The motif of the woman in the doorway and related imagery in traditional Chinese funerary art.

• Author: Goldin, Paul R.

A mysterious image in traditional Chinese tomb art, that of a woman standing in an open or half-open doorway, has been inadequately treated by modern scholarship. This paper discusses the manifest sexual significance of the image. It was considered licentious for a woman to go to the gate of her household; she was expected to remain within the compound at all times, secluded and unseen. After an examination of relevant texts and tomb artifacts, the article concludes with a speculative account of the meaning and intended purpose of this motif.

A RECURRENT AND MYSTERIOUS IMAGE in traditional Chinese tomb art is that of a woman standing in an open or half-open doorway, peering out and sometimes conveying the impression of welcoming the viewer inside. (1) The art historian who has discussed this motif most fully is Wu Hung; his conclusion is that the gateway occupies a "liminal position" and functions as an "intermediary stage between life and death." (2) Although this is a plausible interpretation, more needs to be said, because the "woman in the doorway" is also a well attested motif in the literature of the late Han and Six Dynasties periods--with radically different connotations, as we shall see presently.

But even without considering the literary evidence, it is clear from certain examples of the motif in funerary art that it must function as more than simply a limen between life and death. A second-century carving on a stone sarcophagus from Xinjin [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Sichuan province, is a case in point (fig. 1). To the left of the woman in the half-open doorway, one finds a kneeling couple holding hands and kissing. (Incidentally, this sarcophagus refutes the oft-heard contention that kissing had no place in traditional Chinese culture. (3)) Why should two people be depicted in an amorous embrace next to what is supposed to be a symbol of the transition between life and death? To the immediate right and left of the woman in the doorway, furthermore, we see two exotic birds; presumably these are meant to be a pair of luan [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] or "lovebirds," representing connubial bliss. (4) Therefore, unless one is prepared to argue that the woman in the doorway is totally dissociated from the other images on the sarcophagus, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, rather than indicating a boundary between life and death, the motif must have something to do with the union of male and female.

Such an interpretation is also more in line with the predominant literary uses of the same topos. An educated Chinese audience would have immediately recognized this image as one of indecency and licentiousness, since it was considered quite improper for a woman to go to the gate of her household; she was supposed to remain within the compound at all times, secluded and unseen. (5) Generally speaking, the reasoning is that a woman must not make herself seem amenable to sexual advances by allowing passers-by to look at her. The locus classicus of this injunction appears in the Zuozhuan [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: "When welcoming or seeing off [guests], women do not go out of the gate" [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (6) This rule (and variations on it) is particularly common in writings of the Han and Six Dynasties. Ge Hong (AD. 283-343), for example, repeats this line from the Zuozhuan in a moralistic harangue on the appropriate rituals governing relations between the sexes:

The Master who Embraces Simplicity says: The Odes glorify the ospreys and value their separation. (7) According to the rituals, unless they have been linked by a matchmaker, males and females do not see each other, do not sit together, do not converse with each other, do not share clothing or articles, and do not pass things directly to each other. When sisters who have been married return home, their brothers do not share their sitting-mat. The words of the "outer" [i.e., of the males' quarters] do not go into [the inner quarters, where the women live]; the words of the "inner" do not go [to the outer quarters]. When welcoming or seeing off [guests], women do not go out of the gate; when they are out walking, they must cover their faces. In the street, males go on the left, females on the right. These are the enlightened regulations of the Sages, which emphasize the separation [of the sexes] and stop the flow [of promiscuity]. (8)

Ge Hong summarizes these "enlightened regulations" in order to compare them to what he considers the debauched practice of his own day, when the separation of the sexes is no longer strictly observed.

Thus it is evident that the prohibition against stepping through the front gate was motivated by anxiety about female chastity. Ban Zhao [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (A.D. 48-116?), not surprisingly, includes a version of the rule in her somber Admonitions for Women [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]:

Your ears must not hear any turpitude; your eyes must not see any perversion. Abroad, you must not have a seductive appearance; within [the house], you must not neglect your dress. You must not mix with crowds or watch at the gates. This is what is meant by concentrating your mind and rectifying your sexual allure. (9)

Ban Zhao's premise seems to be that a woman possesses a natural sexual allure (SE [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), which she must keep shielded from men. (10) "Watching at the gates" is like putting on a "seductive appearance" outside the home: it invites misconduct.

Similar restrictions are regularly found in ritual manuals from later dynasties (11) and are reflected in contemporary poetry. For example, the famous poem "A Bitter Lot" [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] by Fu Xuan [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (217-278)--who was himself no libertine (12)--opens with the lines:

Bitter is my lot, that I am a girl!

My Lowliness is hard to convey.

Boys can stand at the gate. (13)

Fu Xuan's poem may suggest that the prohibition against standing in the doorway was perceived as harsh and even humiliating for women, but writers such as Ban Zhao and Ge Hong agreed that the alternative would be to encourage unbridled lust and social instability. What is important, for our purposes, is that the textual sources cited above are univocal in their understanding of the purpose of the regulation: it was imposed on women in order to prevent them from inflaming the sexual urges of strangers. Nowhere is it suggested that the issue has anything to do with the transition between life and death. So we must conclude that any educated viewer of the age who observed a depiction of a woman in a doorway, as on the Xinjin sarcophagus, would have naturally interpreted it as an unsettling erotic image. If such viewers ever understood the image as a representation of the liminal space between life and death, they could have done so only after considering its manifest sexual significance.

At first blanch, this interpretation of the commonplace image might appear farfetched, because it may seem indecorous for tomb chambers, sarcophagi, and other funerary objects to bear images that contemporary viewers would have perceived as erotic. The eminent classicist M. I. Finley, for example, opined in connection with Etruscan tomb art that "'indecent pictures' are not habitual in the tombs of any culture," (14) adding that whenever they appear in such a context, a historian must immediately ask why they are there in the first place. So if we are to contend that the image of the woman in the doorway had an erotic dimension, it would seem that we have some explaining to do.

Two observations are pertinent at this juncture. First, suggestive imagery was not at all uncommon in early Chinese tomb art; there are many, far more explicit, depictions in the archaeological record. Second, in literary sources, the image of the woman in the doorway was not used exclusively with censorious intent; that is to say, the image also appears in poems where the sexual connotations are presented in a neutral, if not approving, light.

Regarding the first observation, it should be noted that death rites in ancient China may sometimes have attained an orgiastic character. A famous...