Australia-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry
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STUDENT ESSAYS ON CHINA

Mid-Qing Stories by Pu Song Ling

By Cindy Li
University of New South Wales

Posted to Web Site:  7 May 2003


About the author:


Cindy Li is an Arts/Law student at UNSW and she is doing a history major.  She submitted this essay for a first year Chinese history subject.  Cindy originally came to Australia from Hong Kong and she is interested in Chinese history largely for heritage reasons.  Cindy wishes to go on exchange to Hong Kong in the future.

Cindy won the W J Liu Chinese Studies Prize for 2002.


Abstract:


This essay discusses and analyses the depiction of women in Pu Song Ling’s Strange Tales of Liaozhai.  It considers the way in which the male-gaze of the author moulds his conception of women.  It also addresses the debates in historiography regarding women’s position in the neo-Confucian patriarchy of late imperial China.


Introduction:


Women in late imperial China are often regarded as being the victims of a severely patriarchal, neo-Confucian system.  Recent historiography, however, has departed from this “victim stereotype” and has instead, sought to investigates the various ways in which women held power within the patriarchal framework.

To consider these issues, I discuss the way in which women are depicted in Pu Song Ling’s Strange Tales of Liaozhai, a collection of short stories from the High Qing period.  I argue that these stories can only offer limited insights about the experiences of Chinese women because the author considers women through a male-gaze.  I also make comparisons between the male-gaze of Pu Song Ling and the male-gaze adopted by some of the earlier historiography on Chinese women.


Text of essay:


The Strange Tales of Liaozhai was a collection of surrealist, short stories written by Pu Song Ling (1640-1715).  The dynastic transition from the Ming to the Qing (1644) was 4 years after his birth. His work was first published in 1740, during the High Qing (c.1683-1839) 1/.  This essay focuses on Chinese women’s status in this particular time period. In the Qing dynasty, women were generally subject to greater patriarchal control; however, this trend did not begin in the Qing, but it was a continuation from earlier dynasties 2/. 

Love and marriage are some of the many subjects in Pu’s stories 3/.  These stories are a primary source which offer historians insight into the neo-Confucian gender order in the Qing dynasty.  Recent historiography, informed by post-modern feminist theory, departs from the assumption that all women throughout Chinese history were always victims of a monolithic patriarchy. 

Dorothy Ko in her study of Chinese women writers in the seventeenth century takes on this theoretical approach 4/.  While she agrees that the stereotype of the victimised Chinese woman is “not without its grain of truth” 5/, she argues that this image of woman, frozen in time, obscures the dynamism of gender relations in Chinese history. 

In Confucian ideology, the family was the most fundamental social unit. It was regarded as the bastion of morality 6/.  The subjugation of wives to their husbands had a clear political purpose.  A wife’s proper relationship with her husband was regarded as a model and metaphor for the subject’s relationship with the emperor 7/.

The state was therefore one of the chief agents in fostering and promoting family ideals throughout Chinese history 8/.  The Manchu, in an attempt to legitimise their rule of the Chinese, rabidly promoted “familistic moralism” among commoners in order to signify their commitment to Confucian ideals 9/.  Women’s subjugation was therefore an important basis on which the wider Confucian political order was constructed.

The doctrine of sancong (Three Obediences) is often regarded as definitive of women’s position in Confucianism 10/.  This treatise, found in Confucius’ Book of Rites specifies that throughout a woman’s life course, she is to live under the directions of her menfolk:

“The woman follows the man: -- in her youth, she follows her father and elder brother; when married, she follows her husband; when her husband is dead, she follows her son” 11/.

The sancong is the ideological and philosophical basis for women’s subjugation in Chinese kinship formations.  Under sancong a woman does not exist in her own right. Her existence and even her own identity is defined by male-kin.

However Dorothy Ko questions the extent to which the sancong is entirely representative of women’s position.  To reduce the Chinese construct of womanhood to the sancong is to assume that the Chinese patriarchy was based only on coercion or brute force 12/. 

Ko argues that while women may be denied power on an official level by Confucian discourse, in their actual experiences they may enjoy a degree of “informal power” 13/.  In certain circumstances, they may even be able to mitigate or manipulate Confucian ideals of womanhood 14/.

The status of the widow in Qing society is an example which illustrates how women, in particular contexts, were able to have power within an overarching patriarchal framework.  In Confucianism, a wife was expected to remain chaste and to continue serving her patrilineal family, even after the death of her husband. 

The Qing rulers enthusiastically supported the cult of the chaste widow, which was a remnant from earlier dynasties 15/.  Qing efforts to promote widow chastity could be regarded as part of the broader attempt to impose stronger controls on female sexuality and ultimately, to further disempower women.

However, Matthew Sommers explains that in the Qing legal code widows, among all women, had the greatest property rights and independence, providing that they remain chaste 16/.  In elite families, some widows were even able to take over the patriarchal authority once held by their husbands 17/.

The potential for widows to become heads of households is described in Pu Song Ling’s “Hsi-liu” 18/.  In this story, a diligent woman by the name of Hsi-liu becomes the head of her household after the death of her husband.  She works hard and is ultimately rewarded when she transforms her two wayward sons into a merchant and a scholar.

But not all widows were able to enjoy the independence which Hsi-liu possessed in Pu’s story.  If, for instance, a widow’s chastity was broken through adultery, remarriage or rape, then her rights to her husband’s property, to her children and to refrain from remarriage were all lost 19/.  The strong distinction between chaste and unchaste widows can also be in seen in Pu’s stories.

While a chaste widow like Hsi-liu is rewarded and praised for her virtue and hard work, unchaste widows are criticised.  In “The Faithless Widow” 20/.  Pu describes a widow who commits all possible acts of faithlessness: she squanders her husband’s money, remarries and deserts her children.  Ultimately, she is punished with death when haunted by her husband’s ghost.




Although Pu’s stories generally support the Confucian gender order, these stories may also contain mixed messages and may express sympathy for women who are victims of the patriarchy.  As Jonathan Spence has argued, Pu was not sentimental about marriage and was well aware of the miseries of many wives 21/.

In the “Virtuous Daughter in Law” 22/ Pu details the miseries which wives could experience in the patriarchal and patrilocal family.  A young wife Shan-hu dutifully waits on a tyrannical mother-in-law. Shan-hu is blamed and beaten by her husband for his mother’s displeasure and he finally divorces her. 

Even after her suicide attempt, Shan-hu’s husband remains unmoved.  Pu’s vivid descriptions of Shan-hu cutting her own throat and crying tears of blood arouses pity in the reader.  Shan-hu as a tragic figure serves as poignant criticism of the Chinese patriarchal family which subjects the wife to the control of both her mother-in-law and husband.

However, Pu constructs Shan-hu not only as a victim, but also as a model of feminine virtue (perhaps to arouse the reader’s sympathy).  Shan-hu receives passively the abuse of her husband and her mother-in-law and she guards her chastity by refusing to remarry, even when divorced.

Pu contrasts the virtue of Shan-hu with the other daughter-in-law who manipulates her husband and squanders the family fortune 23/.  He even ends the story by having Shan-hu rewarded for her virtue through ancestral intervention 24/. In this way, Pu applauds the utter selflessness of Shan-hu and thus he supports the doctrine of sancong.

Pu’s stories on female sexuality also suggest that he supports neo-Confucian conceptions of female sexuality. The need to maintain the ancestral lineage required strict control of female sexuality. In Confucianism, women were denied their sexuality because the disciplines of domestic life were incompatible with desire 25/.

In Pu’s stories, female sexuality is depicted in a mystic or surrealist way.  By relegating female sexuality to surrealism, Pu accepts that female sexuality is a taboo subject that cannot be spoken of in realistic terms. Inadvertently, he contributes to its taboo status.

In Pu’s stories, there is a tendency to depict female sexulity as if it were a monstrosity. While the most sexually assertive women in his stories tend to be foxes or devils in disguise, human women often play no active part in courtship or sexuality.

This can be best seen in “The Painted Skin” 26/.  In this story, a monster disguises herself as a beautiful woman by wearing a painted human skin.  She ensnares a married man name Wang and through repeatedly having sex with him, she sucks all the yang energy out of Wang and ultimately, he falls ill and dies 27/. The notion that sexual intercourse with a woman is depleting or harmful to a man’s yang energy is extremely misogynistic. 

On the other hand, Wang’s wife, the human woman in this story, is depicted as a model of virtue. She willingly suffers public humiliation and degradation to restore her husband back to life 28/.  In this story and in many others, Pu polarises women into either paragons of virtue or femmes fatales 29/.  The former stereotype exonerates Confucian gender constructs; the latter warns of the consequences if society were to depart from the Confucian gender order.

This reducing of women to stereotypes can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the author is male.  Through Pu’s male gaze, women tend to be either idealised or reduced to their sexuality.




As Susan Mann argues, stories about women written by male authors can only offer historians limited insight into women’s lives 30/.  The male gaze objectifies women and denies them their subjectivity 31/.

To further explain this, I will first discuss how Pu’s stories conceive of a woman’s identity.  I will then consider how he views widow suicide and footbinding through a male gaze.

In his stories, Pu tends to define women in relation to their menfolk thus denying them their own identity.  In almost all of his short stories, the first line introduces the name of a male character 32/. 

Women characters are generally introduced later in the story as the relatives of the male characters. Unlike male characters, female characters are seldom introduced without the author explaining to whom they are related to.  And so in Pu’s eyes, women exist, not in their own right, but through their relations with men.

Pu further denies women their sense of subjectivity by defining their actions through a male gaze. His treatment of widow suicide is an example of this. In “Perserverance Rewarded” 33/.  A-pao’s husband dies and out of her love for him, she tries to hang herself.  This greatly moves the Judge of Hades and he restores her husband back to life.

In this story, the many possible causes of widow suicide are reduced only to a widow’s yearning for her husband.  This very male-centric conception of widow suicide brushes aside the many other pressures which widows were subject to, under the Confucian patriarchal system.  If this story was written by a female author, then the causes of A-pao’s suicide attempt may be more complex then Pu suggests.

Likewise, in earlier historiography, widow suicide had also been regarded through a reductionist male gaze. Jonathan Spence for instance, argues that widow suicide was generally accepted as an act of virtue and he assumes that this was the chief cause of the pervasiveness of widow suicide 34/.  But in doing so, he reduces women to mere dupes, who accepted, without question, their society’s misogynist and patriarchal attitudes. 

Recent historiography, on the other hand, addresses the phenomenon of widow suicide more broadly.  The Qing legal code granted property rights to widows.  Because these rights could be forfeited if she broke her chastity, it was in the interest of the dead man’s family to force his widow to remarry 35/.

A widow in this situation faced a “triple jeopardy” of the loss of her children, an inferior match in marriage and the personal humiliation of failing to stay chaste – these pressures, among many others, would have likely contributed to the causes of widow suicides 36/.

Footbinding, like widow suicide, is regarded as symbolic of Chinese women’s subjugation and like widow suicide, it also tends to be understood through the male-gaze.  Pu’s stories make references to women’s little feet and shoes as being sexually titillating to men.

In “Miss Lien Hsiang” 37/, for instance, a woman devil Miss Li gives her little shoe to a scholar to express her love interest in him.  Pu’s stories do not offer any insight into female attitudes towards footbinding; they do not discuss any of the pain (or pleasure) which women attributed to this practice.

Dorothy Ko argues that it is important to understand how Chinese women themselves regarded footbinding in order to understand why it lasted for a millennium 38/. Footbinding was a misogynistic practice which attempted to objectify women and to keep them in purdah.  Ko argues that while it should not be condoned, footbinding should also be regarded as a custom which offered something to women.

To these women, it was not only a symbol of their gentility, but also a symbol of their agency as individuals 39/. It was “one of the few sources of pride” available to these women 40/.  While Ko’s analysis footbinding regards women as agents making choices rather than as passive dupes, it is nevertheless important not to overlook the systematic patriarchal pressures on women to bind their feet.

Because Pu considers women through a male-gaze, Liaozhai can only offer limited insights into the lives of Qing women.  The patriarchal assumptions underlying his stories offer far greater insights to the historian than the actual stories themselves.

While Pu was in some respects, sympathetic to women’s subjugation, he generally supported the neo-Confucian gender order, especially in regards to female sexuality and widow chastity.  Although subjugation of women in late imperial China is generally regarded by historians as pervasive, recent feminist historiography has tended to depart from the stereotype of the passive and victimised Chinese woman.

This stereotype is disempowering to women because it regards them as passive dupes and it denies them their subjectivity. While it is important to understand how these women viewed their own position in society, the abuse and subjugation of women under the Confucian framework must not be denied.


Bibliography:


Ebrey, P., “Women, marriage and the family in Chinese history”, in Paul S. Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, University of California Press, 1990, pp. 197-223.

Ko, D., Teachers of the Inner Chambers Women and Culture in Seventeenth- Century China, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994.

Mann, S., Precious Records Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997.

Ng, V., “Sexual abuse of daughters-in-law in Qing China: cases from the Xiang’an Huilan”, Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 1994, pp. 373-391.

Pu Songling, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio Liaozhai zhiyi, (trans.) H. Giles, Dover Publications, New York, 1969.

Pu Songling, Strange Tales of Liaozhai, (trans.) Lu Yunzhong, Chen Tifang, Yang Liyi & Yan Zhihong, The Commercial Press, Hong Kong, 1990.

Sommer, M., “The uses of chastity: sex, law and the property of widows in Qing China”, Late Imperial China, vol. 17, no. 2, 1996, pp. 77-130.

Spence, Jonathan, The Death of Woman Wang, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978.


Notes:


1. In the latter half of his life, Pu was living in the High Qing. By this time, the Qing had eliminated all remnants of Ming loyalist resistance and was reaching its peak. 

2. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1997, p. 20.

3. Throughout this essay, I make generalisations about Pu’s many stories. From his collection of 491 stories, I have selected and read ten, which give insights into the lives of women.

4. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Standford University Press, California 1994, p. 4.

5. ibid.

6. Vivien Ng, “exual Abuse of daugheters-in-law in Qing China: cases from the Xiang’an Huilan”,Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 1994, pp. 373-391.

7. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Standford University Press, California 1994, p. 6.

8. Patricia Ebrey, “omen, Marriage and the Family in Chinese History” in Paul S. Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, University of California Press, 1990, p. 223.

9. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in Chian’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 22.

10. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Standford University Press, California 1994, p.6.

11. Confucius cited in Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Standford University Press, California 1994, p. 6.

12. ibid.

13. ibid., p.11.

14. ibid.

15. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in Chian’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 23.

16. Matthew Sommer, “he uses of chastity: sex, law and the property of widos in Qing China”,Late Imperial China, vol.17, no, 1996, p. 77.

17. ibid.

18. This story is reproduced in Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978, pp. 62-70.

19. Matthew Sommer, “The uses of chastity: sex, law and the property of widows in Qing China”, Late Imperial China, vol.17, no, 1996, p. 77.

20. Pu Song Ling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, H. Giles (trans.), Dover Publications, New York, 1969, pp. 288-291.

21. Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978, p.109.

22. Pu Song Ling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, H. Giles (trans.), Dover Publications, New York, 1969, pp. 229-237.

23. This story centres around the recovery of the family fortunes.  It shows how property ownership relates to female subjugation.  The Chinese regarded property as owned by the whole family and not by individuals.  In order to keep property in the family, there was a greater need to control female sexuality.  A virtuous woman, like Shan-hu, would never remarry and would dutifully raise male heirs so that both the family property and the ancestral lineage could be maintained.

24. Shan-hu’s dead father-in-law comes back from the grave, revealing to her a secret buried treasure that will allow the family to reclaim its squandered fortunes.  But only Shan-hu, who is the sole virtuous person in her family, is able to dig up the treasure.

25. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in Chian’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997, p.15.

26. Pu Songling, Strange Tales of Liaozhai, (trans.) Lu Yunzhong, Chen Tifang, Yang Liyi, Yang Zhihong, The Commercial Press, Hong Kong, 1990, pp.73-78.

27. Monsters or devils are predominantly yin and can only exist in the world if they suck the yang energy out of mortals.

28. She approaches a madman doctor who forces her to swallow his sputum in public.  When she chokes and vomits, her husband’s heart falls out of her mouth and she brings him back to life.

29. In another story, “Lien-Hsiang”, two women, a fox and a devil are sexual competitors and they vie at seducing a scholar. However, they wish the man no harm and when he becomes sick from their Yin energy, they try to bring him back to life. In the end of the story, they become much like sisters to each other.  While the women in this story change from being temptresses, to being virtuous, they are still defined through stereotypes.

30. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in Chian’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 3.

31. ibid.

32. Of the ten stories which I have read, only “Hsi-liu” begins by introducing a woman character.

33. Pu Song Ling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, H. Giles (trans.), Dover Publications, New York, 1969, p. 115-121.

34. Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1978, pp.100-101.

35. Vivien Ng, “Sexual Abuse of daugheters-in-law in Qing China: cases from the Xiang’an Huilan”, Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 2, 1994, p. 74.

36. Susan Mann, Precious Records Women in Chian’s Long Eighteenth Century, Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 25.

37. Pu Song Ling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, H. Giles (trans.), Dover Publications, New York, 1969, pp. 104-115.

38. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chamber Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China, Standford University Press, California 1994, p. 150.

39. ibid., 171.

40. ibid.

 


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