Shaping and circulating a transforming courtesan image in her poetic collections and in anthologies
Author(s)
Date Issued
2016
Citation
Chen, J. (2016 Aug 23-28). Shaping and circulating a transforming courtesan image in her poetic collections and in anthologies. 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Yang Wan 楊宛 (ca. 1600 — ca.1647) was a well-known courtesan of late Ming Nanjing who left us with the possibly only extant individual collection by a Nanjing courtesan around her period. This poetry collection Zhongshan xian 鍾山獻 and its three sequels were compiled and published by her husband Mao Yuanyi 茅元儀 (1594–1640), a famous literatus from a gentry family to whom she married at sixteen sui. As a courtesan-turned-concubine/wife, Yang Wan shaped a fluid literary identity oscillating between a courtesan lover whose desire and longing was implied in depictions of passionate dreams and erotic moments, and a virtuous woman who properly performed her domestic duties as a wife, a mother, and a daughter. This fluid literary identity is represented in many ways such as her imagination of her natal home
which combined a decent family and her experience in Qinhuai pleasure quarter, her poetic interaction with her husband which extended beyond the conventional responding poems between couples, as well as her exchanging poems with both old courtesan friends, newly associated gentry ladies and male literati. In this way, Yang was able to establish a network transgressing the limits of the inner chamber and the pleasure quarters. I argue that, the poetry of Yang Wan, a transforming courtesan, not only discoursed with highly stylized topos and genres in a well-established male literary tradition, but also opened a window to look
into a larger historical transition of women writers’ identities from courtesans to gentry ladies. Moreover, many significant analogies of women writings in the Ming and Qing dynasties included Yang Wan’s poetic works. Anthologizing her poetry along with paratexts can be interpreted as a process of re-contextualizing and re-stabilizing this fluid image of a transforming courtesan into an organized textual space informed by the anthologizers’ intentions, which turn her into a layered image engaged with various discourses of
gender, literature and politics.
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