Shu Li: Reclaiming The Inner Chambers: Song Lyrics Set in The Boudoir by Women Writers of Late Imperial China

Abstract

This dissertation centers on the song lyric, a genre known for its femininity in classical Chinese literature. This feminine aesthetic quality, characterized by the theme of love and the image of a lovelorn woman, derives from the song lyric’s inherent association with the boudoir poetics, which was created, practiced and developed by male literati to represent and appreciate feminine beauty. As women writers appeared in unprecedented number and constituted an important of the literary landscape from the seventeenth century, the song lyric became one of their most adopted genres. It is therefore of interest and significance to investigate how the women writers interacted with the male-constructed boudoir poetics in their song lyric writing.

To explore this question, this study draws on the concept of negotiation, which was first introduced into the field by Maureen Robertson in her analysis of women’s shi poetry. The act of negotiation is a contestatory process where the dominant convention established by male writers was accepted in general, but crucially also adjusted by women writers to assert their own subjectivity. Based on Robertson’s definition, this dissertation seeks to examine the concept’s applicability and adoption in the context of women’s song lyric writing. The study also borrows from Rosi Braidotti the notion of the nomadic feminist subject, which emphasizes both the difference among women and the multiplicity of the individual subject without a fixed inner core, to better elucidate the reason for, as well as the goal of women writers’ negotiation.

Through a comparative and gender-sensitive reading of 55 song lyrics by 19 poets from the late imperial China, it is demonstrated how women writers broke away from the literati boudoir convention through negotiation, how they reconstructed their inner chambers as a space of diversity based on their lived experience and situatedness, and how they represent the female subjects in their poems as an entity of multiplicity and subjectivity.