sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

As discussed above, Chen Yulian’s personal life seen as the embodiment of an ideal companionate
marriage is a projection resulting from several textualizing efforts. The allographic prefaces, in
particular the one by the woman poet Pan Suxin, emphasize Chen and Zuo’s conjugal relation as an
important source of Chen’s poetic production. The entry on her in the Mingyuan shihua (Remarks on
Poetry by Notable Women), an important biographical work of women poets of the Qing period
compiled in Beijing by Chen’s woman friend, the well‐known poet and critic Shen Shanbao (1808‐
1862), 13 can be viewed as what Genette terms an epitext – material on Chen’s poetry and life
published outside of Poems from the Loft. Its effect is to create social and cultural capital for Chen.
Shen Shanbao, who admired Chen Yunlian as a poet, quoted Chen’s poetry extensively and effusively.
She concludes the entry by directing attention also to Chen’s companionate marriage. 14
This conjugal image was not invented by Shen Shanbao and Pan Suxin, but their respective epitext
and paratext call attention to this aspect. Ultimately, the couple’s own projection of conjugal
harmony in their social life is the source, and Chen Yunlian has woven it into the auto/biographical
texts of her poems and Zuo Chen’s matching poems in Poems from the Loft. This auto/biographical
strand is an attractive “pattern” stitched into Chen Yunlian’s larger narrative fabric, a pattern that
has, over time, worn out and lost luster, and when it started to unravel, Chen decided to discontinue
it by deconstructing and replacing it with other patterns – other texts and paratexts. I will examine
below some of the stray threads in the frayed pattern.
In truth, Chen Yunlian had a conflicted relationship with her husband. They married when Chen
was twenty‐one sui. 15 Although Zuo Chen’s dates are not known, the couple’s interaction suggests
that he might have been younger than his wife. Not only did Zuo not have a successful career, but in
his wife’s eyes, he gradually became an intolerable philanderer. Chen Yunlian’s youth and talent
might have kept Zuo’s romantic and sexual interests in the earlier stages of their marriage. Later on,
when he was frequently away from home attempting to take the examinations and later seeking
employment, he was also pursuing other pleasures. 16
Set between Chen Yunlian’s poems addressed to Shen Shanbao that were written before and
after the couple’s 1846 visit to Shen in Beijing is a series of three poems addressed to Zuo Chen:
Composed Orally to Congratulate My Husband Taking a Concubine”
#1
Take comfort in life that Heaven follows man’s desires,
You should know that I helped to complete this romantic affair.
For you I shut the gate of the Guanghan Palace
(Author’s note: The wedding day was at the end of the month.)
I am willing to let the little bright star have the beautiful night. 17
#2
Seductive and heavily made up, robed in beautiful silk –
Seeing her, the romantic groom is about to go crazy.
On her bosom she wears the fruit of the pepper tree
Propagating to fill the measure, begetting many sons.
#3
This scholar with hair not combed up takes the brush
To paint for you her delicate eyebrows with care.
My dear, cherish her deep inside the golden chamber
So I can compose a song of gaining a treasure in the bedchamber. 18
What emotions might have underpinned these poems? Jealousy, sarcasm, self‐abnegation, desire
for a son, a combination of the above? A woman of strong character and learning, Chen Yunlian was
described by her elder brother as a “metropolitan graduate with hair not combed up,” that is, an