39: Women In and Around Chinese Poetry

You may have noticed that one of the tags on the Four Seasons: Spring translation is "female-voiced poetry". Like Du Fu in The Beautiful Woman, Li Bai in his Midnight Four Season Songs is impersonating, or at least focusing on, the voice of, a young woman. This was (and continued to be) a common practice among male Chinese poets, going back at least to Qu Yuan's Li Sao, and possibly as far back as the Book of Songs, which includes many poems in a woman's voice that may (or may not) have been recorded or composed by men. Not that there weren't a number of well-known women writers of poetry; indeed, in the case of Midnight Four Season Songs, the female-centric poems of a male author are patterned after the much older work of a female poet. That Li Bai would and even could make this choice is of great significance; it means that by his day (8th century CE, the High Tang), the activity of men engaging in explicit literary impersonations of women had grown to involve the work of women themselves -- all to say nothing of the way such literary gender games naturally interacted with works of other genres (eg in the frontier or garden poem). Never a simple matter, the use of a female voice in a poem by a man became a sort of nexus of layered representation. On the one hand, Li Bai, the quintessential "poet of personality" known almost more for his image and lifestyle than his work (remember his many names), is inevitably closely linked to the appearance of his work as a powerful figure in his own right, a sort of inevitable, ghostly overlay above the text itself. On the other hand, unlike in some of his other more famous poems, here he writes not of himself but of a series of women, in the style of a specific woman. What are we to make of this?

There is an enormous amount to say about the topic of women in Chinese poetry, and I won't attempt to go any further in one post. For more, I recommend the book Women Writers of Traditional China, by Kang-yi Sun Chang and Haun Saussy.