Xiaorong Li has written an illuminating study of Chinese women's poetry from the late Ming to the early Republic, focusing on the trope of the gui (“boudoir” or “inner quarters”). She takes the poetry once labeled by Liang Qichao and Hu Shi as the trivial, boring and insignificant scribblings of privileged women, and reveals the many ways women, from the late Ming into the early 20th century, transformed the gui trope from the sentimental projections and erotic fantasies of male authors into the meaningful expression of women's views and experiences, reflecting their growing sophistication and political consciousness. One of the strengths of the book is Li's sure-handed treatment of both the literary conventions of Chinese women's poetry and the historical contexts in which women wrote.
In her first chapter Li delineates the history of the boudoir trope in Chinese poetry, beginning with mostly male-authored palace-style poetry in the early 6th-century anthology, New Songs from a Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong) on beautiful, sensuous and lonely women abandoned by their male lovers. She analyses briefly the influential 10th-century anthology of song lyrics (ci), The Anthology of Poems Written among the Flowers (Huajian ji). These male-authored ci poems alternate between erotic fantasies of sensuous beauties and political allegories in which the abandoned woman represents the virtuous and loyal male official unfairly unappreciated, unrecognized or dismissed by his sovereign. In the Song period, in Li's analysis, the ci genre underwent further development with Li Qingzhao, the most famous of all woman poets, and with some male authors, who used the boudoir trope in increasingly subtle ways to depict their own deep inner feelings. By the Ming-Qing era, Li concludes, the generic conventions of the boudoir trope were so deeply ingrained that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a poem is simply a statement of conventional themes or an actual expression of lived experience.
In chapter two, Li explores the influential Qing-era anthology compiled by Yun Zhu (1771–1833), The Anthology of Correct Beginnings by Inner-Chamber Talents of the Present Dynasty (Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji). Part of this chapter reiterates themes in Susan Mann's fine book, Precious Records (Stanford University Press, 1997) which also focused on Yun Zhu's anthology. As Yun Zhu was determined to show women as talented and virtuous orthodox Confucians, the boudoir trope in Correct Beginnings is recontextualized and recoded to emphasize the boudoir as a site of daily work, embroidery, raising of children and supervising of households. I would have liked an explanation in this chapter, if only in a footnote, as to how Li's interpretation of Yun Zhu's anthology differs from Mann's.
In chapter three, Li analyses the poetry of Gu Zhenli (1623–1699), a Ming loyalist who was unhappily married and who transformed her boudoir poetry into a vehicle for political dissent and social criticism. Most of Gu Zhenli's poems are undated, and she adopted a variety of voices so that, in Li's summation, “the boudoir in her lyrics is rendered ambivalent, heterogeneous, and multifaceted” (p. 88). Yet Li demonstrates the many ways Gu subverted boudoir (and gender) conventions, using her poems to express frustration with her confinement and bitterness over her poverty and her marriage to a man she considered her inferior. In places Li seems tentative in her analysis of Gu's poems, noting that a line or a poem “may” signify this or that, but she conclusively demonstrates how Gu Zhenli used poetry to express her unhappiness in ways that would have offended orthodox Confucians.
Li devotes chapter four to a discussion of women's poetry in times of war and chaos when they were forced out of the confinement of the inner quarters. Women whose lives were disrupted by the Taiping Rebellion sometimes wrote of nostalgia for their earlier peaceful lives in the safety of the inner quarters, but through their sufferings their horizons were necessarily broadened, and even in describing their experiences of war and disorder they assumed new more public roles. In response to the Opium War (1839–42), some women expressed frustration with their confinement in the inner quarters, suggested that male incompetence was to blame for China's defeat, and expressed their desire to participate more actively in defending their country.
In chapter five, Li moves to the late Qing and early Republic, to discuss the expanding educational and career opportunities for women, and the growing popularity of the notion of the “new woman,” a modern citizen helping to build a modern nation state. She concentrates on the poetry of the anti-Qing revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin (1875–1907), and the cosmopolitan poet Lü Bicheng (1884–1983). Although not as iconoclastic or famous as Qiu Jin, Lü Bicheng, in Li's reading, was a kind of cultural revolutionary, giving the topos gui a new significance as a “space of self-expression.”
In her brief conclusion, Li emphasizes the complex variety of perspectives encompassed in the boudoir trope in women's poetry from the late Ming into the early Republican era: “The gui is a space full of ambivalent inscriptions, a site of struggle over the meaning of life as a woman, of female subjectivity” (p. 180). In giving sensitive translations and insightful commentaries on this “boudoir poetry,” Xiaorong Li has demonstrated its relevance far beyond the inner quarters in documenting three centuries of women's participation in social, political and cultural change.
