Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction

Front matter

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Comparative Cultural Studies

Ari Ofengenden, Series Editor

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Note on Style and Excerpts xiii

INTRODUCTION Toward a Spatialized Understanding of Women’s Literary Tanci 1

CHAPTER THREE Gender, Syncretism, and Female Exemplarity: Jin Fangquan’s Qizhenzhuan (A Tale of Exceptional Chastity) 109

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

CHAPTER FOUR “Beyond Rouge and Powder”: Rewriting Female Talent in Sun Deying’s Jinyuyuan (Affinity of the Golden Fish) 155

CHAPTER FIVE A New Romance of the Nation-State: On Wang Oushang’s Zixuji (A Tale of Vacuity) 191

CONCLUSION 221

Glossary 229 Works Cited 239 Index 259

About the Author 275

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BEGAN MY RESEARCH on women’s written tanci works in 2008 with the encour-

agement of my PhD adviser, Professor Maureen Robertson, a leading scholar in

early modern Chinese women’s poetry studies. After publishing my first book, Women’s Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Twentieth-Century China, with Purdue University Press in 2015, I found substantial amounts of understudied written tanci works, which led to this second book project. Over the last decade my study of tanci narratives has benefited from pioneering scholars’ works, particularly research by Mark Bender, Wilt L. Idema, Ellen Widmer, Maram Epstein, Hu Siao-chen, Wai-yee Li, Dorothy Y. Ko, Susan Mann, Grace S. Fong, Xiaorong Li, Patricia Sieber, and Maria Franca Sibau. Patricia Sieber’s rigorous commentary on the 2019 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) panel “Queer Renditions: From Late Imperial to Contemporary Sinophone Literature and Culture” inspired me deeply in the development of the structure of this book, particularly chapters 1 and 2. Tani E. Barlow’s powerful commentary on the 2020 AAS panel “Rearticulating Gender and Class in Postsocialist China: Women’s Literature as Method” and her important elucidations on the concept of “feminine becoming” in the Chinese and Sinophone contexts helped me immensely in improving the theoretical positionality of this study. I am sincerely grateful for the rich, nuanced, and constructive suggestions provided by the two reviewers of this manuscript. Part of chapter 5 has been published as a peer-reviewed chapter in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature (volume 4, chapter 22, pages 2205-16). While developing this book, I have received important inspirations from recent innovative tanci scholarship published in Chinese as books or articles, particularly works by Bao Zhenpei, Sheng Zhimei, Zhou Wei, Zheng Zhenwei, Wei Shuyun, Tong Lijun, Li Lingnian, and Wang Zeqiang.

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I received crucial encouragement from Justin C. Race, director of Purdue University Press, who provided important suggestions for preparing this book for publication. I am deeply grateful for Susan Wegener, who kindly shepherded the review and revision process. Katherine M. Purple and Kelley J. Kimm have done meticulous editing and proofing for the manuscript. My gratitude goes to Christopher J. Brannan and Bryan D. Shaffer for their substantial work with the front cover design and marketing of the book. I am deeply thankful for my editor and dear friend Virginia Broz, who has assisted me for over a decade in having my manuscripts copyedited and proofread and who played an indispensable role in the development of this book. In the earlier stages of developing the road map for this book project, I received generous help from my MA thesis adviser, Professor Hong Shen at Zhejiang University, who kindly sponsored my sabbatical research trip to Hangzhou in fall 2017 and who helped me access archival materials related to Ming Qing women’s literature and vernacular narratives in local libraries. I am deeply thankful for the library specialists at the Shanghai Municipal Library, who helped me locate two rare and understudied sanci texts. I am grateful for the library specialist in the East Asian Reading Room of the Library of Congress, who offered generous help for my research trip to locate one of the tanci texts discussed in this book. I am thankful to Beijing Palace Museum for assisting me in acquiring the copyright for the book cover image.

This current book on women’s tanci fiction could not have been completed without the inspiration, support, and encouragement of mentors, peers, colleagues, friends, and family members. I am thankful for Dean Joseph P. Ward of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah State University for providing faculty travel funding for two related presentations at the annual meetings of AAS and the Modern Language Association (MLA) anda CARE research trip grant that led to the discovery ofa major tanci text discussed in this book. I am also thankful for my department head, Professor Bradford J. Hall, who supported my research endeavor for this book project and provided needed conference travel assistance. My promotion and advisory committee chair, Professor J. P. Spicer-Escalante, has provided indispensable support and advice for my research and professional growth for the last decade; this book project would not have been fully shaped without his encouragement. I want to thank my colleague Crescencio Lopez Gonzalez, who cheered me on during the course of completing this book. Sarah Gordon, who provided suggestions for my first book, again gave me encouragement for my writing endeavors. My friend Jie Guo gave me numerous theoretical suggestions on this project and provided endless encouragement. I owe sincere gratitude to the staff at Utah State’s Merrill-Cazier Library, whose decade-long support and outstanding professionalism give me a true sense of at-homeness and make my research activities possible.

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

Finally, I thank my family for their selfless love and steadfast support of my research pursuits. I dedicate this book to my family: my grandparents Guo Juncai and Jia Qiulan and my parents, Guo Xianxian and Xu Shengze.

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Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

NOTE ON STYLE AND EXCERPTS

N-TEXT CITATIONS FOR verse from the original tanci texts are listed in the fol-

lowing sequences: juan (scroll or volume): hui (chapter), ye (page number); thus

(1:10, 234-55).

Unless otherwise stated, all translations of Chinese texts into English are by the author.

Written texts of tanci often contain blended verse and prose, and sometimes represent speech and singing in the characters’ soliloquies or conversations with one other. Below is a sample of an excerpt and its translation from Linked Rings of Jade, as discussed in chapter 1.

En

In reflection of my life, [Sing] Since my childhood I was confined at my father’s

official mansion, and locked up in the inner chambers, as if living in an embellished

cage. Today, my aged mother presses me on practicing embroidery day by day, making

me unaware of the beauty of the blossoming spring flowers. When autumn comes,

I could only steal glimpses of the fine moon across the curtain. My drawers lack Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction

E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xiv NOTE ON STYLE AND EXCERPTS stimulating books for reading. [Spoken parts] If I ever want to compose a line of poetry, not only would I be scolded by my parents, [Sing] even the nanny would not allow it. She would say, a girl should not learn to write poetry, and that, brush and ink grind on one’s heart and damage one’s fine looks. [Spoken parts] How could they know that my female siblings and sisters-in-law all chant poems and read chuanqi stories? [Sing] They did not lose their beautiful looks at all, nor have I ever seen them trespass women’s propriety by merely reading and reciting lines.

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Introduction

TOWARD A SPATIALIZED UNDERSTANDING OF WOMEN’S LITERARY TANCI

OMEN’S TANCI 1G, or literally “plucking rhymes,’ are chantefable nar-

ratives written by educated women from seventeenth-century to early

twentieth-century China. Growing out of the oral traditions of performed tanci songs of the South Yangtzi regions, tanci was appropriated by late imperial women as a distinctive genre for self-expression. Having maintained the orality and musicality of their origins, these works are written in rhymed, seven-character lines and include dramatic dialogue, fictional narration, and poetic insertions. Often the chapters have titles in rhymed couplets summarizing plots and major events. The chapters’ openings frequently contain female-voiced authorial commentaries or insertions about the seasons, family backgrounds, personal moods, or circumstances of the writing. Published tanci include prefaces by the author and the author’s relatives and friends, or poems about the author or the characters. The stories depict adventurous women who adopt male disguises to explore life as men’s equals and who outperform their male peers in their intellectual achievements and military expertise. Addressed to audiences in the inner chambers, tanci was circulated among women in a hand-copied format. In the nineteenth century, the flourishing book industry allowed tanci to be extensively printed and circulated among women. During this period, Hou Zhi (EZ, 1760-1829) completed her editing of E$) (Yuchuanyuan, Jade Bracelets, late Ming) and published her own tanci, $ EJE (Jinshanghua, Brocade Flowers) and 43 EJ Be ( Jinguijie, Heroines in the Golden Chambers). Tanci provides a unique category of fictional narratives and enriches studies on the rise of the novel in non-Western vernacular traditions.

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tanci by women articulate innovative imaginations of women’s private yearnings, histrionic disguises, and non-normative gendered relations. These fantastic tales arranged for their heroines to cross-dress and explore new societal roles, while delaying the act of doffing their disguises. Tanci's depictions of diverse positions of women as objects of desire, narcissistic viewers of themselves, or desiring subjects of other women unsettle the heterosexual gender norm. Yet, feminine desires for autonomy and individual agency in ¢anci are not antithetical to Confucian orthodoxies of virtue. Rather, tanci authors’ depictions of women’s fantasies of freedom have been carefully rationalized to leave the ethical characters of their heroines unharmed; loyalty, patriotism, filial piety, and uprightness are recast as sources of emotional empowerment for women. A heroine could decline an imposed marriage by prioritizing filial duties to her maternal parents over her obedience to her future husband. A married woman could manage to justify her religious practices. A cross-dressed heroine could ease the pressure of marriage through mock marriage with another woman, where she could perform the conventional duties of a loving husband and filial son-in-law. Chastity and filial love are evoked to justify the disguised protagonists’ unconventional lives. Traditional moral tenets such as loyalty and patriotism are transformed through celebrations of women’s intellectual and political wisdom.

This book offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women’s representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. The five discussed texts span Chinas polemical nineteenth century, when the nation’s civil war led to new imaginaries of heroism, martyrdom, loyalty, and subjectivity. The Taiping Rebellion nearly overthrew the Qing government and profoundly impacted the cities of south China, the birthplace of performed tanci traditions and home to many reputed women fanci authors, causing these writers to have tragic experiences of personal loss and political exile. In 1861, when the rebels broke into Hangzhou city in Zhejiang province, the reputed author Zheng Danruo (AA 47, 1811-1860), whose husband was the head official of Hangzhou, committed suicide to protect her chastity. Jin Fangquan (AA E, 1833—after 1890), author of 2 Al (Qizhenzhuan, A Tale of Exceptional Chastity, 1861), and Wang Oushang (TE FEE, 1832-1903), author of FER (Zixuji, A Tale of Vacuity, 1883), both suffered extensive exile in southern cities during the Taiping Rebellion. These women authors’ experiences as wartime refugees allowed them the means of acquiring nascent identities beyond the inner chambers through personal writings about warfare, exile, and nostalgia. This innovative turn toward wartime realism transforms the feminine utopian ideal toward immortality or imagined autonomy in traditional tanci. This book considers how warfare and disorder inspire women’s reconfiguration of orthodox values such as chastity and filial passions, political loyalty, and female martyrdom.

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Tze-lan Sang observes that “talented women of the scholar gentry class” in late imperial China, though granted a greater access to writing and publishing, could “refer to their own lives in public writing using only highly formulaic poetic language and very limited scripts of female sentiment and virtue. Any woman who overstepped these marks was very much in the minority” (Sang, “Romancing Rhetoricity and Historicity” 202). Under restrictive social conditions and pressures of censorship and self-censorship, fictionality could be an alternative for a marginalized subject to voice the real self. In comparison with wartime poems written by late imperial women authors on wartime exile, trauma, suffering, and nostalgia, tanci authors’ fictional narratives accommodate authorial self-distancing in inscribing social realities onto the narrative tableau of tanci. At times of social disorder and political turmoil, fictionality empowers the feminine subject in a socially disadvantaged position to speak about social tragedy and personal sufferings through stylized verses, historically framed narratives, character focalization, or transformed supernatural beings to voice “truth.” Narrative elements and modes of depiction such as supernaturalism, dramatic coincidences, fictional characterization, or tragicomic separation and reunion could serve as vehicles of disseminating and enunciating fictional realism through a distanced and ironized viewpoint. For early modern women, fictional realism allowed possibilities of negotiating with the dominant cultural and political ideologies and systems of value in the Confucian society and of finding new means and venues of self-articulation. Whereas the ostensible discrepancies between truth and fictionality, between authenticity and artist expressions, have been well examined in modern and contemporary discourses on realism in reportage literature, visual art, cinema, and theater, tanci works by Jin Fangquan, Zheng Danruo, and Wang Oushang suggest a rich and manifold repertoire of wartime narratives that allowed women’s creative endeavors to respond to social and political realities within the boundaries of prevailing cultural codes.

Also, my research expands studies of women’s tanci by considering depictions of women’s domestic authority in this fictional genre. The chapters of the book explore how women’s tanci fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in addition to offering portrayals of alternative visions through fantastic narratives or feminine utopian ideals, establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority and negotiations of the marriage paradigm. In quite a few women-authored sanci, the cross-dressed heroines undergo refeminization by marrying their fiancés and, rather than entirely losing their agency, gain access to much domestic authority in a polygamous family. Other ¢anci texts reconfigure the polygamous family structure by illustrating mock unions between the female cross-dresser and “his” understanding wife. Sometimes, female same-sex relationships could displace the sexual contract underlying the marriage contract. The texts stage a rivalry between women’s homoerotic bonds and heterosexual marriage, which problematizes the sexual contract underlying the

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor social contract of the polygamy. The plot emphasis shifts from the refeminization of the cross-dresser to opener closures beyond marriage.

Anne E. McLaren suggests in Chinese Popular Culture that chantefables, along with oral literature and drama, might have important connections with the rise of the early Chinese novel. Some critics argue that “the rise of the Chinese novel in the fourteenth century developed from the profession of storytelling” that was a form of popular entertainment dating back to as early as the Song dynasty (Ye Yang 19). Tanci narratives include the orally delivered tanci and written tanci, which are two interrelated but distinctive narrative repertoires that do not overlap one-to-one. Written tanci can be traced to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). In the late Ming, a small number of tanci works by men provided accounts of historical events or famous figures;

they were called is BAADA (jiangshilei tanci, or tanci that orally tell historical accounts). Since the seventeenth century, talented women authors have appropriated tanci as a feminine fictional genre. Possibly one of the earliest tanci works authored by women is the voluminous late Ming work Jade Bracelets, which consists of 224 |E] (hui, chapters) and 1.36 million words. Written tanci vary from 200,000 words to 2 million words in length. The longest tanci is HH TE (Liubuameng, Dream of the Pomegranate Flowers, 1841) by the late Qing author Li Guiyu ££, which consists of 360 juan (volumes) and 4.83 million words in rhymed seven-character lines. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant, in their 2004 book The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, include excerpts of translations from seminal ¢anci works. A bibliography by Sheng Zhimei records 538 surviving novel-length tanci texts. The majority of these texts were published under artistic names or with anonymous authorship (263-485). Another bibliography by Bao Zhenpei, highlights 38 texts written by women from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first century (Bao, Manuscripts of Treatise 301-2). Mark Bender calls these works “chantefable narratives” (Bender 153). The term “chantefable” is a fitting translation for written tanci to illustrate the genre’s importance in late imperial vernacular traditions.

During the Qing, tanci works enjoyed rising popularity, and the genre reached its pinnacle of development from the late eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century. Such popularity could be attributed to tanci’s origin as a kind of “leisure narrative” (Sheng 7). Literary tanci, thanks to its roots in storytelling, encompasses the features of oral performance, such as deploying thrilling and elaborated plots to attract audiences and embedding everyday life experiences in its accounts (8). The flourishing of such a genre of leisure narratives was much dependent on a prosperous socioeconomic environment. Only in such an environment could audiences afford to leisurely enjoy tanci storytelling in tea houses, or could women enjoy the pleasure of passing time by reading saci stories. The rise and decline of tanci bear close correlation with the social, economic, and political situations of the Qing. In the first half

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor of the nineteenth century, the publication of new anci and the reprinting of existent texts flourished. To attract more readers, publishers competed in enhancing the illustrations and appearances of printed sanci. In 1842, there were as many as eight editions of Jade Bracelets published, indicating the immense demand for tanci in the market (78).

The contested implications of gender identities related to performed sanci narratives and written tanci for reading could be observed in the diversified usages of the term “UER” (ndi tanci, women’s tanci). Zhou Liang observes that the term mii tanci, which in a modern setting often designates performed tanci, was initially used in a broader sense and referred to tanci works composed by cultivated authors for reading. These textualized works imitated the style and content of the performed zanci narratives and were often composed by women authors. However, occasionally there were male authors who made similar attempts. These textualized tanci works were all called nü tanci. Because of their imitation of the stylistic features of performed tanci, they are alternatively referred to as HEER] (ni tanci, imitative tanci; Zhou Liang 264). In this earlier usage of the term, nii tanci is not necessarily gender-bound in terms of authorship, nor does it refer to performed tanci narratives as in many contemporary settings. Zhao Jingshen observes that tanci includes X] (wenci, tanci for reading) and UB fi) (changci, tanci for singing) based on their stylistic differences (Zhao 5). Zhao refers to these wenci texts as written tanci works “of the woman, by the woman and for the woman,’ which are similar to the female-authored kind of textualized nii tanci, as delineated by Zhou Liang.

Fang Cao, in an important essay “UER” (“Nii tanci kao? “On Women’s Tanci”), observes that the term nii tanci includes three different aspects (Fang Cao 50). First, as Zhou Liang observes, nii tanci could refer to textualized tanci works composed by female authors and some male authors that imitate performed tanci tales. Second, nii tanci could refer to female tanci singers instead of to any particular feminine styles of tanci performance. Contemporary tanci performance is not defined by the gender binary and does not fall into masculine or feminine styles of performance. Third, in the history of Suzhou tanci performances, some female performers of tanci gradually transited to the profession of courtesans, and in this transitory process the style, content, and audience of their performances underwent significant changes and shifted to an increased focus on singing over storytelling. In order to please their male audiences they performed traditional ¢anci as well as other operatic genres, including œ H (kungu, a southern classical opera), IH (jingqiang, capital melodies), PP T (bangzi, rhythmic wooden-block opera), and 23] (xiaodiao, short tunes or song-based melodies). Some female singers gradually merged with professional courtesans at the time. They were referred to as nii tanci, which was an abbreviation of ii 454 ii] (jini tanci, courtesan tanci performers). In the late nineteenth century, traditional tanci performance gradually went out of vogue for male audiences. A Ying, in a historical review of performed

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor nü tanci, observes that professional female tanci singers later had to shift to sing ae

( pihuang), the northern musical melodies at the base of Peking opera (A Ying 413).

could be found in numerous archival records since late Ming, as Zhou Wei observes FAY AK (1503-1557) records that

Earlier records of female tanci singers who performed for male and female audiences

(“A Study of ‘Women’s Tanc?” 104). Tian Rucheng in Hangzhou blind performers, male or female, took to learning pipa and singing of novels and “Fifi ( pinghua, plain tales) storytelling to earn a living (20:18). Zhou Wei notes that before the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736-1796), nii tanci largely referred to blind women sanci performers who had the mobility to perform at private gatherings for affluent families. Since the nineteenth century, nii tanci performers included female singers who were not blind. On May 26, 1872, Chiping sou FFF published 13% (Shenbao, Shanghai News), which records anecdotes an article on ii tanci in of famous female tanci performers since the reign of Emperor Jiaqing and endorses quite a few of them as caini, or talented women (Chiping sou, “Nä tanci xiaozhi” 2).

In a sequel to this article published on May 28, Chiping sou observes that nii tanci or female éanci singers in Shanghai at the time were also addressed as WIE (mii xian- E5 (shuchang, story houses;

sheng, female scholars) who performed at the so-called Chiping sou, “Jie nii tanci xiaozhi” 2; see also Xu Ke 459-64). In comparison with female prostitutes who would take seats at the table of their patrons and attend them in smoking, female tanci performers would be seated at a distance from the patrons. Many of them would insist on “selling their songs but not their bodies” (Chiping sou, “Jie nü tanci xiaozhi” 2). Zhou Wei observes that this group of female tanci performers in Shanghai enjoyed higher social status than prostitutes and could be addressed as Hu) (shuyu nü tanci, story hall female tanci performers; Zhou Wei, “A Study nn

T of ‘Women’s Tanc?” 105).

As a vernacular genre, ¢anci was and still remains an indispensable part of people's cultural lives in the lower Yangtze region, an important cultural and economic center of China. Zheng Zhenduo points out that southern readers, particularly women and less educated men, might not have been familiar with seminal historical figures and poets, but all knew eminent characters in tanci stories by heart (Zheng Zhenduo

124). The popularity of tanci attracted late imperial women to utilize the genre to educate their readers and transform social customs. Tao Zhenhuai (K A 18, seventeenth NHE (Tianyuhua, Heaven Rains Flowers), comcentury), the alleged author of RN mented that she resorted to tanci because it was a more popular means of dissemination than rituals, music, and the play texts and could attract more audiences (‘Tao Zhenhuai 30). Similar observations about deploying the genre’s popularity among the cultured and common readers for educational purposes were articulated by later authors Zheng Danruo and Qiu Xinru (BBL Ul, 1805-1873). In late Qing, intellectuals found tanci to be an instrumental medium for educating women, resonant with

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 the contention by the reformist Liang Qichao (22 GER, 1873-1929): “If one intends to renovate the people ofa nation, one must first renovate its fiction” (qtd. in Denton 74). The broad cultural base of tanci rendered it an ideal vernacular medium for disseminating educational incentives to the masses at the turn of the twentieth century.

Written tanci by women authors expand the conventional notion ofa feminist bildungsroman, in that the female characters’ journeys of self-discovery are made possible by temporarily making women appropriate masculine social roles. In tanci, the oscillation of narrative closure, between the cross-dressed heroine’s marriage or her death upon the revelation of her true identity, often reflects the texts’ analogous negotiation between social conformity and individual development. Some authors resort to magic and alchemy to project an imagined ending by portraying the heroines as reincarnated immortals who return to the heavenly realm and are rewarded with autonomy because of their virtuous deeds. Some make tactical conciliations by making the heroine return to marriage with her betrothed fiancé. Yet, more than a few texts are open-ended and leave the heroines’ destinies undetermined when their true sexuality is exposed. Prominent examples include the unfinished FFF (Zaishengyuan,

LL

Destiny of Rebirth) by Chen Duansheng (BEE, 1751-1796), in which the exposed

Meng Lijun refuses to become the emperor’s concubine and falls fatally ill. Likewise, in Zheng Danruo’s & 5% (Mengyingyuan, Dream, Image and Destiny), the twelve heroines who are reincarnated flower goddesses all perish due to illness, misfortune, or suicide to resist against imposed marriage. The texts’ deliberations about the heroines’ negotiations of freedom against an intransigent social order reflect the very enigma of a modern female selfhood. Literary tanci celebrate women’s solidarity and foreshadow modern and contemporary feminist writings about female subjectivity, gender performances, and unconventional imaginings of desire and sexuality. These tales explore women’s self-discovery and search for freedom and provide rich illustrations of the authors’ interior yearning for identity and selfhood, or highlight female creative power through depictions of exceptional and adventurous heroines. Tanci serves as a vehicle for expressing women’s reconfiguration of the orthodox values of virtue and chastity by rendering the disguised heroines as active agents who implement changes in the social and political systems. Such negotiation between obedience and resistance could be a cross-cultural experience that women in the West and in China shared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the early twentieth century, some writers adapted this genre to disseminate tales of Western or traditional heroic women and to appeal to patriotic interpretations. The female revolutionary Qiu Jin (KEE, 1875-1907) composed an autobiographical tanci KATA (Jingweishi, Pebbles of the Jingwei Bird, 1905). The story depicts a group of late Qing young women who travel to Japan to study and to seek new paths to national salvation. The author prays that her readers will shatter their “slavish confines and arise

Guo, Li. Writing Gender In Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction. E-book, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284317631 Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor as heroines and female gallants on the stage of liberty, following in the footsteps of Madam Roland, Anita, Sophia Perofskaya, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Joan of Arc” (“Excerpts” 44). In Qiu Jin’s view, eminent modern Western women could serve as exemplars for her female compatriots and encourage them to act as conscious agents of national salvation. Qiu Jin’s renovation transformed the genre into a medium of “women’s feminist-nationalist activism” (Dooling and Torgeson 4). Some male writers wrote in shorter tanci tales about heroic women as models of patriotic passions. Such examples include YA H L RREK] (Faguo nityingxiong tanci, Tale of a French Woman Hero, 1904) by Yu Chenglai (AKIK, 1881-1937), HAE I. (Yanzhixue, Rouge Blood, 1908) by Zhou Shoujuan (Jal J Als, 1895-1968), — bth Ad ec FRC BY KES Rn

(Ershi shiji niijie wenmingdeng tanci, Twentieth-Century Tanci: Light of Civilization in the Women’s World, 1911) by Zhong Xinging $% Ù, and [A] -Lo tii (Jongxinzhi, Heartlocked Cape Jasmine, 1911) by Cheng Zhanlu (FEI, 1879-1943). These tanci project the endeavors of elite intellectuals to herald women’s sociopolitical awakening by reinventing images of Western heroines and martyrs as sources of transnational identification.

Among book-length studies on tanci in English, Mark Bender’s 2003 groundbreaking monograph offers research on the origins and aesthetic features of performed tanci storytelling. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant (2004) provide a chapter-long discussion on the history and stylistic features of tanci, or “plucking rhymes,’ and they include excerpts of translations from seminal tanci works. Toyoko Yoshida Chen’s doctoral dissertation, Women in Confucian Society: A Study of Three Tan-Tz'u Narratives, examines three seminal texts, Heaven Rains Flowers, Destiny of Rebirth, and BE 4¢. (Bishenghua, Blossoms from the Brush), as early examples of “literary achievement of women in the history of Chinese fiction” (ii). Nancy J. Hodes’s doctoral dissertation, Strumming and Singing the “Three Smiles Romance”: A Study of the Tanci Text, analyzes performance-related ¢anci through an examination of two versions of the żanci text = KWAK (Sanxiao yinyuan, Three Smiles Romance) and their respective degree of literariness and suggests a collaborative and interdisciplinary study of performance-related tanci texts. Marina Hsiu-wen Sung offers a nuanced study on how the narrative aesthetics of Chen Duansheng’s tanci Destiny of Rebirth contributes to a feminist vision within a traditional Confucian social system (Sung, Narrative Art; Sung, “Chen Duansheng” 16-18). Sung’s visionary research takes a narratological approach to the study of tanci narratives by exploring the storyteller-narrator’s manipulation of narrative points of view and character focalization and the role of narrative agents (supernatural and human), as well as the text’s complex plot arrangements. Hu Siao-chen’s doctoral dissertation, Literary Tanci: A Womans Tradition of Narrative in Verse, proposes women’s written tanci as a “feminine” form of poetic expression and argues that literary tanci should be envisioned as a form of écriture feminine. Hu’s dissertation was