Affiliation:
1. University of Georgia, USA
Abstract
Abstract
This article examines the emaciated self-images of four women’s self-inscription poems on their own portraits. They are Huang Hong (early seventeenth century), Xi Peilan (1760–after 1829), Tan Yinmei (fl. mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth century) and Zheng Lansun (1819-61). These women similarly describe their self-images as qiaocui (emaciated), alluding to the legendary girl poet Feng Xiaoqing. Inherently ambivalent, qiaocui could imply sexual and erotic appeal, the virtuous mind of a recluse, sickness, ordinariness, melancholy, as well as aging and death. The article argues for the importance of the rhetoric of qiaocui and the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing in the self-inscriptions by women in Hangzhou and the broader Jiangnan region as a medium to construct their female subjectivity. This article suggests that, initially a persona publicly circulated in the late Ming, the topoi of Feng Xiaoqing came to define the women’s personhood in private spaces in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Subject
History,Cultural Studies,Gender Studies