Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood
Susan Mann
The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 4. (Nov., 2000), pp. 835-862.
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Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood SUSAN M A N N
SALMAN
RUSHDIE CALLS MYTHOLOGY "the family album or storehouse of a culture's
childhood, containing {its) . . . future, codified as tales that are both poems and
oracles" (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, "the waking dreams our societies permit"
that celebrate "the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks" (73).
O f course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom
rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors,
librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators,
and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood-an
industry that,
I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.
Scholars who study myth will doubtless find m y use of the term here overly broad.
T h e myths I discuss are stories that many scholars of comparative mythology would
not consider myths at all, but rather "histories" or, perhaps, legends, that conceal,
distort, obscure, or otherwise overwrite the remnants of archaic plots and characters
that form the stuff of true myth.' Embedded as they are in historical and cultural
context, though, Chinese myths of womanhood yield unexpected insights into
historical consciousness about women, and among women, in Chinese history. So
whereas the subject of this address has an intellectual debt to a past president, Wendy
Susan Mann is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.
This article was originally presented as the Presidential Address to the 52nd Annual
Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, 10 March 2000.
The author gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Weijing Lu and Baomin
Ye, and the support of the committee on Research of the Academic Senate, University of
California, Davis. For generous advice, assistance, and criticism I am also indebted to Beverly
Bossler, Joan Cadden, Sherman Cochran, Catherine Kudlick, Ellen Johnston Laing, Weijing
Lu, P. Steven Sangren, and G. William Skinner.
'As Anne Birrell (1991) points out, a big problem for everyone interested in myth is that
all true myths are overlain with thousands of years of historicization. Birrell also draws a clear
line between myths and what she calls "the literary tradition," which "express[es) religious,
ritual, and imaginative verities" (161).
TheJournal of Asian Stadies 59, no. 4 (November 2000):815-862. O 2000 by the Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 836
SUSAN MANN
Doniger, its slant is peculiar to historian^.^ And i t plays (not without irony) on the
widespread myths that surround "Asian" women in the media and in popular
consciousness in the United States (Manderson and Jolly 1777). I can hardly touch
on most of the myths of Asian womanhood this afternoon. Rather, I focus on Chinese
myths, with passing (though I hope not frivolous) allusions to myths in other parts
of what is called Asia. Among those Chinese myths, I single out two-not
necessarily
the ones most familiar even t o this erudite audience (although yes, Mulan is one of
them). Conspicuous by its absence will be one of the great Euro-North American
myths about Chinese women, the m y t h of submission, oppression, and the bound
foot, a subject that will make a very belated appearance in the coda, where-as
Professor Doniger would note-it
will become clear that "often when we think we
are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative of the
other" (Doniger 1998, 11).
I n Japan and Korea, as in South Asia and Southeast Asia, women as well as men
figure in the myths of history and civilization, and they are narrated in forms every
bit as diverse as those we find in China. But myths of Asian womanhood outside of
China lean heavily toward goddesses, female deities, powerful ghosts, and their
occasional this-worldly manifestations and appearances as character types, often
represented in puppet plays, folktales and rituals, and temple art or home decoration.
O n e thinks, for example, of the Javanese puppet known as kethopruk, which is
especially popular among women;3 or Balinese exorcism rites celebrating the demonic
Durga, or rice rituals devoted t o the divine Dewi Sri.4 In South Asia, female myths
are based on figures from the Riimiiyana and the Mahiibhiirata (Majumdar 1753). And
in Indian folk art, images of the goddess Lakshmi adorn the walls of houses painted
2 0 n eof the unsung perks of serving as the president of the Association for Asian Studies
is the opportunity to spend time with a past-president and get acquainted with the person
and the mind, and it was reading the work of my predecessor, Wendy Doniger, that inspired
me to think about old problems in new ways. Like Doniger, I am interested in myths as "all
the various forms of narrations of an experience," forms that function in two zones: they can
be highly individualized and specific to a particular person, and yet at the same time they can
be universalized to an abstract or ideal type, such that the same story could happen to anyone
(Doniger 1998, 1-3, quotation on p. 7). As readers will see, however, in this address I speak
as a historian, not as a student of myth and religion. My perspective differs from Doniger's in
ways that become clear as the address proceeds.
3Barbara Hatley (1990, 192) discusses the Javanese puppet theater known as kethoprak,
which was especially popular among women. The plots of these puppet plays, whether historical or legendary, often feature a female type (branyaklkenis)who is strong-minded, loquacious, outgoing, and assertive: "Her behavior is explicitly contrasted with the submissiveness
and decorum traditionally expected of a Javanese woman."
4James Boon (1990, 212) remarks: "Balinese images of women and men do not simply
complement a stratified rank of male over female. Stereotypes of demonesses from folktales
and ritual coexist with those of female deities; whereas Balinese exorcisms celebrate demonic
Durga, rice rituals are devoted to divine Dewi Sri. Many ills, particularly in the realm of
marriage, are attributed to male Rakshasas and other goblins. Most germane for present purposes, Tantric-Siwaic values of puritylpollution reversals abound. . . . And these complexities
connect Bali's Indic components to Indo-European variations on gender-inflected symbols and
systems. . . .[I)n the institutions and rituals that concern us here, the category 'female' will be
shown to remain symbolically double, even where wives do not necessarily link opposable
social units. Wives in their various resonances and valences represent an encompassing mediator
not just in exogamous kinship systems but in what we might call endogamous 'twinship
systems' too. Here the accent falls not only on wives or wives-become-mothers, but also on
sister-wives-become-ancestresses, and superior ancestresses at that."
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: M Y T H S OF ASIAN W O M A N H O O D
837
by women in the co~ntryside.~
None of these resemble the historicized myths of
women that fill China's written records. The exceptions in Asia are Korea and
Vietnam, where Chinese influence after the twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced
discourses on women similar to those found in China, though on a far smaller scale.
A Vietnamese text composed in classical Chinese in 1327 to celebrate the
successful resistance to Mongol invasion (attributed in Vietnam, as in Japan, to the
protection of divine powers), includes three records of the lives of female sovereigns
whose stories follow closely Chinese models of exemplary womanhood, especially the
ideal of the woman warrior. The Departed Spirits of the Viet Realm presents biographies
of the Trung sisters, Trac and Nhi. Trac leads an army of the people to avenge a
wrong against her husband by the local prefect, a corrupt official ruling as an agent
of Han imperial power. With the support of her younger sister, she musters a force
so fierce that they seize the entire circuit, inspiring riots elsewhere that lead to the
ouster of Han rule. The sisters eventually install themselves as "Queens of Viet" and
take a surname of their own (Trung). Meanwhile the Chinese emperor, enraged, sends
an army led by Ma Yuan to defeat the sisters. Many bloody battles later, the Truong
troops are routed and the two sisters killed in the fighting. A temple built to honor
their memory is revived as a sacred site when prayers for rain there are successful, and
the spirits of the two women appear in a dream to the ruling Vietnamese emperor
during the twelfth century. Other temples dedicated to the sisters were built
elsewhere, and the emperor later bestowed on them the obviously Chinese-style title
"Chaste Divine Ladies," the first of many such honor^.^ By the nineteenth century,
the tale of Trung Trac had been feminized and romanticized to focus on her marriage
to her husband, Thi Sach, and the trope of a woman fighting for her country while
mourning the battlefield death of her husband has had enduring appeal in Vietnam
in recent years (Taylor 1783, 335), though these later romanticized versions should
not distract our attention from the message of the early tales. A second, shorter tale
in the same Vietnamese collection concerns a woman of Champa named My E, who
was married to the king of that country. She was captured by the Vietnamese ruler
after her husband was killed in battle, but she committed suicide on the way to the
capital at Hanoi by leaping into the river and drowning. Local villagers, awed by the
continued sounds of a woman's cries from the spot where she drowned, built a temple
to honor her and to placate the spirit. When the emperor himself passed by the site
later and heard the story, he had a vision in which a woman appeared to him saying:
"I have heard that a woman follows only one man, and faithfully so. . . . {Now) I have
reached the golden springs and met my husband. My hopes have been fulfilled. . . ."
The emperor, awed, bestowed upon her the title Woman According with Orthodoxy.
5 F ~images
r
of the goddess Lakshmi in Indian women's folk art, particularly house and
wall paintings in the countryside, see the exquisite illustrations in Huyler 1994.
'According to Keith Taylor, later Vietnamese historians (e.g, in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) bemoaned the fact that women, not men, were the only ones strong enough
to stand up to Chinese invaders. On the other hand, the Song poet Huang Tingjian (10541105), "celebrating the exploits of heroes on the southern frontier, compared Trung Trac with
Lu Jia, who resisted Han W u Di's armies in the name of Nan Yue in 111 BCE. . . " (Taylor
1983, 335). A commentary on the Trung sisters written by a Vietnamese scholar in 17 15
contrasts their patriotism and their defense and strengthening of the court of the Lac lords
with the "conspiratorial" women of China, naming Empress Lu of Han and Empress W u of
Tang. And the commentary concludes: "Now, in these days, there are the Chaste Widow of
Trao-nha and the Pure Wife of Ty-ba who are unanimously acclaimed for their uprightness
and for whom the whole nation laments! It was the same kind of resolute appeal that pushed
out the borders of the Trung queens' territory. . . ." (translated in Taylor 1983, 337).
838
SUSAN M A N N
Other titles followed, in 1285, 1288, and 1313 (Ostrowski and Zottoli 1999, 2223, quotation on p. 23; see also Taylor 1983, 334-39).
Both of these Vietnamese myths, and the bestowing of titles on the virtuous
women celebrated in them (not to mention the construction of a local temple to honor
a virtuous woman's suicide) closely follow templates familiar in classical Chinese texts
of the same period. The upsurge of interest in stories of virtuous Vietnamese women
in the period coinciding with the Mongol invasions suggests other interesting parallels
with the Chinese case. For example, the myth of the Trung sisters, echoed elsewhere
in Southeast Asia,7 recalls an archaic m y t h of heroic sisterhood in China, as we shall
see.
Turning to the other Asian society where myths of womanhood figure
prominently, namely Korea after the twelfth century, we find a courtly tradition of
compiling the biographies of exemplary women that closely followed Chinese
historiographical precedents. Martina Deuchler has found stories of female martyrs
like the Chinese lienii, or exemplary women, in Korean local gazetteer^,^ even though
indigenous traditions of recording women's lives are l a ~ k i n g But
. ~ apart from these
Vietnamese and Korean examples-most
of which bear the unmistakable stamp of
Chinese influence-it
is in China alone, among all the societies in Asia, that we find
a singularly voluminous record of legendary female figures whose narrated lives fill
tome after tome, dynasty after dynasty, from earliest recorded history right u p t o the
present. These stories mostly take the form of the infamous "biographies of exemplary
women" or lienii zhzlun-especially
female martyrs and models of fidelity and moral
determination. By Ming and Q i n g times, collecting stories of legendary women's lives
had become a publishing craze, with illustrated books depicting the "100 beautiful
persons" (bui mei~en)'~-an eclectic assortment of female legends ranging from the
7Anthony Reid (1988, 167) offers a Thai account of "two sisters who led the successful
defence of Phuket in 1785: Queen Suriyothai, who was killed defending Ayutthaya in 1564;
and Lady Mo, who rescued Khorat in 1826 after leading an escape by several hundred captive
women." He goes on to say that "If such militant heroines played a larger role in Southeast
Asia than elsewhere, it is probably because status was more prominent than gender, and women
were not excluded from taking the lead if the occasion required it."
'Martina Deuchler, personal communication, 24 February 2000. In a forthcoming article,
Deuchler characterizes these stories and notes that the influence of Chinese Neo-Confucian
thought on other aspects of literary women's lives is apparent after the sixteenth century. For
instance, according to Deuchler, although few women's writings from the Chos6n period
survive, a notable literary collection by the female classical scholar Yunjidang (1721-1793)
expresses views commonly held by her peers in China at the time, namely that "although what
men and women do differs, the human properties bestowed by Heaven are at first not different
at all. Thus, when I studied the classics and had questions about their meaning, my elder
brother instructed me in a caring manner until I came to a complete understanding." Translation from Deuchler, forthcoming.
'At the time of writing, what little work had been done on these sources was published
in Korean (Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush, personal communication, 17 February 2000).
l o o n the genre "meiren," see W u Hung 1997, 323-30. W u dates the earliest of these
texts to the late Ming. In Qing times, he describes a trend of "compiling sets of twelve
identifiable, historical women" (331). One in particular, captioned with a series of poems by
W u Weiye (1607-1671), "mixes famous beauties (such as Xishi), literary women (such as Cai
Wenji), and martial women (such as Hongxian). . . " (331). W u Hung points out that the
Manchu emperors' fascination with and taste for Chinese female beauty made them enthusiastic
patrons of this genre; the Qianlong Emperor, in one painting, had himself portrayed relaxing
while looking down on five young women dressed in Chinese clothing, and complimenting
himself that he had reversed the story of Wang Zhaojun-instead of a Han Chinese lady
moving north to join the foreign ruler, he (the foreign ruler) had now arrived in China to
sublime to the distinctly frivolous-serving
as a kind of tea-table classic that was
mimicked in books by connoisseurs of courtesans who listed and ranked their virtues
in handbooks resembling mail order catalogues. Legendary women, their stories
elaborately visualized in illustrations, paintings, and performances, were "a thing" in
Chinese culture, as nowhere else."
Yves Bonnefoy made this discovery while treating the Chinese case in his
sweeping survey of Asian mythologies. H e finally dealt with the sheer volume of
myths about women in China by creating a special section titled "Ancient Chinese
Goddesses and Grandmothers," in which he remarked with evident confusion that
"{alncient Chinese mythology includes several female figures who play a more
important role in its beliefs than one would have expected from such a patriarchal
society." Seeking to explain this anomaly, Bonnefoy attributed the unusual
prominence of female characters in China's earliest myths to an evolutionary stage of
Chinese civilization's development when (in his words) "women had a much more
important position" (Bonnefoy 1991, 241). Bonnefoy's gesture toward Engels' (and
Morgan's) notion of a stage of primal matriarchy is a myth all its own that has been
widely circulated in China among Marxist historians,12 though few scholars these days
find it persuasive. David Keightley has shown that by the time Chinese civilization
enters the written historical record, one finds nary a trace of matriarchal power, at
least if we are to depend for evidence on elite burial practices and recorded religious
beliefs. Keightley writes dismissively: "From at least the Late Neolithic until the Late
Shang, the political and economic status of most women in China . . . was inferior to
that of most men" (Keightley 1999, 53).
Of course, the fact that women occupied low political and economic status in
early China may not tell us the whole story about their power in society. Anne Birrell,
studying the archaic myths of China that preceded the reconstructed, historicized
myths comprising most of the stories in Bonnefoy's collection, has noted that even
though male deities predominate in classical Chinese myths about gods and goddesses,
it is the female ones who are "often more mythologically significant in terms of their
function and role." How so? Well, Birrell notes, it is women whose stories figure in
accounts of "creation, the motion of celestial bodies, nature spiritrs), local tutelary
spirit{s), motherrs1 of a god, consort[s} of a demigod or a god, harbingerls) of disaster,
donorrs} of immortality, bringerrs1 of punishment, and dynastic foundation" (Birrell
1993, 163)-not a bad list, on anyone's measure of significance. P. Steven Sangren's
recent research, drawing on work by Glen Dudbridge and other students of myth,
has stressed that mythic tales "may provide insights into Chinese culture repressed
become its master (357). Wu concludes that the portraits of Chinese women favored by the
Manchu emperors "symbolized. . . a defeated nation that was given an image of an extended
feminine space with all its charm, exoticism, and vulnerability" (363), leading to an exaggerated reinvention of the genre stressing multiplicity and passivity.
"On visual representations of women in Chinese portraiture, drama, and published illustrated texts, see Vinograd 1992, 15-18; Clunas 1997, 33, 90-91; Hegel 1998, 168, 172ff.
See also Wu Hung's discussion of "dangerous screens," from which women emerged to haunt
or seduce their male victims, in his analysis of the Screen of Ladies zlnder Trees, a late-eighthcentury tomb mural (Wu Hung 1996, 95, 104). Wu also describes (121-22) a screen painting
associated with the legends surrounding the life of Yang Guifei.
12Min(1995) includes several articles that present evidence for archaic matriarchies and
goddess worship in China, arguing that elements of these survive in the practices of minority
peoples throughout China, though they disappeared in the dominant culture beginning about
3000 BCE, following invasions by patriarchal warriors and, later, the rise of Han Chinese
culture and government.
by normative convention in the more self-conscious self-representations of Chinese
culture familiar to us in Chinese philosophy and elite l i t e r a t ~ r e . " ' ~
A few of the women who figure in these archaic myths of Chinese civilization
even make it recognizably into the historicized versions-perhaps we should call them
legends-that are the focus of this address. The two daughters of the sage-emperor
Yao who married the sage-emperor-to-be Shun belong to the narratives of archaic
myth that predate textual records, offering faint echoes of the sister myths found in
southeast Asia.14 Their story leads off the first chapter of Liu Xiang's classic collection
of historical female biographies, the Lienii zhuan. The Xiang Queens, as they were
known (because they were buried by the Xiang River, where they drowned themselves
following the death of their husband), counseled their husband Shun as he struggled
to serve his evil father as a filial son, knowing full well that his father had conspired
with his younger brother to kill Shun. At his father's command, and in testimony to
his filial piety, Shun undergoes three trials, in each of which he is saved by the advice
of his wives. In the first trial, his father commands him to repair the walls of a granary,
only to set it afire while Shun is at work on it. Shun, advised ahead of time by his
wives to wear bamboo rain coverings, leaps from the roof of the granary with his
ersatz parachute and escapes. Next, his father orders him to dig deeper a well that
has run dry. This time his wives caution him to prepare a tunnel as an escape route,
sparing his life once again when the evil father begins filling the well to bury Shun
alive. In a final plot foiled, the Xiang Queens give Shun medicine to drink so that
when his father plies him with liquor, he will not die of alcohol poisoning. Shun's
virtue as a filial son, his survival in these moments of great peril, and even his accession
to the throne, all depend upon the sage advice of his wives. During the Ming dynasty
another legend was added to the story of the two sisters, who were linked to a species
of bamboo that grows near Lake Dongting where they died. According to the story,
the sisters caused the bamboo to become speckled "like tear stains," as they wept
upon it while mourning the passing of Shun (Birrell 1993, 167-69). An eighteenthcentury commentary on this text, written by the female scholar Wang Zhaoyuan,
embellishes the original Liu Xiang version with this telling comment on the advice
of the sisters: "The two daughters [of Yao] taught Shun the skill of a bird to go up
into the granary and the art of a dragon to go into the well" (see O'Hara 1945, 1317, quotation in n.9, p. 15).
Such myths of archaic sisterhood have been deeply suppressed in China, as Edward
Schafer noted: "A few traces of the old goddesses can be detected in T'ang unofficial
13See Sangren 1993, 4, citing Dudbridge 1978 and his study of the Guanyin myth (a
filial daughter's conflicts with her father arising out of her refusal to marry). See also Sangren
1997.
14The propitious stories of the Trung sisters and the Xiang Queens contain overlapping
elements that caused their tales to be confused by later mythmakers. According to Taylor
(1983, 335), there is evidence that the Trung sisters became cultic figures in parts of China
in later centuries. A fifteenth-century Vietnamese source mentions a shrine to them at Canton,
and a Vietnamese envoy to China in 1793 reported seeing a similar shrine in Hunan on the
south shore of Lake Dongting, though Taylor thinks this might have been a confusion with a
shrine to the twin goddesses of the Xiang, the legendary consorts of Shun, whose cult was
established in the same place. Taylor cites Schafer (1980, 38-42, 57-69, 93-103, 1 3 7 4 5 ) .
Birrell (1993), who discusses this myth at some length, notes that the sisters were historicized
as Yao's daughters very late (sixth century CE), but that they are mentioned first in the Shang
shu, which is a late Zhou text, and they may have originated in the South, since they are
associated with the Xiang River (the site of their joint suicide), a tributary of the Yangzi (160161).
P R E S I D E N T I A L A D D R E S S : M Y T H S OF A S I A N W O M A N H O O D
841
Figure 1. The Xiang queens bring food to Shun, in this civilized
rendering of the mythic sisters as model wives. Note bamboo raincoat in
rear. From Luo Wenchao @*B, Lidai nzingyuun tushuo @!f&@H3,
(Illustrated stories of noted women through the ages). Shenbao guan,
Shenchang shuhuashi, Dianshizhai facsimile reprint,
[I7791 1879, vol. 1:la.
cult and popular lore, . . . [but} they are so insignificant as to be hardly worth
mentioning" (Schafer 1980, 59). Even so, other archaic myths of womanhood remain
close to the surface of historicized legends in the Chinese written record. The theme
of undying or eternal love (Birrell 1993, 210-ll), the drama of female sacrifice
through suicide (222-23 et pussim), and especially the storied "Country of Women"
(248-49), where women do everything men can do, and without their help-all are
archaic forms thar survive beneath the textual and visual surface of later Chinese
historical legends about women. Archaic myth and historicized legend are starkly
juxtaposed in the Han dynasty W u Liang Shrines, where the primal goddess Nii Gua
and her consort Fu Xi appear snakelike and intertwined right alongside such civilized
models of Confucian womanhood as the mother of Zengzi weaving while her filial
son kneels at her feer.15
Two legacies of archaic myth thar appear as traces in later historicized myths of
Chinese womanhood form the focus of this address. The first is a trace from the myth
of the country of women, which recurs in tales of women warriors, cross-dressed like
Hua Mulan; women scholars, cross-dressed or straight, like the female historian Ban
''On Nii Gua, see Birrell 1991, 33-35, 69-71, 163-64 et passim; also Cai 1995.
Zhao; and even the Iron Girls of the Cultural Revolution. This mythic legacy,
enduring and reinvented continually through Chinese history, proves over and over
again that women can do anything men can do. The second trace taps archaic tales of
water maidens and dragon ladies retrieved by Schafer from the mythic past: Yang
Guifei is heir to the myth of the snake or dragon who saps the vitality of her lover
through the seductive power of her beauty. To explore these two legacies we shall
consider two myths of Chinese womanhood-the myth of the woman warrior and the
myth of the seductive young girl and her powerful patron. (The myth of the female
scholar, or cainii, makes a brief cameo appearance in the conclusion.) All of these
myths of womanhood are products of a civilizing process in which archaic myth was
overwritten by history, literature, and the arts of popular culture. All belong to the
domain where myth grows and thrives: in the ubiquitous reading and viewing
audiences of the marketplaces, temple fairs, and domiciles of China's late empire. All
of these myths were deployed with the express purpose of displaying some version of
the Confucian moral agenda that dominates the written record. But this does not
make them any less interesting as myths, especially if our goal is to show why that
Chinese moral agenda found it (and still finds it) necessary to foreground women. As
we shall see, these legendary women, through their enduring and continually
elaborated myths, become logically constituted elements of what we have been pleased
to call China's patriarchal society: integral, if paradoxical and confusing (as befits a
good myth), parts of the story of how that proper patriarchy should work. That is,
narrating the values of patriarchy in Chinese culture depended on and celebrated
powerful women.
Myths in China's Historical Narratives
To find the reasons why female figures play so grandly in the myths on China's
historical stage, we must look not to ancient matriarchies or ancient dragon and water
myths, but to beliefs and structures embedded in the very "patriarchal" systems that
most of us, like Bonnefoy, consider structures of women's oppression. Our goal is to
understand the elements in the civilizing process in China that made it necessary to
foreground women and their stories. Here Bonnefoy himself is helpful, because he has
identified two of the key figures or character types who define the earliest Confucian
myths of womanhood: empress dowagers and widows. Both roles empower women in
earliest Chinese narratives, helping us to see how-as Margery Wolf so brilliantly
showed many years ago (1972)-motherhood and widowhood force women to the
foreground of the power politics of China's patriarchal system. In particular, empresses
exercise unusual control over their sons, placing them at the center of palace intrigues
and imperial matchmaking, thanks to the power of mothers in the Chinese family
system.16 And widows are the trustees of their male progeny, making tales of assertive
female fidelity among the most popular tomb decorations for Han aristocrats.
Some of the earliest evidence for the ways in which myths of womanhood were
woven into the narrative fabric of China's history comes from tomb paintings of the
Han. W u Hung has shown how tomb art can be understood as a narrative commentary
on the life and values of the deceased, selected and composed by the deceased himself
prior to his own death, as part of his planning for the proper representation of his
''See Yang 1960-61.Yang stresses the long-term importance of empress dowagers in
Chinese history-the result of the power of mothers in the Chinese family system.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: MYTHS O F ASIAN W O M A N H O O D
843
own life as well as his family's welfare (Wu 1995). On the wall of the tomb, the
narrator positions himself in a symbolic moral pose at the end of the pictorial sequence,
just as the historian offers a moral comment of his own at the conclusion of a historical
treatise. Referring specifically to the use of women's images as part of the repertoire
of narrative images in the Han dynasty W u Liang Shrine, W u notes that the female
figures all derive from stories in Liu Xiang's Lienii zhzlan and that, significantly, "None
. . . are chosen from Liu Xiang's categories of 'reasoning and understanding,' 'virtuous
and wise,' and 'benevolent and wise.' All are from the two domestic types: 'chaste and
obedient' and 'chaste and righteous' " (213). W u interprets this to mean that W u
Liang wanted to send a powerful message to his own widow about her charge after
his death: "These pictures seemed to have been aimed at a particular audiencenamely, W u Liang's widow and orphaned sons-advising
them to maintain
harmonious relationships in the household and to be loyal and filial toward their
deceased husband and father" (232). (In fact, as W u Hung shows, the painters of the
tomb figures even changed the sex of key figures in some of the stories of famous filial
sons to cast them as the filial sons of widows.) A stellar example of the power in a
widow's image is the carving of Liang the Excellent from the W u Liang Shrine (21 1).
Liang is shown cutting off her nose to signal her determination never to remarry, even
when wooed by the emissary of a wealthy and powerful king. Admonishing a surviving
spouse, this painting shows us the ideal widow in her dead husband's eyes.
Such practical, embedded, earthly myths of widowhood, lodged securely in the
time-and-space-bound structures of state and family, make it clear how far from early
myth the Han era takes us, despite the presence in the W u Liang Shrine of Nii Gua
and Fu Xi (Birrell 1993, 70). And they show us the immediate slippage between
myths of womanhood and the family system in which those myths became embedded
in the earliest centuries of Chinese history. But they do not explain why stories about
women must figure in historical narratives. To understand women's visibility in both
picture and text in Chinese history, we must take account of multiple interacting
factors in the Chinese civilizing process that papered over archaic myths. These factors
are far too complex to treat fully in a short essay of this kind. But they may be briefly
noted as the unique constituent cultural forms that make China the only Asian
civilization to foreground stories of women in this manner. These factors are: first,
yin and yang cosmologies; second, voice and narrative style in literature; third, the
integral relationship between pictorial and written narratives; and, perhaps most
important, the social formations that express and "reembroider" cosmological,
linguistic, and performative imperatives. The social formations to which I refer are:
China's massive bureaucratic state with its enormous power to collect and disseminate
information; an obsessively detailed written record of the past; highly ritualized family
and community systems; and an immense audience that was open and constantly
expanding with the market. Limitations of space prevent a detailed investigation of
the ways in which the social formations of the bureaucratic state and the commercial
economy produced an urban print culture and a public audience for myths about
women in history, lavishly illustrated and richly embellished with fictional detail,
and ultimately performed on stage with song, instrumental and percussive
accompaniment, and dance.'' But we will eventually imagine ourselves as part of that
"A preliminary effort to tackle these complex subjects would lead immediately to the
work of Mark Elvin (1784) and of scholars who study the interface between historical and
fictional narratives, and the relationship between ritual and drama, publishing and performance. Research that has especially influenced my thinking includes Hegel (1998),Yu (1797),
audience, to see what we can see. Our brief excursion will take us from Han tomb
rubbings through sagas of some of China's most famous legendary women, as found
in sources ranging from illustrated editions of the Lienii zbaan that first appeared in
the thirteenth century to the so-called "hundred-beauties" albums of the late Qing
period. W e will have to skip over the female figures who filled the children's books
used by little boys (and girls too, sometimes) to memorize their first characters and
classical sayings,18 so that we can enjoy the New Year paintings that festooned the
homes of ordinary commoners throughout the late empire.19 Late-nineteenth-century
New Year paintings show as nothing else can how Chinese myths of womanhood were
produced and reproduced in the context of an audience whose steady expansion
through centuries preserved and valorized their stories, embellished their meanings,
and used their examples-consciously or no-to give direction to their own lives.20
In the childhood of Chinese culture, long before the advent of footbinding, we
find celebrated two extraordinary female myth figures: Hua Mulan and Yang Guifei.
I single out these two only partly because of their fame.21More important is the fact
that they allow me to ask the kinds of questions about historical consciousness that
my subjkct begs to answer. In effect, their stories fill two bills: first, they are grounded
in history yet they lend themselves easily to fiction and other commodified art forms
pleasing to the audience that interests us; and second, they have been celebrated in
Widmer (1992), Grant (1989), and studies by David Johnson, especially Johnson (1989). Also
Carlitz (1991, 1997), and W u Hung (cited previously). On narrative in the New Year paintings
(nianhuu) discussed below, see Knapp (1999, 133-57).
18Han (1993) presents scores of examples of stories about women that figured in classical
instruction books used by students preparing for the examinations or learning the basics of
literary Chinese. For instance, in the Xiao me, compiled in the late twelfth century by Zhu
Xi, we find the stories of the mother of King Wen (165), and the wife of the Duke of Weiling,
who could recognize the arrival of a worthy man by the sound of the wheels of his carriage
(168). The student is reminded that Mencius' mother's love for her son was such that she
moved three times, and from youth to age it was unwavering: "so too should my heart be
steadfast, and I too will become like Mencius!" (175). The same text also includes a story of
a widow immolating herself to resist a forced remarriage (195). In the San zi jing, compiled
in the middle of the thirteenth century, the opening paragraph refers to Mencius' mother (269)
and presents other stories of famous women such as Cai Wenji and Xie Daoyun (271). In the
Yuan instructional text Lidai mengqiu the student-led through the dynasties one by onelearns that under the reign of the three Tang emperors Taizong, Xuanzong, and Xianzong,
the women's quarters were "shameful" and infiltrated with barbarian influence (a thinly disguised allusion to Yang Guifei and the politics surrounding her) (281). An instructional text
preserved in the Yongle dadian includes stories about Xie Daoyun's willow floss poem and about
the tears of Shun's widows and the speckled bamboo, and about Yang Guifei's late arrival to
an imperial summons because she was drunk asleep (369). The same text quotes poets Du Mu
and Du Fu on Yang Guifei's passion for lichees (371).
'"Hundred-beauties motifs were especially favored by printers who marketed New Year
paintings, such as the famed Yangliuqing woodblock printers of Tianjin. The genres titled
"Four Beauties" or "Ten Beauties," depicting famous women from history such as Xie Daoyun,
Cai Wenji, Hua Mulan, and others (sometimes Daoist immortals or goddesses, for instance,
such as Ma Gu or Chang E), were considered particularly auspicious emblems of prosperity
(the phrase was jiating meiman,'houseful of beauty'). See Bo 1986, 105-6.
20Sangren(1993, 8ff.) presents an eloquent discussion of this point, drawing on current
literary theory that stresses readers and audiences as consumers and producers of texts who
construct meaning for their own purposes. See also Sangren 1997.
21 Before Hua Mulan became a transnational icon of pop culture through her canonization
as heroine of a Disney movie, she was well known to U.S. readers because of Maxine Hong
Kingston's brilliant novel Woman Warrior (1975, 1976). Yang Guifei is much more obscure
in the United States, except among Chinese-Americans, many of whom still hear her story
from parents or grandparents.
multimedia representations from earliest times to the present. To their stories I shall
add details of a third mythic figure, the female historian Ban Zhao. (Sadly, like most
female historians, Ban Zhao did not lead a life that invites fictional fantasy or inspires
art forms pleasing to an audience. She can, however, make a useful appearance when
we investigate the myths that inspired Chinese women in the twentieth century.)
Before we turn to Hua Mulan, Yang Guifei, or Ban Zhao, however, we must pause
to review some of the reasons why their lives are found in the storehouse that encodes
China's culture.
Let us begin with our first premise, derived from the combined insights of
Messieurs Bonnefoy and Keightley: namely, that powerful female myth figures are an
integral part of Chinese patriarchy. W e know that the earliest understanding of power
in Chinese culture was dualistic: that a yang figure required its yin counterpart. Lisa
Raphals' recent study of women in Han and pre-Han texts shows how women's lives
figured in the great dualistic tropes that informed early Chinese politics: stories of
order and chaos in the kingdom, distinctions between outer and inner, and
admonitions about the separation of the sexes on which the division of labor and hence
the social order were based. Although, as Raphals points out, the construction of
gender relations in early China differs sharply from what we see in the late imperial
period, it is these formative early centuries that produced the remade myths on which
my own discussion today is based (Raphals 1998). The earliest construction of female
roles in Chinese narrative, as Raphals shows, is evenhanded, portraying women in a
correlative, complementary, or balanced position vis-h-vis men. Thus, a wise or
resourceful woman may be the cause of a weak ruler's success, while a scheming and
seductive woman is the source of a vulnerable ruler's downfall. The interesting point
here is that the consort role is rarely omitted from early historical narratives, even
though they focus on kings, and consorts' behavior is invoked at crucial junctures to
explain outcomes. The woman is necessary, in other words, to the story line, and she's
usually in the role of catalyst-the person who makes the plot unfold.
Later Han sources of narrative distinction between male and female, especially
those that place males in a hierarchy above females, are constructed around yinlyang
or neilwai dichotomies by philosophers, especially Dong Zhongshu, bent on
systematizing orderly hierarchies. In their initial construction, however, all of these
terms were terms of distinction or difference, not separation and hierarchy (Raphals 1998,
212-13). And although Dong Zhongshu succeeded in codifying a philosophical
system that relegated women, together with yin and nei, to an inferior place in a
hierarchical structure, his ideas did not have much of a hearing for centuries afterward,
as Daoism and then Buddhism claimed ideological hegemony in China, and womenespecially smart women-stormed
to the forefront of the historical record. In early
mythmaking about Chinese women, then, we can locate principles of complementarity
in language and in narrative that require a female consort to enable (or disable) a male
ruler. And in the moral philosophy of the great Han synthesis, we see parallel efforts
to stabilize and fix hierarchical order by relegating women to a subordinate role.
By the beginning of the Song period, a time that most of us tend to mark as the
high tide in a sea change in the social relation of the sexes in China, female figures
were deeply enmeshed in the literary, historical, and
canon of Chinese culture.
They were necessary to the narration of the dynastic cycle (its rise and fall being a
function of the interactions of yin and yang). They were integral to the moral discourse
of Confucianism (particularly as mothers and consorts). And, as other scholars have
emphasized, they supplied the poetic voice through which male poets and political
figures could express their disaffection, criticism, and alienation (Huang 1995, 81-
97). It is no accident, I think, that the myths I've chosen today come from this early,
pre-Song period of Chinese history and narration. Historians of late imperial times
themselves noted a shift, between the Tang and the Song, in the portrayal and imaging
of women in written and visual culture. Writing late in the eighteenth century, Zhang
Xuecheng suggested that two long-term historical processes worked to undermine
women's status from the time of Ban Zhao (the female historian of the Han) to the
time of Li Qingzhao (the most noted female poet, and one of the few historically
documented female writers, of the Song). The first was the aestheticizing and
sexualizing of women's writing, possibly a complex outcome of the self-conscious
development of a female voice by male writers, as well as the changing poetic tastes
of the Han elite, and the turn away from Confucian morality toward esoteric concerns
in Buddhism and Daoism. The second was commercialization: the commodification
of women's talent as entertainment, a process that Zhang understood continued
rapidly after the end of the Tang (Mann 1999).
Turning now to our two mythic figures, Hua Mulan and Yang Guifei, let us see
how their stories were stashed, and repeatedly unpacked, in China's cultural
storehouse. W e shall begin with the story of Mulan, because chronologically it comes
first. The earliest record of Mulan appears in a ballad from the sixth century. The
scene is set during the rule of the Toba Wei house at the turn of the fifth century. It
begins with Mulan sitting by the door of her home, weaving and weeping, for her
father has just been summoned to serve in the quota of military conscripts ordered
up by the emperor. Her brother is too young to take his place. She is the oldest child.
She goes to the market. She buys a "gallant horse," a cloth and saddle, snaffle and
reins, and a whip, and the next day she steals away and camps by the side of the
Yellow River. She joins other soldiers and they battle over a thousand leagues, crossing
frontiers and hills for twelve years. O n returning, they are all presented to the
Emperor, who is handing out prizes of cash. Asked what she desires, Mulan says: "I
beg only for a camel that can march a thousand leagues a day, to take me back to my
home." Returning to her amazed and grateful parents and siblings, Mulan sits on her
bed, casts aside her soldier's cloak, dons her old dress, binds her hair, fastens her
combs, and goes out to the road to confront her former soldier friends in her true
sexual persona. They are astonished that she has fooled them so completely. The ballad
ends there with two lines about a male and a female hare running as fast as they can
go. At such a moment, the poet suggests, neither can see clearly whether the other is
male or female-just
as soldiers fighting a war will be oblivious to such fine
distinctions while they are bent on saving their livesz2
In Mulan's original ballad, there is no mention of filial piety, no allusion to a
subsequent marriage, and no embroidering at all of her personal story. Hers is a hero's
tale for a heroine who is brave and clever. The ballad does subsume other mythic
elements: horses, camels, and "barbarian" military culture, the critique of harsh
conscription by the state, and above all, the story of a cross-dressed heroine who "steps
into a men's world to achieve great things." Notable in its appeal is the absence of a
"See the superior translation in Frankel (1976, 68-70), which shows that Mulan had an
elder sister as well as a younger brother. Frankel's commentary on the ballad (70-72) notes
that the meaning of the final two lines can be explained as a huwen (see p. 165), or "reciprocal
phrase" (a two-part statement with mutual relevance). In this case the final lines say: "The hehare's feet go hop and skip1 The she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled." This means that
what is said about the one also applies to the other, that is, "when both are running fast,
neither of them can see clearly whether the other is a male or a female, and the same goes for
soldiers busily fighting a war" (p. 72).
P R E S I D E N T I A L ADDRESS: M Y T H S O F ASIAN W O M A N H O O D
847
love interest or any hint of romanticization of the heroine, an almost essential element
in later tellings of the story, including of course, our own Disney's.
The most important embellishments to Mulan's story appear first in the play
Mulun Goes t o War in Place of Her Father (CiMalun tifa congjzln) by the Ming playwright
Xu Wei (1521-1593). Xu adds several narrative elements to the original ballad: a
description of Mulan's successful capture of rebel forces, her marriage to a young local
scholar upon her return home, and a dramatic departure scene where she takes leave
of her parents. But according to Jeannette Faurot, his main contribution to the plot
was to change the story's tone. Besides duty, Xu Wei's Mulan is motivated by her
excitement at the prospect of going off to war to use skills her father had taught her,
and in her first aria she sings of her desire to find a place for herself among the heroes
and heroines of history, citing two lien& one of whom (the famous Tiying) wrote a
letter to the emperor offering herself as a concubine in exchange for the release of her
father, wrongly imprisoned:
The Maiden Xiu risked her life
Tiying submitted to judgment.
These were both companions in 'skirts and hairpins'
Who stood firm on the earth and supported heaven.
Should only men be heroes?23
(This dramatic invocation of filial daughters and lienii was picked up in later versions
of the tale, appearing in an illustrated collection of stories of virtuous women printed
in 1779.) Xu Wei added other contemporary touches to his Ming play, including a
comic scene where Mulan, trying on her army boots, unbinds her feet and sings how
awful it is to have spent years achieving a "phoenix-head" point, only to replace it
with a "floating barge" (Faurot 1972, 87).
But let us momentarily leave Mulan and her feet and turn to another legend.
Our next story is decidedly not the tale of a virtuous woman focused on a family
or on the marginal world of military life and commoner soldiery. Instead, it is a myth
explaining historical change that places a woman at the center of nearly every trope
in Chinese political theory: the scheming eunuch, the manipulative imperial in-laws,
the infatuated ruler distracted from his duty, the effeminate culture that invites
barbarian invasion, the innocenceitreachery of a seductive young woman, the follies
of luxury, the pathos of love lost, and the eternity of true love that triumphs over
death. Yang Guifei's story captured an audience the way Princess Diana's life and
death captured the global tabloid press, but for much, much longer. Poems, paintings,
plays, and a land-office business in pictures in the form of niunhuu (New Year paintings
for decorating the home at Spring Festival time-the
equivalent of the modern
decorative wall calendar) made the details of her story familiar to the least literate
householder. The volume of visual and textual production representing the Yang
Guifei story is hinted at in the poems and paintings of scenes from her life that are
catalogued in imperially commissioned lists and modern d i c t i ~ n a r i e s . ~ ~
Once again, we may begin with the bare historical narrative before moving on to
23Translationby Jeannette Faurot (1972, 85-86). Faurot notes (146, nn. 35-36) that both
of the young women heroines named here took desperate measures to protect the interest of
their natal families (Xiu shi of Qin committed murder to avenge a wrong against her family).
24See,for example, Hu 1990, 136-38, 676-77, 681 et passim; Cai (1994, 1263, 127881); and the list of titles in index 39 of Kangxi yuding lidai tihua shi (1976).
Figure 2. The filial daughter Hua Mulan parting from her parents.
From Luo Wenchao %*at7, Lidai mingyuan tushuo E{t%@H%
(Illustrated stories of noted women through the ages). Shenbao guan,
Shenchang shuhuashi, Dianshizhai facsimile reprint,
117791 1879, vol. 2:5a.
its later fanciful embellishments. Yang Guifei was to become the consort of Emperor
Ming Huang (Xuanzong, r. 713-755), who ruled China at the peak of its influence
throughout East Asia. Xuanzong's childhood alone is enough to explain how he fell
into his famous historical predicament. He was the grandson of the only woman in
Chinese history to assume the role of emperor: the infamous W u Zetian. Xuanzong
spent his youth with his father, in strict seclusion, while his grandmother
systematically murdered princes she considered threats to her claim on the throne.
Xuanzong's uncle, who ascended the throne after W u Zetian died, was poisoned by
his own consort. Then the consort was killed in a coup led by the Princess Taiping,
daughter of Empress W u and aunt to Xuanzong. Xuanzong himself, once having
achieved the throne, was locked in a struggle with the Princess Taiping that ended
in her own suicide. Xuanzong had reason to be careful about his choice in women.
Yang Guifei herself was originally betrothed to Xuanzong's own son, the Prince
of Shou. But five years after her marriage she left her husband, took up residence in
the imperial palace as a Daoist nun under the name of Taizhen, and entered the
emperor's quarters as concubine as soon as her former husband had registered a new
bride. The year was 745. She was 27 and the emperor 61. Their union lasted until
her death in 756. Yang Guifei's appointment as imperial consort brought her relatives
into powerful positions at the court, including her three elder sisters who all got titles
and her male second cousins, in particular Yang Guozhong, who rose to become Chief
Minister in 752. Her immense influence in the palace, displayed in the name the
emperor bestowed upon her ("Precious Consort," or Guifei), made her a legend in her
own time, inspiring a new folk saying: "Don't be pleased with the birth of a son1
Don't deplore the birth of a daughterlLook at Yang Guifei, now, who brought her
family fortune" (Graham 1998, 11).
Yang Guifei's place at the court was soon complicated by the machinations of her
unscrupulous and power-hungry cousin and a conniving eunuch named Gao Lishi.
But her downfall came as a result of her implication, by rumor and slander, in an
affair with the general An Lushan, a frequent guest at the court. An Lushan's treason
develops against the backdrop of the Emperor's withdrawal into his love life with
Guifei, including their legendary retreat to escape the summer heat at the hot springs
in Huaqing near Xi'an, where on the seventh day of the seventh month, so legend
has it, they vowed eternal love under the crescent moon. Meanwhile, back at the
palace, amid dancing and revelries, news arrives of An Lushan's rebellion. The court
packs up to retreat into exile in Sichuan, but en route the escorting troops mutiny,
kill Guifei's cousin the corrupt courtier Yang Guozhong, and demand her life as well.
Guifei hangs herself with a silken cord at a place called Mawei, while the emperor
weeps.
This story, dramatic enough without much extra color, soon acquired a supporting
cast of characters including the poet Li Bo (composing poems at the court extolling
Guifei's beauty); and a rival for the emperor's attention, the lovely Meifei, permitting
Guifei and Meifei many scenes in which one or the other flies into a jealous rage or a
drunken daze, as they compete for the emperor's attention. The story of the emperor's
interest in his own son's wife also tickled the fancy of Chinese storytellers, who added
plenty of suggestive detail. Finally, in an elaborate finale that was fully realized by
the playwright Hong Sheng at the end of the seventeenth century, the story continued
after Guifei's death, as a Daoist priest reunited her spirit with the soul of the aged
emperor, proving that love transcends death after all.25
Clearly Yang Guifei's is a myth of womanhood that conflates the collapse of the
empire with the sexual fall of the ruler, comparing the seductive powers of a woman
to the treacherous powers of a general, and rendering the narration of the dynastic
cycle in sexualized and even romantic language. Many historians, in fact, locate the
major turning point in Chinese history at precisely this moment in time, the outbreak
of the rebellion of An Lushan, placing Yang Guifei at history's linchpin. But of course
the stripped-down "official" version of the Guifei legend, minus the fictional
narrativizing, is less interesting-especially without the apparently made-up character
of her rival Meifei. And what happens to her as she is reinvented in Japan shows the
utter malleability of her story line. As Masako Nakagawa Graham has shown, Yang
Guifei figured for a time as an emblem of eternal love (she has a cameo role in
Murasaki's Tale ofGenji), but she ultimately emerged in a reinvented form as an avatar
'>Hang Sheng's play, The Palace ofEternal Youth (Changsheng dian), was completed in 1688.
In that play, as Graham notes (1998, quotation on p. 184), Yang Guifei ascends to heaven
where she becomes the symbol of eternal love, the Emperor crossing the rainbow bridge to the
moon on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival to join her there, where she awaits him in the
company of the lunar goddess Chang'e:
"Emperor Ming Huang and Lady Yang Yuhuan . . . were formerly angels in
heaven; but owing to certain faults they were sent to live for a while on earth. Now
the time for their banishment is over, and since they love each other dearly we agree
to the Weaving Maid's request; let them remain as lovers in Tridiva, the highest
heaven." Graham's translation follows that of Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, trans.,
The Palace 4Eternal Youth, 2nded. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980), p. 269.
850
SUSAN M A N N
Figure 3. Yang Guifei drunk, perhaps waiting for the Emperor while
he dallies with her rival. Reproduced in Zhongguo Yangliuqing muban
nianhua @HMm7&fCKqi& (Collected Chinese new year woodblock
prints from the Yangliuqing Studio), Tianjin: Xinhua shudian,
1992, p. 59.
of the Goddess Atsuta, who arrives in China from her home shrine near Nagoya to
ruin Emperor Xuanzong's plans for an invasion of Japan. In other words, the woman
who causes the fall of China's ruling dynasty is actually an agent of the Japanese karni.
Myths as a Source of Historical Consciousness
So now we have recounted two great myths of Chinese womanhood: the story of
Hua Mulan and the tale of Yang Guifei. Let us turn then to the next section of this
address: myths of womanhood as sources of historical consciousness in modern China,
and their appropriation by a universalizing discourse of women's rights in the
twentieth century. Yang Guifei was part of the past that Song intellectuals rejected,
as they reinvented Confucian values in a new age. As Julia Ching has noted, "The
T'ang dynasty is known for the relative freedom of women as well as for the reign of
a woman ruler, the Empress Wu (r. 684-704)" (Ching 1994,259). Ching argues that
the obsession with loyalty and the importance of female submission that dominates
Song thought stems directly from this reaction against images of women from the
Tang. The rejection of a certain kind of mythic woman within China itself points to
significant changes in the roles and status of elite women in the Song and post-Song
period. The post-Song era, after all, is the regime of the bound foot, the long-suffering
P R E S I D E N T I A L A D D R E S S : M Y T H S OF A S I A N W O M A N H O O D
851
chaste widow, and the suicidal martyr. And it is the post-Song era that has been the
focus of most research on Chinese women's history in the United States.
Now it is probably true that during this late imperial post-Song era, young girls
got an overdose of the overly moralized Confucianized woman preferred by NeoConfucian philosophers and celebrated in the famous didactic texts published at an
increasing rate from the thirteenth century onward. Yet they also saw plenty of the
antiheroine Yang Guifei, whose tale filled color woodblock prints, early learning
guides, opera stage, and poetry books. In other words, all kinds of stories about women
contributed to the historical consciousness of women's place in the cultural, political,
and social order that emerges so powerfully in the writings of late Ming and Qing
intellectuals. To these stories we owe the sharp critical awareness of signs of decline
in women's status in late imperial times that first emerges in the writings of elite
men starting in the late eighteenth century. And we know from the writings ofwomen
themselves, published during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
in cities throughout coastal China, that reading about women's lives in past time
conveyed a sense of historical relevance and cultural empowerment, while providing
a language of protest or criticism that legitimized their own discontent. The majority
of women who neither read nor wrote could still find their own touchstones of identity
by absorbing the stories of legendary women from Hua Mulan to Yang Guifei.
Watching plays, hanging New Year paintings, and hearing stories and poems read
aloud, they favored the nuances that appealed to them most, and added those they
felt were missing.
Space prevents showing many of these here, but even a few examples of New Year
paintings and book illustrations show how vividly the lives of Mulan and Yang Guifei
were portrayed in visual culture. (Foreshadowing her much later appearance on the
American lunchbox, Mulan adorned late-19th-century kites.) Of particular interest
are New Year paintings invoking the "hundred beauties." Titled "Four Beauties" or
"Ten Beauties" or even "Eighteen Beauties," these depict eclectic and anachronistic
groups of famous women from history such as Xie Daoyun, Cai Wenji, Hua Mulan,
and others (sometimes Daoist immortals or goddesses, for instance, such as Ma G u or
Chang E ). Such clusters of beauties were considered particularly auspicious emblems
of prosperity, ideal for festooning the walls of a home (the phrase was jiating meivzan
or "houseful of beauty.")
Turning finally to the twentieth century, the age of the "new woman," we find
China's cultural storehouse richly stocked with myths that foregrounded "the woman
question" for late Qing reformers and May Fourth intellectuals alike. Wang Zheng,
analyzing views of women in China's May Fourth era, observes: "it is not accidental
that the [May Fourth} era created the term xinniixing (new woman) instead of
xinndnxing (new man). Though May Fourth feminism changed educated young men's
views toward women, it is the new woman that emerged as a new social category in
modern China" (Wang 1999, 23). W e would merely add here that it is not accidental
precisely because the historical role of women in China made women necessary to the
narratives of political, social, and economic change: catalysts who made change
happen.26
This heritage of famous women, and the urgency of "the woman question" in
early twentieth-century China, made it only natural that Chinese women would first
* T o r a survey of the women's biographies revived for inspiration from the end of the
Guangxu period through the revolution of 1911, including many lives of female military
leaders, see Li and Zhang 1975, 1:167-72.
852
SUSAN M A N N
Figure 4. Mulan kite. One of the "standing figure" types popular with
kite-flyers celebrating after Spring Festival. Reproduced in Wang
Shucun EWW,comp., Zhongguo minjian nianhuashi tulu $gEa&i&m@
(An illustrated history of popular Chinese new year prints), Shanghai:
Renmin yishu chubanshe, 1991, vol. 2: 55 1.
search their own historical record, then turn to seek Western counterparts to their
own lienii: female role models in Western culture who could become their new
"measure of civilization." 27 In fact, writing histories of "great women" became a
minor transnational industry of its own in this period, particularly in Britain and the
United States. Margaret Burton's collected biographies of the great women of modern
China is just one example (Burton 1912). In England, British women writers were
compiling lives of their "notable" contemporary counterparts in India (Chapman
1891). Their heirs were pioneers in studies of Chinese women, including Miss A. C.
Safford, translator of Lii Kun's revised edition of the Lienii zhuan (1899); Florence
Ayscough, author of Chinese Women, Yesterdzy and To-Day (1937); and Genevieve
Wimsatt, collector of women's biographies and legends about Chinese women
(Wimsatt 1928,1934). A book surveying the "great women" of India printed in 1953
27Excerptsin Li and Zhang (1975, 1:183 et passim.) show how Chinese writers of the late
nineteenth century compared their own progress to that of India under colonial rule, using
women's status as a measure.
unabashedly notes, by contrast, the difficulty of retrieving the lives of historical female
figures in that cultural context. The editors ultimately settle not on historical figures,
but on those known from literary sources, with these words:
It is unnecessary to discuss the historical character of the latter. Some of them may
be real historical personages, while many are undoubtedly legendary, or mere
creations of poetical fancy. But whatever may be their real character, they have been,
for more than a thousand years, . . . so much the flesh of our flesh and the blood of
our blood that it is impossible to ignore them as mere fictions. They have inspired
the thoughts and ideals of our women and shaped their lives for untold centuries,
and may be said to have been more real, more living, and more vital than any actual
women could be. What living women have proved to be such formative forces as, for
example, Sati, Sita, and Savitri? What could be better illustrative examples of the
true dignity of Indian womanhood than Draupadi, Shakuntala and Gandhari?
(Majumdar 1953, x)
In their scanty coverage of historical personages, which supplies only bare sketches of
women's lives-queens, consorts, and daughters of noted rulers; female saints, mystics,
poetesses, musicians, and teachers-the contributors display once again the dramatic
historiographic difference between South Asia and China, when it comes to preserving
the stories of women's lives.28
Meanwhile, as China's early-twentieth-century female readers ransacked the
Western historical record for the great women they knew must be there-women
whose stories would prove vital, they knew, to unlocking the secrets of Western wealth
and power-whom did they find? Some of their discoveries are unsurprising: Joan of
Arc, of c6urse, and Florence Nightingale, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon, George
Eliot-women
recognizable as lienii: strong women of deep moral conviction who
moved into a man's world to achieve great things.29One of their choices, though, is
a quintessential example of what Chen Pingyuan has called (1989, 63-76) the process
of "creative mistaking" (chuangzaoxing de wujie) by which one culture appropriates
ideas and symbols from another to make them its
I refer to the redoubtable
Madame Roland, watchword of female radicals everywhere in China during the May
Fourth era, when she was widely known as the "Mother of the French Revolution."
Though Madame Roland is not exactly a watchword in European histories of the French
Revolution, she was instantly recognized by Chinese fans of Rousseau (through whose
writings she must have been introduced to them) as a cainii, a talented young woman,
and a national heroine whose loyalty unto death marked her as a lienii as well. Madame
Roland was, after all, reading Plutarch's Lives at the age of nine, just as bright young
Chinese girls read Liu Xiang's Lienii zhuan. And her last words, cried out as she faced
the guillotine at the age of 39, were committed to memory in Chinese by countless
young admirers: "0 Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"31
28Forexample, Sen (1953, 370) remarks of Chandraprabhii that she was "one of the most
romantic feminine figures in Indian history. . . , though she is altogether unknown to the
general public." By contrast, figures from the Riimiiyana, the Mahabhiirata, and classics such
as the play Shakuntala are, in the words of one editor, "more real, more living, and more vital
than any actual women could be" (Majumdar 1953, x).
29Xia(1995, 104-20) discusses some of these new role models. See also Li 1981, 22223.
30Foranother contemporary analysis of this process of constructing a Western Other, which
"has allowed the Orient to participate actively and with indigenous creativity in the process
of self-appropriation," see Chen Xiaomei 1995, quotation on pp. 4-5.
?'See May 1970, esp. 15-16, 31-37, quotation on p. 288. Also Xia 1995, 107; and Li
1981.
Most fluid of all in the process of creative mistaking that sent female heroines
back and forth across cultural boundaries was the figure of Joan of
Clearly Joan
was important because of her powerful affinities with Hua Mulan, who became a
central figure in the revolutionary visions of young Chinese women during the early
twentieth century.33The undying popularity of Hua Mulan is apparent even before
the 1911 Revolution, in the seemingly nostalgic and definitely counter-revolutionary
"hundred-beauties" books published in the late Qing period, where she appears
countless times. The compiler of an illustrated biographical sketch of Mulan in one
such book, printed in 1908, tells us:
When I read the poem of Mulan when I was little, I wondered how a girl with bound
feet could go off to war like that. Then later I learned that in ancient times women
did not bind their feet, so they were strong and brave. And men didn't shave their
heads, so it was easy for a woman to pass as a man. Nowadays when so many women
do not bind their feet, do they emulate the bravery of their fathers and rulers, and
go off to fight in battle? Actually, instead many of them charge about causing
disturbances, pursuing their own personal agendas-more offensive by far than footbound women! It is my desire here to wipe away their shame in behalf of all women
who do not bind their feet!34
Here Mulan becomes an emblem of the new female citizen and a reproach to her
contemporary counterparts who have neglected their duty to their country and failed
to take advantage of the new opportunities opened to them by their enhanced physical
strength.
Wang Zheng puts it best when she says that stories like Mulan's helped women
imagine themselves "stepping into a men's world to achieve great things" (1999,
333). W e find women eulogizing other legendary figures who stepped into a man's
world to achieve great things, like the female historian Ban Zhao, whose portrait
replaced Confucius' on the walls of a newly opened girls' school, and whose critical
biography published in 1940 in The Women's Journal (Funii zazhi) reminded modern
readers of the courage and the vulnerability of highly educated Chinese women
32Consider,for example, the following excerpt from a poem by the young woman revolutionary Qiu Jin: "Women and men are born alike1 Why should men over us hold sway?. . . 1
We'll follow Joan of Arc-With our own hands our land we shall regain!" Quoted in Snow
(1967,94), from Fan Wen-Ian, "Chiu Chin-A Woman Revolutionary," Women ofChina (0ct.Dec. 1956). See also the characterization of the female leader of the May 30'" Movement in
Shanghai as a "Chinese Joan of Arc" (Gilmartin 1995, 134); and of Song Qingling as "China's
Joan of Arc" by Western observers in 1926, because of her emergence to prominence at the
revolutionary capital at Wuhan (Gilmartin 1995, 183).
33Abrother of Xiang Jingyu recalled that she was inspired to emulate the feats of Hua
Mulan during the crisis over a missionary incident in Hunan in 1902. See Gilmartin 1995,
74; McElderry 1986, 96; and Wang 1999, 3 4 7 4 8 . Citing Witke (1970, 4 5 4 9 ) , Gilmartin
notes the widespread "Mulan complex" among young Chinese women of Xiang Jingyu's generation ( 2 4 5 4 6 , n.7). Wang (1999) presents numerous examples of the Mulan complex in
her interviews with Chinese women who were entering professional life during the 1930s and
1940s. See esp. pp. 21-22, 41-42, 127-128 (where Mulan is coupled with Liang Hongyu,
wife of the Southern Song general Han Shizhong, who joined her husband on the battlefield
in 1130 to resist Jin invaders), 179-180, 225 (one of Wang's informants remembers the "old
idea" that girls should be like Xie Daoyun and Mulan), 291 (another informant recalled singing
the ballad of Hua Mulan in her progressive elementary school in Hunan during the May Fourth
era), 297 (this same informant changed her name to Mulan when she joined the Communist
Youth League, because her father was old and she had no older brothers).
i"'Xiyuan waishi" (1908), juan 1 ("Filial to their parents"), entry number 4.
throughout history, who were forced to strategize as they maneuvered in political
circles dominated by men.35
It is striking to compare the fate of these womanly myths, which inspired young
female revolutionaries and reformers, to what befell Yang Guifei's story during the
1920s. Advertisers in China's emerging consumer culture put her picture on calendars,
where she could be seen emerging from the bath at Huaqing in a newly transparent
negligee, transformed compliments of the British American Tobacco Company's
artists.3b
In the post-1949 Maoist era, myths of Chinese womanhood have met a similarly
mixed fate. The Western-style "new woman" was first disparaged as a bourgeois
affectation, while classical models of elite womanhood like Ban Zhao were dismissed
as feudal remnants, and enduring emblems of female strength and courage like Hua
Mulan fell prey to the vicissitudes of Maoist political campaigns. A staple of
revolutionary opera, the play "Red Detachment of Women" (Hongse niangzi jun) was
made into a film in the early 1960s, featuring Mulan in a leading song, with the lines:
"Gu you Hua Mulan, ti fu qu cong jun I Jin you niangzi jun, kang qiang wei renmin"
[Long ago Hua Mulan went to join the army for her father I Today the Red
Detachment of Women shoulders rifles to fight for the people).37 At the height of
Cultural Revolutionary fervor, on the other hand, these lines were rewritten to purge
all traces of the "feudal" Mulan myth: "Dasui tie suolian, fanshen nao geming! I
Women niangzi jun, kangqiang wei renmin" [Smash your shackles, rise in revolution!
We're the Women's Company, taking up arms for the people) (Ebon 1975, 135) .
But the post-Mao reforms have brought with them a remarkable recovery and
revalorization of old myths about Chinese women, as the phrase mingyuan (meaning
35"Lizhouguike" (1940) begins her account of Ban Zhao's life by examining Ban's family
background and the men to whom Ban owed her education and her status in the palace: her
father, her husband, and her elder brother. Then (97) the author invites us to re-read Ban
Zhao's own preface to her Instructionsfor Women (Nii jie), which reads in part as follows:
This person, lacking in knowledge and slow of wit by nature, was the fortunate
recipient of my father's favor, and relying as well on my mother's instruction, at the
age of 14 was betrothed to a man of the Cao family. That was more than forty years
ago. Since then I have struggled and fought, always fearing that I would fall short,
to make up the difference between myself and my parents, in order to ease the burdens
that beset relations between those inside the court and those outside it. And so I
labored day and night, exhausting my energy without speaking of my hardships.
Then and forever after, I have known that I am lacking and that my nature is simple
and my instruction without purity. I live in continual fear for my son, Gu, who has
received favor at the court and won special recognition from the emperor himself
. . . , an achievement I myself could never dream of. A man, of course, can look out
for himself, and I need not continue to worry about him, but I do tremble for all my
daughters, especially when the time comes for them to marry, and I will no longer
be able to guide them, and they will not hear me reiterate the wifely rituals. Fearing
that I have failed them, and seeking guidance from my ancestors, I now suffer in
deep agony, aware that my own fate is uncertain, and mindful that the same is true
for all of you. So for every worry I have written a book to assuage my concerns, titling
it Nii jie qi pian (Instructions for women in seven chapters).
How timelv these anxious admonitions must have seemed to Ban Zhao's admirers in the
1940s! For a recent study of Ban Zhao's influence in twentieth-century Chinese women's
movements, see Xia 2000.
36"Yang Guifei Emerging from the Bath," as seen on a BAT calendar poster, 1920s. Slide
courtesy of Sherman Cochran, from British-American Tobacco Company, Ltd., The Recoru7of
the British-American Tobacco Conzpany, Limited (Shanghai, 1925). See Cochran 2000, 74-75.
i7Personal communication, Weijing Lu, citing a libretto in her own possession.
856
SUSAN M A N N
Figure 5 . Mulan at the turn of the twentieth century. From Xiyuan
waishi ,e,Hgf-@[pseud.], Xizlxiang gujin xiannii zhuan Q@k+Wkf@
(Lavishly illustrated biographies of resourceful women, past and present),
preface dated 1908, vol. 1, n.p.
"famous beauties") revives to become an emblem of moral and physical virtue. Old
stories about famous women are being hauled out and dusted off to take their place
in the history of Chinese women's long struggle to overcome feudal oppression. To
be sure, certain less well known female models from the past have been carefully
repositioned to foreground their importance (examples here include the inventor of
cotton weaving, Huang Daopo, and the many female leaders of peasant rebellions who
had been allowed to sink into o b ~ c u r i t y ) New
. ~ ~ model women have entered the
historical record as officials, professionals, Party leaders, and workers building the
revolutionary new society (Meng 1990). And old volumes in the "hundred beauties"
genre are being reproduced in brocade-bound facsimile edition^.^' In 1993 a book
titled Famous Beauties of China through the Ages (Zhongguo lidui mingyuun) trumpeted
the virtues of the thousands of famous women whose deeds have been preserved in
stories and songs and arts of popular culture-deeds displaying "love of the country
T n the early 1980s, some of these collections were published in English to capture
audiences outside of China. See, for example, Women ofChina (1983, 1984). The latter includes
biographies of Huang Daopo, Tang Sai'er (a female peasant rebel leader of the fifteenth century),
and Hong Xuanjiao, a female commander in the Taiping revolutionary armies.
3 9 0 n a recent trip to Beijing, I purchased just such a reprint of a famous "hundred
beauties" volume of the Qianlong period, with preface by Yuan Mei (Yan 1998).
and love for the people," "nationalist consciousness," "intelligence and
purity,""loyalty and fidelity" (Lin 1993, 2-17). This effusive language points to the
ironic resonance of old myths of Chinese womanhood in the post-Mao era, with its
resounding rejection of the Maoist ideal that "men and women are the same."
The popularity of old myths in the current commercial marketplace is reflected
as well in the explosion of publications on women in time past that have filled Chinese
bookstores since the early 1980s. As Du Fangqin has pointed out, in the decade from
1981 to 1991 alone, the "second great wave" of publishing on women's history (the
"first" was the May Fourth period) produced a treasure trove of works on women,
especially biography. Much of this literature, D u emphasizes, exudes a neoclassical
tone, reflecting the values and interpretive judgments of late imperial culture,
especially in its attention to court life and politics, in its valorization of women
warriors, and in its tendency to place women in a larger historical narrative scripted
by the actions and beliefs of men (Du 1996, 16). A "hundred beauties" collection
published in Canton in 1988, illustrated by a noted contemporary artist, includes the
Xiang Queens, Hua Mulan, the newly enshrined heroine of Chinese working women,
Huang Daopo-and, inevitably, Yang Guifei, who appears in a special centerfold (Cai
1988).*O
Perhaps it is no accident that romanticized revivals of myths of female youth and
beauty like the legend of Yang Guifei are making another appearance in post-Mao
China. In the earthbound world of political intrigue and sensual indulgence of the
1990s, Yang Guifei is any young girl passed into the traffic of wealthy patronage
where, shaken like a money tree, she becomes the source of her family's success and
the sign of her official patron's eternal youth. In today's China, where men of wealth
and power demand the sexual services of beautiful young women, families recognize
that one fast track to upward mobility in the "sea" of Chinese commerce is a pretty
daughter who can work as a prostitute. Sleeping your way to the top, as Yang Guifei
long ago demonstrated, is another venerable legacy of the myths of Chinese
womanhood.
Coda
Like Madame Roland, who quickly faded into obscurity in France but got a new
life in modern China as the mother of the French Revolution, the footbound Chinese
woman who dominates the Western historical imagination is a product of creative
mistaking that has no place in the family album or storehouse of China's own cultural
childhood. When women writers in Europe and North America reached for myths to
explain the history of Chinese women, the creative mistaking becomes especially clear,
for they tended to settle on a particular myth about Chinese women: the bound foot.
They settled, in sum, on a singular silence in Chinese myths of womanhood. They
selected the one aspect of Chinese womanhood that was never mythologized in history
or fiction outside the pages of erotic novels and "spring pictures" used as guides and
provocations for lovemaking.
When footbinding stopped in China, so suddenly that it left reformers and
foreigners alike gasping in amazement, the shallowness of its cultural roots was clearly
"These illustrations by Lu Yuguang, who at the time they were published was the Director
of the Guangzhou Art Gallery, with text translated by Kate Foster, have appeared at the
following website: www.span.com.au/100women/illust.html.
858
SUSAN MANN
exposed. That many Westerners still cling to the myth of the bound foot as if it
defined for all time the essence of what it meant to be female in "traditional" Chinese
culture tells us something important about the items in the cultural storehouse of
Europe and North America, especially the myths Westerners need to imagine an Asian
other. But footbinding can tell only a limited story about Chinese women, much less
about their own myths and how they read them.
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