For elite women during the last years of the Qing dynasty, new opportunities and imperatives both beckoned and threatened. In the rush to claim the “new woman” as an agent of modernity or revolution, progress and prejudice combined to erase an older model of the talented woman, the cainü, with her command of poetry and traditional arts. The twelve essays in Different Worlds of Discourse show us the complexities of gender identity during the years between China's traumatic defeat by Japan in 1895 and the birth of Republican China in 1912.
Different Worlds of Discourse is organized into three sections: “Transformations of Gender Roles,” with essays by Harriet T. Zurndorfer, Hu Ying, Grace S. Fong, and Xiaoping Cong; “Transformations of Genres,” with essays by Joan Judge, Jing Tsu, and Ellen Widmer; and “The Production of Gender and Genres in New Print Media,” with essays by Rudolf G. Wagner, Nanxiu Qian, Xia Xiaohong, Chen Pingyuan, and Siao-chen Hu. The essays cross these boundaries, however, and converge to address a set of very specific themes.
The first theme concerns what Joan Judge calls the “cognitive transformation” that was “central to the historical changes of the late Qing era” (p. 147). Judge shows us how popular collections of exemplary Western women's lives, intended to demonstrate new patterns of life, work, and career, were actually reconceptualized with special Chinese characteristics to keep them from being too threatening. More radical by far were the glamorous female assassins described by Jing Tsu, or the anarchists studied by Xia Xiaohong, who confected their identities from a pastiche of imported science and political thought and an indigenous Chinese tradition of martyrdom.
The next theme is late Qing China's tormented relation to the cainü or the traditional “talented woman.” Harriet Zurndorfer paints a Liang Qichao (1873–1929) temperamentally unable to acknowledge women's scholarship. Nanxiu Qian shows us how the 1902 Nü xue bao (Journal of Women's Learning), which hewed to a modernizing, revolutionary line, erased the memory of an earlier Nü xue bao in which cainü had held sway just a few years earlier. Hu Ying focuses on Wu Zhiying, whose famous calligraphy graced the barely rescued stele from Qiu Ju's grave, to reveal the complexities involved in establishing a modern identity as an artist rather than as a revolutionary. Grace Fong shows us that Lü Bicheng, a poet who stayed firmly within the classical language tradition, managed the complexities brilliantly, becoming both a successful author and entrepreneur as she developed her own cosmopolitan identity.
In each section of the book, one scholar foregrounds women's education, yielding a particularly interesting variety of perspectives. Xiaoping Cong traces “modern” women's education to the very cainü who had long been valued in elite families as the teachers of sons and thus crucial to the maintenance of status. Modern normal schools expanded this role, idealizing women as teachers for the nation. Ellen Widmer and Chen Pingyuan show, however, that this role had its contradictions: the desire for education spread from elite wives to elite courtesans, and Widmer analyzes male-authored fiction that grappled with “the vexed nature of personal feelings in an era of rapid change” (p. 200). Could one still love an educated courtesan? In the Beijing pictorials discussed by Chen Pingyuan, courtesan fashion began to imitate normal school uniforms, chronicled by the voyeuristic “male gaze” (p. 315) of the pictorial editors.
Rudolf Wagner and Siao-chen Hu demonstrate the enormous role that male editors and publishers played in the creation of the new woman's identity at the end of the Qing: the publications of Ernest Major's Shenbaoguan, analyzed by Wagner, gave women's issues unprecedented prominence, and Hu discusses the impact of the Funü zazhi (The Ladies’ Journal), whose male editor for the first time accorded women a dedicated space for their own literary work. But while Wagner and Hu make clear the modern predispositions and keen interest in women's causes on the part of both editors, they remind us that by the end of the Qing dynasty, women were also simply good business.
These essays underscore that new trends at the end of the Qing were able to gain strength because they drew on recognizable traditions. The “subversive individualism” (p. 171) that Jing Tsu sees in political martyrdom seems to me directly connected to the centuries of young widows who found moral worth in self-immolation. The beauties displayed in Shanghai and Beijing pictorials had antecedents in illustrated albums from late Ming and Qing. Women had long been valued as educators. These precedents do not make the new trends any less “new”; they just remind us that cultures, like individuals, cannot conceptualize without the use of familiar categories, which change incrementally rather than all at once.
Different Worlds of Discourse builds on two solid decades of scholarly work on women's writing in late imperial China, exemplified in the book's excellent bibliography. By focusing on the very end of the imperial era, Different Worlds of Discourse keeps history complicated, showing the “different orders of plausibility” (p. 194) that Jing Tsu describes as a hallmark of the period.
