Wai-yee Li's Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature is an insightful study on the discursive and imaginative space occupied by women as the dominant figures in literary works from the Ming-Qing transitional period (1640s to 1680s) to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book contributes not only to literary and historical inquiries into the Manchu conquest of China and its ramifications in the cultural imagination, but also the increasing body of scholarship on Chinese women writers and gender studies. The sheer breadth of materials discussed in the book—from classical and vernacular narrative, prosimetric, and dramatic literature to prose essays and occasional poetry—appeals broadly to scholars specializing in various literary traditions in late imperial China. More importantly, this study is a most welcome addition to existing scholarship that goes beyond generic boundaries to explore various cultural issues, such as memory and remembrance, literati networks, book knowledge and the shaping of subjectivity, and the opening and enclosure of human communities.
Instead of following the entrenched exegetical tradition of identifying historical referents as the ultimate explanation of the text, Women and National Trauma investigates how protean transformations of gender tropes mediate the ever fluid and open-ended relationship between history and literature. As the experience and memory of trauma demands repeated confrontation, reenactment, and reshaping through literature, gender tropes are instrumental in helping literati writers to make sense of historical happenings and deal with their own challenges. By illuminating what is hidden beneath the multifarious images of historical or imagined women heroes, Li also calls for the reconsideration of truisms premised on the polarization of good and evil. Women and National Trauma therefore unveils the social processes by which the conceptions of gender brought together the vast network of literary communities in the seventeenth century, and the measure to which gender tropes remained potent amid the political turmoil of the late Qing period and even the twentieth century, mediated by aesthetics, nostalgia, and historical exigencies.
The first two chapters of Women and National Trauma focus on how gendered dictions mediate the represented experience of writers, both male and female, within established literary conventions. Chapter 1 discusses the female voice and feminine imagery adopted by men of letters, penetrating the aesthetic surface to scrutinize the fissures and uncertainties that point to “a poetics of indirectness” (p. 5) that accommodates a broad range of associations, allowing individual writers to define the self, adjudicate others, negotiate their political choices, or forge literary communities on a collective cause focalized around the image of the displaced woman. For female writers (chapter 2), political lament and aspiration give form and meaning to more inchoate and less expressible frustration over the female conditions as they adopted what was traditionally considered masculine discourses to forge female friendship, vent their gender discontent and indictment of ineffective action, and empathize with the dilemmas and failures of men.
Chapter 3 moves on to the representation of real and imagined female heroes in a variety of literary genres, including poetry, prose, prosimetric fiction, variety plays, and Southern romantic chuanqi plays. The fictional distance opens up an allegorical space where male writers enlist female heroism to confer diverse judgments about the fallen Ming dynasty by recontextualizing a Tang tale of a female knight errant as a reproach against the inertia and compromises of the male scholar-officialdom and military elite, vindicating a femme fatale to make a general defense of the romantic-aesthetic realm of the Jiangnan area (albeit fraught with irony), taming a female warrior to reassert patriarchal authority without challenging the new political order, and imagining a female hero into historical existence to allow the continuation of a lost world.
Chapters 4 to 6 examine remembrance, nostalgia, and historical judgments. Chapter 4 traces the transmutation of the courtesan's aura of the late Ming in the early Qing memorial landscape. The “heroizing” trajectory (p. 581) of three prominent literary figures' romantic attachments enabled them to commemorate a lost former self, to reaffirm one's self-definition as a poet-historian, and to rectify compromise and confirm hidden loyalism. Chapter 5 focuses on the interface between victimhood and agency, empathy, and judgment. The diverse literature on displaced women opens up a discursive space that demonstrates how female virtue, such as chastity, commands a broad range of symbolic meanings, with ambiguity accepted and compromise presented as instrumental for survival and reconciliation. The last chapter of the book turns to historical remembrance and judgments through the prism of women's stories. By looking into the underlying logic of both blame and praise, Li shows how, on the one hand, condemnation is hardly sustainable when opprobrium came from one who experienced the sufferings of the Ming-Qing transition; while on the other, writings eulogizing chaste women are rife with rhetorical sleight of hand that allows remembrance through accommodations with the new Manchu order. In particular, the devastation and revival of Yangzhou become the negotiating ground between critique and nostalgia, resistance and compromise, remembering and forgetting.
Women and National Trauma is a weighty book, both in terms of its erudition and the subject matter. The Manchu conquest likely struck the seventeenth-century writers most poignantly as a fundamental rupture to the engrained discourse on orthodoxy (hua) and cultural refinement emblematized by the Jiangnan region. Yet the title, “national trauma,” also points more broadly beyond seventeenth-century China to bridge the early modern period and the advent of modernity. As Tobie Meyer-Fong notes in What Remains, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Manchu conquest of the Jiangnan region in 1645 had replaced local memories of war to become the consummate icon of suffering.Footnote 3 Scholars have situated this erasure of local memory in the context of immanent nationalism and ethnic awareness, as well as Western imperialism and failed modernity in China. Women and National Trauma has complicated this picture by reflecting on ways in which writing and literary communities bear upon historical remembrance in social processes that defy any overarching ideology.
In her first book, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), Li traces the evolvement of the dialectics between illusion of power and the awareness of illusion across a wide variety of literary genres from early China to the late imperial period. In The Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), she examines the rhetorical complexity that underlies divergent readings of the past in early Chinese historiography. Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature is, to a certain degree, a culmination of Li's earlier inquiries, as it delves into the interior dynamics of the literary tradition to unearth the complexity of experiences that were often elided, recalibrated, or altered under the moral imperative of historical judgments.
