How the Chinawoman Lost Her Voice
By David McCraw
This "just-so story" aims to help uncover an obverse side to an oft-told tale. Maybe i should invoke Foucault's ghost here (esp. the "archaeologist of knowledge" -- see the early essays in Foucault 1984; cf. relevant essays in Hoy 1986 and Diamond 1988}. Reviser of history who helps us see what it overlooked, detective of deviancy who helps disclose suppressed ways of thought, accomplice to insurrections of subjugated voices -- come to my aid! Monsieur, i confess having succumbed to the common notion that traditional Chinese poetry suppressed women's voices. Conventional Sinological wisdom confines women to "boudoir laments" and "palace-style poetry" i it reduces women to a persona that projects male fantasies, that gets consumed by hopeless longing for One Man (who always seems to peep, brush in hand, through her boudoir curtains).
M. Foucault, i offer up an alternative account. This genealogy tries to demonstrate that women in Chinese verse can play more interesting roles than simply stroking jealous male egos or providing erotic decor. To trace our genealogy back as far as possible, we must delve uncertainly past strata of Confucian allegoresis, peel away layers of patriarchal exegesis, and hope to uncover more than a reflection of the digger's face. Assuming we have perceived correctly, our dig reveals some remarkably "unconventional " females who dominate the very ancestress of (extant) Chinese verse, its Book of Songs or Canon of Poetry. The folksongs ("Airs") and a few lesser "Capital Odes" of this pre-600 B.C. anthology resound with female voices that inhabit a world apart from languishing boudoir belles. According to Arthur Waley's thematic arrangement, courtship and marriage account for two-thirds of the "Airs. " Of these, about half air the grievances of women in or out of love. And what do these women say? Well, let us listen carefully and hear as much as long-range transmission and translation allow....