucratic state and the commercial economy produced an urban print culture and a public audience for myths about women in history, lavishly illustrated and richly embellished with fictional detail, and ultimately performed on stage with song, instrumental and percussive accompaniment, and dance.'' But we will eventually imagine ourselves as part of that

"A preliminary effort to tackle these complex subjects would lead immediately to the work of Mark Elvin (1784) and of scholars who study the interface between historical and fictional narratives, and the relationship between ritual and drama, publishing and perfor- mance. Research that has especially influenced my thinking includes Hegel (1998),Yu (1797), audience, to see what we can see. Our brief excursion will take us from Han tomb rubbings through sagas of some of China's most famous legendary women, as found in sources ranging from illustrated editions of the Lienii zbaan that first appeared in the thirteenth century to the so-called "hundred-beauties" albums of the late Qing period. We will have to skip over the female figures who filled the children's books used by little boys (and girls too, sometimes) to memorize their first characters and classical sayings,18 so that we can enjoy the New Year paintings that festooned the homes of ordinary commoners throughout the late empire.19 Late-nineteenth-century New Year paintings show as nothing else can how Chinese myths of womanhood were produced and reproduced in the context of an audience whose steady expansion through centuries preserved and valorized their stories, embellished their meanings, and used their examples-consciously or no-to give direction to their own lives.20 In the childhood of Chinese culture, long before the advent of footbinding, we find celebrated two extraordinary female myth figures: Hua Mulan and Yang Guifei. I single out these two only partly because of their fame.21More important is the fact that they allow me to ask the kinds of questions about historical consciousness that my subjkct begs to answer. In effect, their stories fill two bills: first, they are grounded in history yet they lend themselves easily to fiction and other commodified art forms pleasing to the audience that interests us; and second, they have been celebrated in

Widmer (1992), Grant (1989), and studies by David Johnson, especially Johnson (1989). Also Carlitz (1991, 1997), and Wu Hung (cited previously). On narrative in the New Year paintings (nianhuu) discussed below, see Knapp (1999, 133-57). 18Han (1993) presents scores of examples of stories about women that figured in classical instruction books used by students preparing for the examinations or learning the basics of literary Chinese. For instance, in the Xiao me, compiled in the late twelfth century by Zhu Xi, we find the stories of the mother of King Wen (165), and the wife of the Duke of Weiling, who could recognize the arrival of a worthy man by the sound of the wheels of his carriage (168). The student is reminded that Mencius' mother's love for her son was such that she moved three times, and from youth to age it was unwavering: "so too should my heart be steadfast, and I too will become like Mencius!" (175). The same text also includes a story of a widow immolating herself to resist a forced remarriage (195). In the San zi jing, compiled in the middle of the thirteenth century, the opening paragraph refers to Mencius' mother (269) and presents other stories of famous women such as Cai Wenji and Xie Daoyun (271). In the Yuan instructional text Lidai mengqiu the student-led through the dynasties one by one- learns that under the reign of the three Tang emperors Taizong, Xuanzong, and Xianzong, the women's quarters were "shameful" and infiltrated with barbarian influence (a thinly dis- guised allusion to Yang Guifei and the politics surrounding her) (281). An instructional text preserved in the Yongle dadian includes stories about Xie Daoyun's willow floss poem and about the tears of Shun's widows and the speckled bamboo, and about Yang Guifei's late arrival to an imperial summons because she was drunk asleep (369). The same text quotes poets Du Mu and Du Fu on Yang Guifei's passion for lichees (371). '"Hundred-beauties motifs were especially favored by printers who marketed New Year paintings, such as the famed Yangliuqing woodblock printers of Tianjin. The genres titled "Four Beauties" or "Ten Beauties," depicting famous women from history such as Xie Daoyun, Cai Wenji, Hua Mulan, and others (sometimes Daoist immortals or goddesses, for instance, such as Ma Gu or Chang E), were considered particularly auspicious emblems of prosperity (the phrase was jiating meiman,'houseful of beauty'). See Bo 1986, 105-6. 20Sangren(1993, 8ff.) presents an eloquent discussion of this point, drawing on current literary theory that stresses readers and audiences as consumers and producers of texts who construct meaning for their own purposes. See also Sangren 1997. 21 Before Hua Mulan became a transnational icon of pop culture through her canonization as heroine of a Disney movie, she was well known to U.S. readers because of Maxine Hong Kingston's brilliant novel Woman Warrior (1975, 1976). Yang Guifei is much more obscure in the United States, except among Chinese-Americans, many of whom still hear her story from parents or grandparents. multimedia representations from earliest times to the present. To their stories I shall add details of a third mythic figure, the female historian Ban Zhao. (Sadly, like most female historians, Ban Zhao did not lead a life that invites fictional fantasy or inspires art forms pleasing to an audience. She can, however, make a useful appearance when we investigate the myths that inspired Chinese women in the twentieth century.) Before we turn to Hua Mulan, Yang Guifei, or Ban Zhao, however, we must pause to review some of the reasons why their lives are found in the storehouse that encodes China's culture. Let us begin with our first premise, derived from the combined insights of Messieurs Bonnefoy and Keightley: namely, that powerful female myth figures are an integral part of Chinese patriarchy. We know that the earliest understanding of power in Chinese culture was dualistic: that a yang figure required its yin counterpart. Lisa Raphals' recent study of women in Han and pre-Han texts shows how women's lives figured in the great dualistic tropes that informed early Chinese politics: stories of order and chaos in the kingdom, distinctions between outer and inner, and admonitions about the separation of the sexes on which the division of labor and hence the social order were based. Although, as Raphals points out, the construction of gender relations in early China differs sharply from what we see in the late imperial period, it is these formative early centuries that produced the remade myths on which my own discussion today is based (Raphals 1998). The earliest construction of female roles in Chinese narrative, as Raphals shows, is evenhanded, portraying women in a correlative, complementary, or balanced position vis-h-vis men. Thus, a wise or resourceful woman may be the cause of a weak ruler's success, while a scheming and seductive woman is the source of a vulnerable ruler's downfall. The interesting point here is that the consort role is rarely omitted from early historical narratives, even though they focus on kings, and consorts' behavior is invoked at crucial junctures to explain outcomes. The woman is necessary, in other words, to the story line, and she's usually in the role of catalyst-the person who makes the plot unfold. Later Han sources of narrative distinction between male and female, especially those that place males in a hierarchy above females, are constructed around yinlyang or neilwai dichotomies by philosophers, especially Dong Zhongshu, bent on systematizing orderly hierarchies. In their initial construction, however, all of these terms were terms of distinction or difference, not separation and hierarchy (Raphals 1998, 212-13). And although Dong Zhongshu succeeded in codifying a philosophical system that relegated women, together with yin and nei, to an inferior place in a hierarchical structure, his ideas did not have much of a hearing for centuries afterward, as Daoism and then Buddhism claimed ideological hegemony in China, and women- especially smart women-stormed to the forefront of the historical record. In early mythmaking about Chinese women, then, we can locate principles of complementarity in language and in narrative that require a female consort to enable (or disable) a male ruler. And in the moral philosophy of the great Han synthesis, we see parallel efforts to stabilize and fix hierarchical order by relegating women to a subordinate role. By the beginning of the Song period, a time that most of us tend to mark as the high tide in a sea change in the social relation of the sexes in China, female figures were deeply enmeshed in the literary, historical, and canon of Chinese culture. They were necessary to the narration of the dynastic cycle (its rise and fall being a function of the interactions of yin and yang). They were integral to the moral discourse of Confucianism (particularly as mothers and consorts). And, as other scholars have emphasized, they supplied the poetic voice through which male poets and political figures could express their disaffection, criticism, and alienation (Huang 1995, 81- 97). It is no accident, I think, that the myths I've chosen today come from this early, pre-Song period of Chinese history and narration. Historians of late imperial times themselves noted a shift, between the Tang and the Song, in the portrayal and imaging of women in written and visual culture. Writing late in the eighteenth century, Zhang Xuecheng suggested that two long-term historical processes worked to undermine women's status from the time of Ban Zhao (the female historian of the Han) to the time of Li Qingzhao (the most noted female poet, and one of the few historically documented female writers, of the Song). The first was the aestheticizing and sexualizing of women's writing, possibly a complex outcome of the self-conscious development of a female voice by male writers, as well as the changing poetic tastes of the Han elite, and the turn away from Confucian morality toward esoteric concerns in Buddhism and Daoism. The second was commercialization: the commodification of women's talent as entertainment, a process that Zhang understood continued rapidly after the end of the Tang (Mann 1999). Turning now to our two mythic figures, Hua Mulan and Yang Guifei, let us see how their stories were stashed, and repeatedly unpacked, in China's cultural storehouse. We shall begin with the story of Mulan, because chronologically it comes first. The earliest record of Mulan appears in a ballad from the sixth century. The scene is set during the rule of the Toba Wei house at the turn of the fifth century. It begins with Mulan sitting by the door of her home, weaving and weeping, for her father has just been summoned to serve in the quota of military conscripts ordered up by the emperor. Her brother is too young to take his place. She is the oldest child. She goes to the market. She buys a "gallant horse," a cloth and saddle, snaffle and reins, and a whip, and the next day she steals away and camps by the side of the Yellow River. She joins other soldiers and they battle over a thousand leagues, crossing frontiers and hills for twelve years. On returning, they are all presented to the Emperor, who is handing out prizes of cash. Asked what she desires, Mulan says: "I beg only for a camel that can march a thousand leagues a day, to take me back to my home." Returning to her amazed and grateful parents and siblings, Mulan sits on her bed, casts aside her soldier's cloak, dons her old dress, binds her hair, fastens her combs, and goes out to the road to confront her former soldier friends in her true sexual persona. They are astonished that she has fooled them so completely. The ballad ends there with two lines about a male and a female hare running as fast as they can go. At such a moment, the poet suggests, neither can see clearly whether the other is male or female-just as soldiers fighting a war will be oblivious to such fine distinctions while they are bent on saving their livesz2 In Mulan's original ballad, there is no mention of filial piety, no allusion to a subsequent marriage, and no embroidering at all of her personal story. Hers is a hero's tale for a heroine who is brave and clever. The ballad does subsume other mythic elements: horses, camels, and "barbarian" military culture, the critique of harsh conscription by the state, and above all, the story of a cross-dressed heroine who "steps into a men's world to achieve great things." Notable in its appeal is the absence of a

"See the superior translation in Frankel (1976, 68-70), which shows that Mulan had an elder sister as well as a younger brother. Frankel's commentary on the ballad (70-72) notes that the meaning of the final two lines can be explained as a huwen (see p. 165), or "reciprocal phrase" (a two-part statement with mutual relevance). In this case the final lines say: "The he- hare's feet go hop and skip1 The she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled." This means that what is said about the one also applies to the other, that is, "when both are running fast, neither of them can see clearly whether the other is a male or a female, and the same goes for soldiers busily fighting a war" (p. 72). PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS OF ASIAN WOMANHOOD 847 love interest or any hint of romanticization of the heroine, an almost essential element in later tellings of the story, including of course, our own Disney's. The most important embellishments to Mulan's story appear first in the play Mulun Goes to War in Place of Her Father (CiMalun tifa congjzln) by the Ming playwright Xu Wei (1521-1593). Xu adds several narrative elements to the original ballad: a description of Mulan's successful capture of rebel forces, her marriage to a young local scholar upon her return home, and a dramatic departure scene where she takes leave of her parents. But according to Jeannette Faurot, his main contribution to the plot was to change the story's tone. Besides duty, Xu Wei's Mulan is motivated by her excitement at the prospect of going off to war to use skills her father had taught her, and in her first aria she sings of her desire to find a place for herself among the heroes and heroines of history, citing two lien& one of whom (the famous Tiying) wrote a letter to the emperor offering herself as a concubine in exchange for the release of her father, wrongly imprisoned:

The Maiden Xiu risked her life Tiying submitted to judgment. These were both companions in 'skirts and hairpins' Who stood firm on the earth and supported heaven. Should only men be heroes?23

(This dramatic invocation of filial daughters and lienii was picked up in later versions of the tale, appearing in an illustrated collection of stories of virtuous women printed in 1779.) Xu Wei added other contemporary touches to his Ming play, including a comic scene where Mulan, trying on her army boots, unbinds her feet and sings how awful it is to have spent years achieving a "phoenix-head" point, only to replace it with a "floating barge" (Faurot 1972, 87). But let us momentarily leave Mulan and her feet and turn to another legend. Our next story is decidedly not the tale of a virtuous woman focused on a family or on the marginal world of military life and commoner soldiery. Instead, it is a myth explaining historical change that places a woman at the center of nearly every trope in Chinese political theory: the scheming eunuch, the manipulative imperial in-laws, the infatuated ruler distracted from his duty, the effeminate culture that invites barbarian invasion, the innocenceitreachery of a seductive young woman, the follies of luxury, the pathos of love lost, and the eternity of true love that triumphs over death. Yang Guifei's story captured an audience the way Princess Diana's life and death captured the global tabloid press, but for much, much longer. Poems, paintings, plays, and a land-office business in pictures in the form of niunhuu (New Year paintings for decorating the home at Spring Festival time-the equivalent of the modern decorative wall calendar) made the details of her story familiar to the least literate householder. The volume of visual and textual production representing the Yang Guifei story is hinted at in the poems and paintings of scenes from her life that are catalogued in imperially commissioned lists and modern dicti~naries.~~ Once again, we may begin with the bare historical narrative before moving on to

23Translationby Jeannette Faurot (1972, 85-86). Faurot notes (146, nn. 35-36) that both of the young women heroines named here took desperate measures to protect the interest of their natal families (Xiu shi of Qin committed murder to avenge a wrong against her family). 24See,for example, Hu 1990, 136-38, 676-77, 681 et passim; Cai (1994, 1263, 1278- 81); and the list of titles in index 39 of Kangxi yuding lidai tihua shi (1976). Figure 2. The filial daughter Hua Mulan parting from her parents. From Luo Wenchao %*at7, Lidai mingyuan tushuo E{t%@H% (Illustrated stories of noted women through the ages). Shenbao guan, Shenchang shuhuashi, Dianshizhai facsimile reprint, 117791 1879, vol. 2:5a. its later fanciful embellishments. Yang Guifei was to become the consort of Emperor Ming Huang (Xuanzong, r. 713-755), who ruled China at the peak of its influence throughout East Asia. Xuanzong's childhood alone is enough to explain how he fell into his famous historical predicament. He was the grandson of the only woman in Chinese history to assume the role of emperor: the infamous Wu Zetian. Xuanzong spent his youth with his father, in strict seclusion, while his grandmother systematically murdered princes she considered threats to her claim on the throne. Xuanzong's uncle, who ascended the throne after Wu Zetian died, was poisoned by his own consort. Then the consort was killed in a coup led by the Princess Taiping, daughter of Empress Wu and aunt to Xuanzong. Xuanzong himself, once having achieved the throne, was locked in a struggle with the Princess Taiping that ended in her own suicide. Xuanzong had reason to be careful about his choice in women. Yang Guifei herself was originally betrothed to Xuanzong's own son, the Prince of Shou. But five years after her marriage she left her husband, took up residence in the imperial palace as a Daoist nun under the name of Taizhen, and entered the emperor's quarters as concubine as soon as her former husband had registered a new bride. The year was 745. She was 27 and the emperor 61. Their union lasted until her death in 756. Yang Guifei's appointment as imperial consort brought her relatives into powerful positions at the court, including her three elder sisters who all got titles and her male second cousins, in particular Yang Guozhong, who rose to become Chief Minister in 752. Her immense influence in the palace, displayed in the name the emperor bestowed upon her ("Precious Consort," or Guifei), made her a legend in her own time, inspiring a new folk saying: "Don't be pleased with the birth of a son1 Don't deplore the birth of a daughterlLook at Yang Guifei, now, who brought her family fortune" (Graham 1998, 11). Yang Guifei's place at the court was soon complicated by the machinations of her unscrupulous and power-hungry cousin and a conniving eunuch named Gao Lishi. But her downfall came as a result of her implication, by rumor and slander, in an affair with the general An Lushan, a frequent guest at the court. An Lushan's treason develops against the backdrop of the Emperor's withdrawal into his love life with Guifei, including their legendary retreat to escape the summer heat at the hot springs in Huaqing near Xi'an, where on the seventh day of the seventh month, so legend has it, they vowed eternal love under the crescent moon. Meanwhile, back at the palace, amid dancing and revelries, news arrives of An Lushan's rebellion. The court packs up to retreat into exile in Sichuan, but en route the escorting troops mutiny, kill Guifei's cousin the corrupt courtier Yang Guozhong, and demand her life as well. Guifei hangs herself with a silken cord at a place called Mawei, while the emperor weeps. This story, dramatic enough without much extra color, soon acquired a supporting cast of characters including the poet Li Bo (composing poems at the court extolling Guifei's beauty); and a rival for the emperor's attention, the lovely Meifei, permitting Guifei and Meifei many scenes in which one or the other flies into a jealous rage or a drunken daze, as they compete for the emperor's attention. The story of the emperor's interest in his own son's wife also tickled the fancy of Chinese storytellers, who added plenty of suggestive detail. Finally, in an elaborate finale that was fully realized by the playwright Hong Sheng at the end of the seventeenth century, the story continued after Guifei's death, as a Daoist priest reunited her spirit with the soul of the aged emperor, proving that love transcends death after all.25 Clearly Yang Guifei's is a myth of womanhood that conflates the collapse of the empire with the sexual fall of the ruler, comparing the seductive powers of a woman to the treacherous powers of a general, and rendering the narration of the dynastic cycle in sexualized and even romantic language. Many historians, in fact, locate the major turning point in Chinese history at precisely this moment in time, the outbreak of the rebellion of An Lushan, placing Yang Guifei at history's linchpin. But of course the stripped-down "official" version of the Guifei legend, minus the fictional narrativizing, is less interesting-especially without the apparently made-up character of her rival Meifei. And what happens to her as she is reinvented in Japan shows the utter malleability of her story line. As Masako Nakagawa Graham has shown, Yang Guifei figured for a time as an emblem of eternal love (she has a cameo role in Murasaki's Tale ofGenji),but she ultimately emerged in a reinvented form as an avatar

'>Hang Sheng's play, The Palace ofEternal Youth (Changsheng dian), was completed in 1688. In that play, as Graham notes (1998, quotation on p. 184), Yang Guifei ascends to heaven where she becomes the symbol of eternal love, the Emperor crossing the rainbow bridge to the moon on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival to join her there, where she awaits him in the company of the lunar goddess Chang'e: "Emperor Ming Huang and Lady Yang Yuhuan . . . were formerly angels in heaven; but owing to certain faults they were sent to live for a while on earth. Now the time for their banishment is over, and since they love each other dearly we agree to the Weaving Maid's request; let them remain as lovers in Tridiva, the highest heaven." Graham's translation follows that of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, trans., The Palace 4Eternal Youth, 2nded. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 269. 850 SUSAN MANN

Figure 3. Yang Guifei drunk, perhaps waiting for the Emperor while he dallies with her rival. Reproduced in Zhongguo Yangliuqing muban nianhua @HMm7&fCKqi& (Collected Chinese new year woodblock prints from the Yangliuqing Studio), Tianjin: Xinhua shudian, 1992, p. 59.

of the Goddess Atsuta, who arrives in China from her home shrine near Nagoya to ruin Emperor Xuanzong's plans for an invasion of Japan. In other words, the woman who causes the fall of China's ruling dynasty is actually an agent of the Japanese karni.

Myths as a Source of Historical Consciousness

So now we have recounted two great myths of Chinese womanhood: the story of Hua Mulan and the tale of Yang Guifei. Let us turn then to the next section of this address: myths of womanhood as sources of historical consciousness in modern China, and their appropriation by a universalizing discourse of women's rights in the twentieth century. Yang Guifei was part of the past that Song intellectuals rejected, as they reinvented Confucian values in a new age. As Julia Ching has noted, "The T'ang dynasty is known for the relative freedom of women as well as for the reign of a woman ruler, the Empress Wu (r. 684-704)" (Ching 1994,259). Ching argues that the obsession with loyalty and the importance of female submission that dominates Song thought stems directly from this reaction against images of women from the Tang. The rejection of a certain kind of mythic woman within China itself points to significant changes in the roles and status of elite women in the Song and post-Song period. The post-Song era, after all, is the regime of the bound foot, the long-suffering PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS OF ASIAN WOMANHOOD 851

chaste widow, and the suicidal martyr. And it is the post-Song era that has been the focus of most research on Chinese women's history in the United States. Now it is probably true that during this late imperial post-Song era, young girls got an overdose of the overly moralized Confucianized woman preferred by Neo- Confucian philosophers and celebrated in the famous didactic texts published at an increasing rate from the thirteenth century onward. Yet they also saw plenty of the antiheroine Yang Guifei, whose tale filled color woodblock prints, early learning guides, opera stage, and poetry books. In other words, all kinds of stories about women contributed to the historical consciousness of women's place in the cultural, political, and social order that emerges so powerfully in the writings of late Ming and Qing intellectuals. To these stories we owe the sharp critical awareness of signs of decline in women's status in late imperial times that first emerges in the writings of elite men starting in the late eighteenth century. And we know from the writings ofwomen themselves, published during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries in cities throughout coastal China, that reading about women's lives in past time conveyed a sense of historical relevance and cultural empowerment, while providing a language of protest or criticism that legitimized their own discontent. The majority of women who neither read nor wrote could still find their own touchstones of identity by absorbing the stories of legendary women from Hua Mulan to Yang Guifei. Watching plays, hanging New Year paintings, and hearing stories and poems read aloud, they favored the nuances that appealed to them most, and added those they felt were missing. Space prevents showing many of these here, but even a few examples of New Year paintings and book illustrations show how vividly the lives of Mulan and Yang Guifei were portrayed in visual culture. (Foreshadowing her much later appearance on the American lunchbox, Mulan adorned late-19th-century kites.) Of particular interest are New Year paintings invoking the "hundred beauties." Titled "Four Beauties" or "Ten Beauties" or even "Eighteen Beauties," these depict eclectic and anachronistic groups of famous women from history such as Xie Daoyun, Cai Wenji, Hua Mulan, and others (sometimes Daoist immortals or goddesses, for instance, such as Ma Gu or Chang E ). Such clusters of beauties were considered particularly auspicious emblems of prosperity, ideal for festooning the walls of a home (the phrase was jiating meivzan or "houseful of beauty.") Turning finally to the twentieth century, the age of the "new woman," we find China's cultural storehouse richly stocked with myths that foregrounded "the woman question" for late Qing reformers and May Fourth intellectuals alike. Wang Zheng, analyzing views of women in China's May Fourth era, observes: "it is not accidental that the [May Fourth} era created the term xinniixing (new woman) instead of xinndnxing (new man). Though May Fourth feminism changed educated young men's views toward women, it is the new woman that emerged as a new social category in modern China" (Wang 1999, 23). We would merely add here that it is not accidental precisely because the historical role of women in China made women necessary to the narratives of political, social, and economic change: catalysts who made change happen.26 This heritage of famous women, and the urgency of "the woman question" in early twentieth-century China, made it only natural that Chinese women would first

*Tor a survey of the women's biographies revived for inspiration from the end of the Guangxu period through the revolution of 1911, including many lives of female military leaders, see Li and Zhang 1975, 1:167-72. 852 SUSAN MANN

Figure 4. Mulan kite. One of the "standing figure" types popular with kite-flyers celebrating after Spring Festival. Reproduced in Wang Shucun EWW,comp., Zhongguo minjian nianhuashi tulu $gEa&i&m@ (An illustrated history of popular Chinese new year prints), Shanghai: Renmin yishu chubanshe, 1991, vol. 2: 5 5 1. search their own historical record, then turn to seek Western counterparts to their own lienii: female role models in Western culture who could become their new "measure of civilization." 27 In fact, writing histories of "great women" became a minor transnational industry of its own in this period, particularly in Britain and the United States. Margaret Burton's collected biographies of the great women of modern China is just one example (Burton 1912). In England, British women writers were compiling lives of their "notable" contemporary counterparts in India (Chapman 1891). Their heirs were pioneers in studies of Chinese women, including Miss A. C. Safford, translator of Lii Kun's revised edition of the Lienii zhuan (1899); Florence Ayscough, author of Chinese Women, Yesterdzy and To-Day (1937); and Genevieve Wimsatt, collector of women's biographies and legends about Chinese women (Wimsatt 1928,1934). A book surveying the "great women" of India printed in 1953

27Excerptsin Li and Zhang (1975, 1:183 et passim.) show how Chinese writers of the late nineteenth century compared their own progress to that of India under colonial rule, using women's status as a measure. unabashedly notes, by contrast, the difficulty of retrieving the lives of historical female figures in that cultural context. The editors ultimately settle not on historical figures, but on those known from literary sources, with these words: It is unnecessary to discuss the historical character of the latter. Some of them may be real historical personages, while many are undoubtedly legendary, or mere creations of poetical fancy. But whatever may be their real character, they have been, for more than a thousand years, . . . so much the flesh of our flesh and the blood of our blood that it is impossible to ignore them as mere fictions. They have inspired the thoughts and ideals of our women and shaped their lives for untold centuries, and may be said to have been more real, more living, and more vital than any actual women could be. What living women have proved to be such formative forces as, for example, Sati, Sita, and Savitri? What could be better illustrative examples of the true dignity of Indian womanhood than Draupadi, Shakuntala and Gandhari? (Majumdar 1953, x) In their scanty coverage of historical personages, which supplies only bare sketches of women's lives-queens, consorts, and daughters of noted rulers; female saints, mystics, poetesses, musicians, and teachers-the contributors display once again the dramatic historiographic difference between South Asia and China, when it comes to preserving the stories of women's lives.28 Meanwhile, as China's early-twentieth-century female readers ransacked the Western historical record for the great women they knew must be there-women whose stories would prove vital, they knew, to unlocking the secrets of Western wealth and power-whom did they find? Some of their discoveries are unsurprising: Joan of Arc, of c6urse, and Florence Nightingale, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon, George Eliot-women recognizable as lienii: strong women of deep moral conviction who moved into a man's world to achieve great things.29One of their choices, though, is a quintessential example of what Chen Pingyuan has called (1989, 63-76) the process of "creative mistaking" (chuangzaoxing de wujie) by which one culture appropriates ideas and symbols from another to make them its I refer to the redoubtable Madame Roland, watchword of female radicals everywhere in China during the May Fourth era, when she was widely known as the "Mother of the French Revolution." Though Madame Roland is not exactly a watchword in European histories of the French Revolution, she was instantly recognized by Chinese fans of Rousseau (through whose writings she must have been introduced to them) as a cainii, a talented young woman, and a national heroine whose loyalty unto death marked her as a lienii as well. Madame Roland was, after all, reading Plutarch's Lives at the age of nine, just as bright young Chinese girls read Liu Xiang's Lienii zhuan. And her last words, cried out as she faced the guillotine at the age of 39, were committed to memory in Chinese by countless young admirers: "0Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"31

28Forexample, Sen (1953, 370) remarks of Chandraprabhii that she was "one of the most romantic feminine figures in Indian history. . . , though she is altogether unknown to the general public." By contrast, figures from the Riimiiyana, the Mahabhiirata, and classics such as the play Shakuntala are, in the words of one editor, "more real, more living, and more vital than any actual women could be" (Majumdar 1953, x). 29Xia (1995, 104-20) discusses some of these new role models. See also Li 1981, 222- 23. 30Foranother contemporary analysis of this process of constructing a Western Other, which "has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process of self-appropriation," see Chen Xiaomei 1995, quotation on pp. 4-5. ?'See May 1970, esp. 15-16, 31-37, quotation on p. 288. Also Xia 1995, 107; and Li 1981. Most fluid of all in the process of creative mistaking that sent female heroines back and forth across cultural boundaries was the figure of Joan of Clearly Joan was important because of her powerful affinities with Hua Mulan, who became a central figure in the revolutionary visions of young Chinese women during the early twentieth century.33The undying popularity of Hua Mulan is apparent even before the 1911 Revolution, in the seemingly nostalgic and definitely counter-revolutionary "hundred-beauties" books published in the late Qing period, where she appears countless times. The compiler of an illustrated biographical sketch of Mulan in one such book, printed in 1908, tells us:

When I read the poem of Mulan when I was little, I wondered how a girl with bound feet could go off to war like that. Then later I learned that in ancient times women did not bind their feet, so they were strong and brave. And men didn't shave their heads, so it was easy for a woman to pass as a man. Nowadays when so many women do not bind their feet, do they emulate the bravery of their fathers and rulers, and go off to fight in battle? Actually, instead many of them charge about causing disturbances, pursuing their own personal agendas-more offensive by far than foot- bound women! It is my desire here to wipe away their shame in behalf of all women who do not bind their feet!34

Here Mulan becomes an emblem of the new female citizen and a reproach to her contemporary counterparts who have neglected their duty to their country and failed to take advantage of the new opportunities opened to them by their enhanced physical strength. Wang Zheng puts it best when she says that stories like Mulan's helped women imagine themselves "stepping into a men's world to achieve great things" (1999, 333). We find women eulogizing other legendary figures who stepped into a man's world to achieve great things, like the female historian Ban Zhao, whose portrait replaced Confucius' on the walls of a newly opened girls' school, and whose critical biography published in 1940 in The Women's Journal (Funii zazhi) reminded modern readers of the courage and the vulnerability of highly educated Chinese women

32Consider,for example, the following excerpt from a poem by the young woman revo- lutionary Qiu Jin: "Women and men are born alike1 Why should men over us hold sway?. . . 1 We'll follow Joan of Arc-With our own hands our land we shall regain!" Quoted in Snow (1967,94), from Fan Wen-Ian, "Chiu Chin-A Woman Revolutionary," Women ofChina (0ct.- Dec. 1956). See also the characterization of the female leader of the May 30'" Movement in Shanghai as a "Chinese Joan of Arc" (Gilmartin 1995, 134); and of Song Qingling as "China's Joan of Arc" by Western observers in 1926, because of her emergence to prominence at the revolutionary capital at Wuhan (Gilmartin 1995, 183). 33Abrother of Xiang Jingyu recalled that she was inspired to emulate the feats of Hua Mulan during the crisis over a missionary incident in Hunan in 1902. See Gilmartin 1995, 74; McElderry 1986, 96; and Wang 1999, 34748. Citing Witke (1970, 4549), Gilmartin notes the widespread "Mulan complex" among young Chinese women of Xiang Jingyu's gen- eration (24546, n.7). Wang (1999) presents numerous examples of the Mulan complex in her interviews with Chinese women who were entering professional life during the 1930s and 1940s. See esp. pp. 21-22, 41-42, 127-128 (where Mulan is coupled with Liang Hongyu, wife of the Southern Song general Han Shizhong, who joined her husband on the battlefield in 1130 to resist Jin invaders), 179-180, 225 (one of Wang's informants remembers the "old idea" that girls should be like Xie Daoyun and Mulan), 291 (another informant recalled singing the ballad of Hua Mulan in her progressive elementary school in Hunan during the May Fourth era), 297 (this same informant changed her name to Mulan when she joined the Communist Youth League, because her father was old and she had no older brothers). i"'Xiyuan waishi" (1908), juan 1 ("Filial to their parents"), entry number 4. throughout history, who were forced to strategize as they maneuvered in political circles dominated by men.35 It is striking to compare the fate of these womanly myths, which inspired young female revolutionaries and reformers, to what befell Yang Guifei's story during the 1920s. Advertisers in China's emerging consumer culture put her picture on calendars, where she could be seen emerging from the bath at Huaqing in a newly transparent negligee, transformed compliments of the British American Tobacco Company's artists.3b In the post-1949 Maoist era, myths of Chinese womanhood have met a similarly mixed fate. The Western-style "new woman" was first disparaged as a bourgeois affectation, while classical models of elite womanhood like Ban Zhao were dismissed as feudal remnants, and enduring emblems of female strength and courage like Hua Mulan fell prey to the vicissitudes of Maoist political campaigns. A staple of revolutionary opera, the play "Red Detachment of Women" (Hongse niangzi jun) was made into a film in the early 1960s, featuring Mulan in a leading song, with the lines: "Gu you Hua Mulan, ti fu qu cong jun I Jin you niangzi jun, kang qiang wei renmin" [Long ago Hua Mulan went to join the army for her father I Today the Red Detachment of Women shoulders rifles to fight for the people).37 At the height of Cultural Revolutionary fervor, on the other hand, these lines were rewritten to purge all traces of the "feudal" Mulan myth: "Dasui tie suolian, fanshen nao geming! I Women niangzi jun, kangqiang wei renmin" [Smash your shackles, rise in revolution! We're the Women's Company, taking up arms for the people) (Ebon 1975, 135) . But the post-Mao reforms have brought with them a remarkable recovery and revalorization of old myths about Chinese women, as the phrase mingyuan (meaning

35"Lizhouguike" (1940) begins her account of Ban Zhao's life by examining Ban's family background and the men to whom Ban owed her education and her status in the palace: her father, her husband, and her elder brother. Then (97) the author invites us to re-read Ban Zhao's own preface to her Instructionsfor Women (Niijie), which reads in part as follows: This person, lacking in knowledge and slow of wit by nature, was the fortunate recipient of my father's favor, and relying as well on my mother's instruction, at the age of 14 was betrothed to a man of the Cao family. That was more than forty years ago. Since then I have struggled and fought, always fearing that I would fall short, to make up the difference between myself and my parents, in order to ease the burdens that beset relations between those inside the court and those outside it. And so I labored day and night, exhausting my energy without speaking of my hardships. Then and forever after, I have known that I am lacking and that my nature is simple and my instruction without purity. I live in continual fear for my son, Gu, who has received favor at the court and won special recognition from the emperor himself . . . , an achievement I myself could never dream of. A man, of course, can look out for himself, and I need not continue to worry about him, but I do tremble for all my daughters, especially when the time comes for them to marry, and I will no longer be able to guide them, and they will not hear me reiterate the wifely rituals. Fearing that I have failed them, and seeking guidance from my ancestors, I now suffer in deep agony, aware that my own fate is uncertain, and mindful that the same is true for all of you. So for every worry I have written a book to assuage my concerns, titling it Nii jie qi pian (Instructions for women in seven chapters). How timelv these anxious admonitions must have seemed to Ban Zhao's admirers in the 1940s! For a recent study of Ban Zhao's influence in twentieth-century Chinese women's movements, see Xia 2000. 36"Yang Guifei Emerging from the Bath," as seen on a BAT calendar poster, 1920s. Slide courtesy of Sherman Cochran, from British-American Tobacco Company, Ltd., The Recoru7 of the British-American Tobacco Conzpany, Limited (Shanghai, 1925). See Cochran 2000, 74-75. i7Personal communication, Weijing Lu, citing a libretto in her own possession. 856 SUSAN MANN

Figure 5. Mulan at the turn of the twentieth century. From Xiyuan waishi ,e,Hgf-@[pseud.], Xizlxiang gujin xiannii zhuan Q@k+Wkf@ (Lavishly illustrated biographies of resourceful women, past and present), preface dated 1908, vol. 1, n.p.

"famous beauties") revives to become an emblem of moral and physical virtue. Old stories about famous women are being hauled out and dusted off to take their place in the history of Chinese women's long struggle to overcome feudal oppression. To be sure, certain less well known female models from the past have been carefully repositioned to foreground their importance (examples here include the inventor of cotton weaving, Huang Daopo, and the many female leaders of peasant rebellions who had been allowed to sink into ob~curity).~~New model women have entered the historical record as officials, professionals, Party leaders, and workers building the revolutionary new society (Meng 1990). And old volumes in the "hundred beauties" genre are being reproduced in brocade-bound facsimile edition^.^' In 1993 a book titled Famous Beauties of China through the Ages (Zhongguo lidui mingyuun) trumpeted the virtues of the thousands of famous women whose deeds have been preserved in stories and songs and arts of popular culture-deeds displaying "love of the country

Tn the early 1980s, some of these collections were published in English to capture audiences outside of China. See, for example, Women ofChina (1983, 1984). The latter includes biographies of Huang Daopo, Tang Sai'er (a female peasant rebel leader of the fifteenth century), and Hong Xuanjiao, a female commander in the Taiping revolutionary armies. 390na recent trip to Beijing, I purchased just such a reprint of a famous "hundred beauties" volume of the Qianlong period, with preface by Yuan Mei (Yan 1998). and love for the people," "nationalist consciousness," "intelligence and purity,""loyalty and fidelity" (Lin 1993, 2-17). This effusive language points to the ironic resonance of old myths of Chinese womanhood in the post-Mao era, with its resounding rejection of the Maoist ideal that "men and women are the same." The popularity of old myths in the current commercial marketplace is reflected as well in the explosion of publications on women in time past that have filled Chinese bookstores since the early 1980s. As Du Fangqin has pointed out, in the decade from 1981 to 1991 alone, the "second great wave" of publishing on women's history (the "first" was the May Fourth period) produced a treasure trove of works on women, especially biography. Much of this literature, Du emphasizes, exudes a neoclassical tone, reflecting the values and interpretive judgments of late imperial culture, especially in its attention to court life and politics, in its valorization of women warriors, and in its tendency to place women in a larger historical narrative scripted by the actions and beliefs of men (Du 1996, 16). A "hundred beauties" collection published in Canton in 1988, illustrated by a noted contemporary artist, includes the Xiang Queens, Hua Mulan, the newly enshrined heroine of Chinese working women, Huang Daopo-and, inevitably, Yang Guifei, who appears in a special centerfold (Cai 1988).*O Perhaps it is no accident that romanticized revivals of myths of female youth and beauty like the legend of Yang Guifei are making another appearance in post-Mao China. In the earthbound world of political intrigue and sensual indulgence of the 1990s, Yang Guifei is any young girl passed into the traffic of wealthy patronage where, shaken like a money tree, she becomes the source of her family's success and the sign of her official patron's eternal youth. In today's China, where men of wealth and power demand the sexual services of beautiful young women, families recognize that one fast track to upward mobility in the "sea" of Chinese commerce is a pretty daughter who can work as a prostitute. Sleeping your way to the top, as Yang Guifei long ago demonstrated, is another venerable legacy of the myths of Chinese womanhood.

Coda

Like Madame Roland, who quickly faded into obscurity in France but got a new life in modern China as the mother of the French Revolution, the footbound Chinese woman who dominates the Western historical imagination is a product of creative mistaking that has no place in the family album or storehouse of China's own cultural childhood. When women writers in Europe and North America reached for myths to explain the history of Chinese women, the creative mistaking becomes especially clear, for they tended to settle on a particular myth about Chinese women: the bound foot. They settled, in sum, on a singular silence in Chinese myths of womanhood. They selected the one aspect of Chinese womanhood that was never mythologized in history or fiction outside the pages of erotic novels and "spring pictures" used as guides and provocations for lovemaking. When footbinding stopped in China, so suddenly that it left reformers and foreigners alike gasping in amazement, the shallowness of its cultural roots was clearly

"These illustrations by Lu Yuguang, who at the time they were published was the Director of the Guangzhou Art Gallery, with text translated by Kate Foster, have appeared at the following website: www.span.com.au/100women/illust.html. 858 SUSAN MANN exposed. That many Westerners still cling to the myth of the bound foot as if it defined for all time the essence of what it meant to be female in "traditional" Chinese culture tells us something important about the items in the cultural storehouse of Europe and North America, especially the myths Westerners need to imagine an Asian other. But footbinding can tell only a limited story about Chinese women, much less about their own myths and how they read them.

Glossary

An Lushan 24% lienii z!{& bai meiren QsA lienu zhuan z!{ (pj)&id BanZhao Lienii zhuan gIJ&fd Cai Wenji Liu Xiang cainii $& MaGu R&% Chang E #$@ Meifei f@@ Changsheng dian -J?&B meiren $@A chuangzaoxing de wujie ~iJ~lf$~~fll(Ming Huang ws CiMulantifuconiun @*m@2f$@ mingyuan 4% Dasui tie suolian, fanshen nao geming! / Wo- nianhua qg men niangzi jun, kangqiang wei renmin NiiGua &m tT6$B$R@#4BRJB&/ Bf74BF@ Shun ;fZt&%A.E Taiping ;kq Dong Zhongshu g{$@ Taizhen ;kE Funii zazhi #$&@$z Tiying @$# FuXi (3% Wang Zhaoyuan ERgH Gao Lishi Bfik Wu Liang &g Gu you Hua Mulan, ti fu qu cong jun / Jin Wu Zetian you niangzi jun, kang qiang wei renmin Xiang #j &GE*MEW%fE% / +G4RF% Xie Daoyun t1tklBA.E xinnanxing %%'I@ Hong Sheng #% xinnuxing %gJ[$ Hongse niangzi jun $I&$@F% Xu Wei f$# Hua Mulan E*M Xuanzong gg Huang Daopo SBB Yang Guifei @$g#z jiating meiman g$%i$$$j Yang Guozhong &H,e, LiBo $B Yao Li Qingzhao qs,Q Zengzi @F Liang Gaoxing gBf=j Zhang Xuecheng List of References

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Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult of Widow Fidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan Katherine Carlitz The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3. (Aug., 1997), pp. 612-640. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-9118%28199708%2956%3A3%3C612%3ASGIATC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C

Female Virtue and the State in China Mark Elvin Past and Present, No. 104. (Aug., 1984), pp. 111-152. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198408%290%3A104%3C111%3AFVATSI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-1

Woman Revolutionary: Xiang Jingyu Andrea McElderry The China Quarterly, No. 105. (Mar., 1986), pp. 95-122. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0305-7410%28198603%290%3A105%3C95%3AWRXJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Female Rulers in Imperial China Lien-sheng Yang Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 23. (1960 - 1961), pp. 47-61. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0073-0548%281960%2F1961%2923%3C47%3AFRIIC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C