Egan, Ronald. The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China

W omen writers as an analytical category has since the late 1990s gained considerable traction in the studies of pre-modern Chinese literature, with translations, anthologies, and thematic explorations surfacing anew every few years in either monographs or edited volumes.Reference to feminist literary criticism as an analytical framework,however, is still a fairly recent development—that is, until Ronald Egan’s definitive work under review here on the most well-known female poet of the entire Chinese tradition, Li Qingzhao 李清照 (1084—ca.1155).Not only is this 11-chapter, 422-page treatment of a single woman a first in English scholarship, Egan’s theoretical stance also marks a departure from earlier works that place their subject matters in a more native context. That alone makes The Burden of Female Talent a must read for all students of Chinese literature. Moreover, throughout the whole book Egan never allows theoretical discussion to overshadow his focused analyses of Li Qingzhao and the circumstances and challenges she faced as a woman writer, thus retaining the distinctive appeal of the book to the more traditional readership of Sinology. This is not to discount, however,Egan’s conversance with feminist criticism; in fact, his “substantial debt” (p.8) to it is very recognizable, since the underlying approaches are fully subsumable under much of the preoccupations and assumptions of feminist literary theory—and, consequently, susceptible to critiques of the theory in general.

It is in this framework, undergrounded by Egan behind his revisionist close readings and thorough historical contextualizations, that his interpretative strategies guiding the progression of the entire book can be most coherently teased out. To begin with, feminist criticism looks for the oppressed woman in a patriarchal setting, who, in the case of Li Qingzhao, is seen to have resisted in one way or another. The resistance,when the woman is known by and from her writings, is assumed to be encoded in and expressed by the very writings, hence the proxy of literature for psychic response to social circumstances,which is then further situated in historical contextualism where text and context are mediated through the historical person. This procedure, capable of unfolding in various ways, usually, and characteristically, culminates in the encompassing capacity of gender (and gender tension) as the explanatory nucleus that holds everything together. The functioning of other determinants of literary works—models, codes, conventions, generic repertoires, etc.—is more often than not relegated to a secondary role that is then only explained rather than explains. The 11 chapters of Egan’s book run the full course of this logic, and reconsider—and indeed reshape—the entirety of Li Qingzhao scholarship up to the present day.

Considered in this way, chapters one and four and the first half of chapter two accomplish the first step of the procedure—contextualizing Li Qingzhao as a talented woman writer in her own time. Here, Egan describes the hostile environment women writers of the Song found themselves in: women were classically educated but discouraged from writing; when they did write their writings only circulated narrowly, if at all; and whatever that was fortunate to have been transmitted was sifted through male-dominated aesthetics where men prescribed women’s expressive and sentimental ranges. As a singularly outstanding woman poet, Li Qingzhao was constantly dismissed by her male counterparts both in the Northern and Southern Song, including Xie Ji 謝伋, a nephew of her first husband, Zhao Mingcheng 趙明誠 (1081—1129). Things took an even more unfavorable turn during her middle years, when, after the invasion of the Jurchens,Li Qingzhao lost Zhao Mingcheng to illness, fled south, remarried, and eventually divorced her second husband, a man named Zhang Ruzhou 張汝舟. All of these, as Egan suggests, followed Li Qingzhao for the rest of her life and beyond, and became points of contention in the reception history of her. This carefully curated history of Li Qingzhao and the social, political, cultural, and literary environment that surrounded her provides a background against which both Li Qingzhao herself and her afterlife as a reputed woman poet are understood, for it is also since these altered circumstances that Li Qingzhao entered her most productive years of literary creation.

Chapters seven through nine as well as chapter eleven continue the theme of male domination over female representation, now after the death of the historical Li Qingzhao, from the Southern Song to the modern times. This part, to the reviewer, is one of the most judicious and revealing discussions of the reception history of a major poet—almost a Herculean task considering the suffocating amount of existing scholarship ever produced. It details the ways in which changing tides of intellectual and cultural taste as well as social and political conditions combined to reshape the image of Li Qingzhao, both in terms of her biographical highlights and poetic writings. It soon becomes obvious that the historical Li Qingzhao disappeared into the imaginary Li Qingzhaos,who were always shaped, reshaped, or outright manipulated according to the wills of the patriarchal men—some despicable, others misogynist—that lived after her. This is partly achieved by and reflected in the song lyrics (ci詞) attributed to Li Qingzhao that Egan discusses in chapter eleven. There, he both refutes the attribution of and denies the likelihood that Li Qingzhao wrote poems featuring flirtatious women or coquettish girls, a scenario that Egan takes to be more of a male fantasy than historical reality. Instead, Egan continues, Li Qingzhao explored alternative themes and moods in her genuine poems, ones that do not belong to male prejudice against her as a capable, and more importantly, female poet.

Both of these two parts are closely intertwined with the rest of the book, where Egan sets out to rehabilitate Li Qingzhao and free her from centuries of misunderstanding and misrepresentation.He separates genuine song lyrics composed by the historical Li Qingzhao from later attributions(chapter three); exposes the circular nature of reading Li Qingzhao autobiographically (also chapter three); and demonstrates how a non-autobiographical reading of Li Qingzhao’s poems yields new insights into her poetic habits and ingeniousness that sustain her fame as one of the most celebrated poets (chapters two, five, and ten). In addition, Egan proffers original and revisionist readings of Li Qingzhao’s most famous prose writings, the “On Song Lyrics” 詞論 (chapter 2) and the “Afterword”后續(xù) to the Records on Metal and Stone金石錄 (chapter 6),characterizing the former as “a statement about the song lyrics springing fundamentally from her own sense of the challenges she faced as a woman writer” (p.76), and the latter as best read “in the context of what she was striving to do as a writer during that period: to reestablish herself, to reassert her voice as a writer, and to regain her stature and respect” (p.191).

The arguments about the historical Li Qingzhao are now fully present: as an extraordinary woman poet living in a time when men harbored dismissive attitudes toward and normative expectations for women writers, Li Qingzhao “must have been aware of the way that she would be perceived as a woman determined to produce literary work,” in fact, as Egan continues, “It would be strange if her awareness of this unwelcoming attitude did not affect the way she wrote” (p.64).And the way she wrote, according to Egan, was precisely to resist those hostile circumstances—to adopt “masculine” tones and subject matters in her shi詩 poems; to adapt the otherwise obscure anecdote about Li Balang 李八郎 into an almost allegorical tale about the underappreciation of a talented person of the “wrong” gender occupying a “wrong” station in life; to show her concern for Song’s military humiliation in a crafted but disguised, and again, allegorical voice, lest “what she has to say might be dismissed out of hand because she is a woman” (p.186); and to rehabilitate herself, in areas “ranging from the very concrete and legal to the more abstract and social” (p.207)through a seemingly elsewhere-occupied afterword written to accompany her husband’s legacy.

From these arguments also emerge the central contradictions of the book: if Li Qingzhao’s song lyrics are not to be read autobiographically, in the sense that the historical person should be somewhat distinguished from the poetic persona, why are all of her other writings read precisely autobiographically—as expressions of her “writerly aims” and “motives” (p.192), that is, psychic response to external circumstances? If Li Qingzhao’s shi poetry are in line with the expressive possibilities of the tradition, well-crafted to hide her gender identity but express her genuine emotions, why not allow her intimate song lyrics that “capture［d］ or epitomize［d］ her relationship with Zhao Mingcheng” (p.365)? It would seem that in foregrounding gender tension as the sole explanation, itself a conclusion already built into much of the assumptions of feminist criticism,Egan has, only in a more reflective manner than his male predecessors, constructed for himself a“Li Qingzhao,” a feminist “Li Qingzhao.”