A COMPARISON OF THE REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN IN ZUOZHUAN AND SHIJI by XIUCAI ZHENG A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2012 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Xiucai Zheng Title: A Comparison of the Representations of Women in Zuozhuan and Shiji This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature by: Stephen Durrant Chairperson Maram Epstein Member Yugen Wang Member Ina Asim Outside Member and Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research & Innovation/Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2012 ii © 2012 Xiucai Zheng iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Xiucai Zheng Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures June 2012 Title: A Comparison of the Representations of Women in Zuozhuan and Shiji From Chunqiu and Zuozhuan to Shiji, women have experienced a downgrade of their formal status in historical records. In Shiji, women, the wives of dukes, lost their formal equality with their duke husbands in terms of being written into state history, as we see in Chunqiu. Their activities, including marriage, returning home, visits, and death, disappeared from Sima Qian’s history for the Spring and Autumn period, which focuses on the activities of male members of ruling lineages. A positive representation of women’s wisdom, eloquence, and authority is no longer in the interest of nor taken as a ritual part of history writing in Shiji. In the terms of representation of women, especially those from the Spring and Autumn period, in Zuozhuan and Shiji, Zuozhuan gave fuller representation of women than Shiji and its attitude toward women was more positive in comparison to the latter. First, Zuozhuan in many examples presented women as having authority, agency and initiative; in the Shiji versions of these stories, the roles of women were reduced in order to strengthen the agency of and focalization through the male members of a ruling lineage toward a goal of a linear logic of succession. Second, Shiji stressed the disruptive role of women in state affairs by intensively preserving the stories in Zuozhuan that associated women with political disasters and emergencies. Third, Zuozhuan had a non-gendered iv approach to the effect of women’s wisdom, knowledge and eloquence; it left space for complexity of characterization for women. In contrast, Shiji and Lienü Zhuan, where these stories in Zuozhuan were transmitted, emphasized a patterned understanding of women and produced gender role types. With the representation of women in Shiji, the effect of the agency of women in history is patterned. In Shiji, women’s agency is more closely connected to political disasters and negative political situations. In the limited representation of positive heroines, their good roles came from their virtue in being self-restrictive and submissive. It implies as a historical teaching in Shiji that the limitation of the political autonomy of women is a way to promise the success of lineage and tradition. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Xiucai Zheng GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Tsinghua University, Beijing, China DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, East Asian Languages and Literatures, 2012, University of Oregon Master of Arts in Literary Theories, 2006, Tsinghua University Bachelor of Arts in Chinese Literature, 2003, Tsinghua University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Early Chinese History Modern Chinese Poetry PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Diversity Fellow in Chinese, Western Washington University, 2011-2012 Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon, 2006-2011 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Research Grant, University of Oregon, 2006 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express sincere appreciation to the faculty in Chinese at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures and the Department of History at University of Oregon for their assistance in the preparation of this manuscript. My deepest gratitude is due to Professor Stephen Durrant. This project would not begin without Professor Durrant. Professor Durrant has guided me through every stage of this project and has painstakingly edited my manuscript in its every version. Professor Maram Epstein and Professor Yugen Wang also have given me critical comments and helped edit my manuscripts. I am really appreciative of their valuable input and enlightening suggestions. I also thank Professor Ina Asim for her guide and encouragement. She taught me how to do research in the field of history which was completely new to me before the time that I took her class. At last, I sincerely thank Professor Tze-Lan Sang for her help on my English writing when I first came to University of Oregon. I take this opportunity to thank all of you for helping me along my research career at University of Oregon. vii Dedicated to my mentors, Professor Luo Gang and Professor Stephen Durrant viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Introduction of Zuozhuan and Its Relation with Shiji ............................................ 1 The yin-yang Theory and Sima Qian ..................................................................... 11 A Summary of Chapters......................................................................................... 28 II. FROM WENJIANG TO EMPRESS LÜ ................................................................. 31 Women in the Spring and Autumn Period ............................................................. 32 The Image of Wen Jiang in Chunqiu ..................................................................... 47 Palace Women in the Early Han ............................................................................ 62 The Case of Li Ling and Two Witchcraft Incidents .............................................. 76 III. EMPLOTMENT AND AGENCY ......................................................................... 86 Replacement of Motivators .................................................................................... 89 Replacement of Actors ........................................................................................... 103 Replacement of the Power ..................................................................................... 117 IV. THEMES AND VARIATIONS ............................................................................ 129 Women’s Indiscreet Behavior and Political Disasters ........................................... 130 Women’s Partiality and Political Disasters ............................................................ 144 Rulers’ Favoritism of Women and Succession Upheavals .................................... 170 V. WOMEN’S ATTRACTIVENESS AND SPEECH ............................................... 197 The Discourse of Female Disaster in Shiji and Lienüzhuan .................................. 201 Women’s Attractiveness in Zuozhuan ................................................................... 218 Women’s Speeches in Zuozhuan ........................................................................... 237 ix Chapter Page VI. CONCLUSION..................................................................................................... 264 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 268 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Zuozhuan 左傳 (Zuo Tradition) and Sima Qian’s Shiji史記 (Records of the Grand Historian) are two of the most important historical works from early China.1 It has long been recognized that Sima Qian adopted abundant historical materials from Zuozhuan while writing the part of his history which concerns the Spring and Autumn period, but few people recognize how greatly Sima Qian deviated from this source text in his rewriting of the past. This dissertation is an attempt to discover differences between Zuozhuan and Shiji in tackling the same stories or topics in terms of the representations of women. Introduction of Zuozhuan and its relation with Shiji Shiji was composed by the Western Han historian Sima Qian司馬遷 (145-86? BCE). Some scholars, such as Wang Guowei王國維 and Gu Jiegang顧頡剛, have argued that some chapters in Shiji might have been composed by Sima Tan, but these disputed chapters are not in the focus of my dissertation.2 In my dissertation, I will take Sima Qian 1 The reference of the Chinese texts of Zuozhuan and Chunqiu is Yang Bojun 楊伯峻, Chunqiu Zuozhuanzhu 春秋左傳注 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1990). This work will be referred to as CQZZZ in this dissertation hereafter. All the translations of Zuozhuan and Chunqiu in this dissertation come from a not-yet-published manuscript completed by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li and David Schaberg with some minor changes. This manuscript is going to be published by University of Washington Press. My great thanks to these authors and especially to my advisor, Stephen Durrant, for offering me access to it.The referece of Chinese text of Shiji is the 1959 version of Shiji 史記 published by Zhonghua shuju 中華書局. 2 See Wang Guowei, “Taishigong xingnian kao”太史公行年考, in Guantang jilin (Shanghai: Shanghai 1 as