CHASTE AND FILIAL WOMEN IN CHINESE HISTORICAL WRITINGS OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY.
Author | DAVIS, RICHARD L. |
In the eleventh century, Chinese historians made significant advances in their craft. They also promoted certain moral views that differed from those of their predecessors. In particular, they seem to have adopted a distinctive perspective on women. This is most apparent when one compares the accounts of "Notable Women" included in the Xin Tang shu with those written for a similar chapter of the Jiu Tang shu a century previously. The present paper takes some of these accounts as a point of departure for an examination of this issue, its background, and related matters, giving special focus to the work of Ouyang Xiu.
MANY SCHOLARS, classical as well as contemporary, have noted the highly precocious character of eleventh-century historical writing in China--its critical methods often containing remarkably modem resonances. Among the most eloquent articulators of the new methodology, Ouyang Xiu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (1007-72) not only theorized about historical method, he assimilated these ideas into two separate dynastic histories, the New History of the Tang (Xin Tang shu) [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], edited entirely and authored partly by him under official auspices, and the Historical Records of the Five Dynasties (Xin Wudai shi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], or Wudai shiji [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), written individually as a private work and published posthumously. [1]
Repeatedly in both works he invokes the principle of "reason" (li [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), or reasonableness, in evaluating the credibility of historical accounts, and purges from his revised histories nearly all traces of superstition or myth, dismissing these as either "inconsistent with reason" (yu li bu an [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) [2] or "unknown to the eyes and ears of we Chinese." [3] Elsewhere, as single author, he evaluates historical credibility based on the rule of "common sense" or "normal reasoning" (chang li [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])--namely, what can be verified through ordinary observation or deduced through life experiences. [4] Thus, the "Basic Annals for the Liang," the first of the Five Dynasties, is rewritten to eliminate references to "red vapors" appearing over the home of dynastic founder Zhu Wen [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], at the time of his birth in 852. [5] A similar exclusionary rule is applied to the New History of the Tang, whose Basic Annals are widely attributed to the personal pen of Ouyang Xiu. [6] Here, he refuses to report the auspicious omens alleged to have coincided with the births of founding monarchs Gaozu (b. 566) and Taizong (b. 560), rejecting as well the oral traditions that prognosticators had once portended their destiny to rule. [7]
In sum, a high degree of consistency can be found in both works: whether writing on the Five Dynasties or the Tang, whether writing as a single author or editing the work of others, a scrupulously skeptical Ouyang Xiu, in his thoroughgoing hostility to legends that contravene human reason, saw his mission as one of methodical suppression or thoroughgoing exposure. Such realism affected Ouyang Xiu's historical vision in other ways: his treatment of religion, his rulings on dynastic legitimacy, his description of the Mandate of Heaven, etc. Some scholars see in this intensely skeptical spirit a "materialist" view of history; others call it "scientific"; I tend to prefer the term "empirical," in light of its fundamentally experiential thrust. [8] The details of the debate need not be reiterated here. Suffice it to say that this historian who presented himself as a realist and a skeptic, who saw himself as setting a new standard of critical review, and who took a dim view of historians colluding with monarchs to deceive posterity seemed to suspend all reason when depicting so-called "Notable Women" (lienti [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCI]) in the New History of the Tang, and to some extent, in his Historical Records. [9] Here I shall seek to place representations made in the eleventh century into a broader context of historical writing and use the representation of one gender by another to explore the causes and agendas behind such representations.
MORAL EXTREMISM IN THE NEW HISTORY OF THE TANG
None of the four biographies below appear in the original dynastic history, the Jiu Tang shu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCI] compiled in the mid-tenth century; they are the conscious contribution of revisionist historians of a century later. And the four are themselves qualitatively different: each account portrays women who either maim or kill themselves, in frightful and demeaning ways, behavior characterized by one writer as "extreme acts of moral probity" (jiduan daode xingwei [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCI]), in that the stories seem to contain inexplicable levels of self-abnegation for the female actor and sadistic relish for the male reader. [10] I shall not translate or describe all entries under "notable women" in the New History of the Tang, although a full listing based on moral category appears below, in the appendix. [11] Rather, I focus on the most eccentric additions to the biographies in the New History, exploring these stories as reflections of the way men of the S ong wanted to perceive certain women of the Tang--or at least, how they wanted their own women to perceive certain kinds of Tang women-and also as expressions of broader trends in which historical writings are contoured to prevailing moral agendas. Such writings are a part of "an elite discourse on chastity," in the words of Susan Mann, and are as much about male representations of women as about the women themselves. [12] Recent scholarship out of Taiwan on Tang women, focusing on the dynasty's legal code, suggests that the principles of chaste devotion were far less rigidly enforced, or even articulated, when compared with most other periods in Chinese history. [13] In effect, the conservative Song representations of ordinary Tang women, as reflected in the official history of the eleventh century, differs radically from the Tang reality.
Most of the stories newly uncovered by Ouyang Xiu and his cohort undoubtedly began as history, but had acquired layers of embellishment by Song times: they became symbols of an idealized world where reality and fantasy, history and literature coalesce. Scholars of "Confucian biography" have long noted the tendency in traditional China to stress moral categories by stripping historical persons of their individual traits, reducing their lives to simplistic abstractions of good or bad in ways almost ahistorical. [14] For "notable women" in the New History, however, we witness the removing of even those individualized traits that are found in male biography, and at the same time we see the linking of heroic virtue to bodily pain in a manner unique to women and to a degree unprecedented. In the eleventh century, there is thus a new dimension to, or elaboration upon, standard tropes of Confucian biography.
The first of the Tang "notable women" to be newly discovered by eleventh-century writers belongs to the literati class, the wife of a man who was destined for distinction as court historian, Fang Xuanling [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (579-648). The account in the New History refers to a life-threatening incident in his youth and the obstinate devotion of his wife in the face of potential loss. This account is relatively short, in only fifty-four Chinese characters, but it is poignantly convincing, all the same:
The Woman Lu, wife of Fang Xuanling, was of unknown ancestry. Xuanling was still an obscure man when he took ill and nearly died. Seeking to absolve her of further duty [to him], he said: "My illness has turned for the worst, but, being young, you should not live alone; better to devote yourself to the next man." The Woman Lu, weeping, then went to her room where she gouged out an eye, proving to Xuanling that there would surely he no second man. Later, Xuanling recovered and treated her with courtesy for the rest of his days. [15]
It is noteworthy that the Woman Lu [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] insisted on mutilating herself, not because her chastity was challenged by another man, but to show her loyalty to her husband in his illness-a response wholly disproportionate to the problem at hand. One rationalization sometimes employed by contemporary scholars to explain such a painful action is "romantic impulse"--that is, the act reflects "the supreme expression of emotion" (zhiqing [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) for a spouse, the story being intended to inspire the reader emotionally as much as to instruct morally. [16] The Woman Lu is "impassioned" in her motivation, to be sure, but it is difficult to see "romanticism" in her methods. In any case, the compilers of the New History must have known the story to be historically questionable, for it is absent from the official biography of Fang Xuanling in earlier chapters of both Tang histories, Old and New. [17] This would suggest, in turn, that Ouyang Xiu and his cohort adopted a lower standard of verification for their entries under the rubric of "notable women," relative to other chapters of their revisionist work--an issue to which we will return later in this essay. The closest parallel to this story in the Jiu Tang shu, compiled over a century earlier, relates to the Woman Wei [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], a recent widow with a talent for playing a stringed instrument, who cut off her own finger--thus destroying her single greatest asset--rather than allow a rebel admirer to claim her as wife. [18] Physical mutilation occurs in both cases, but Woman Wei faced the imminent prospect of being abducted and chose a somewhat...
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