sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

When all was lost, she painted herself as a lonely, abandoned woman in a desolate autumn night,
her only outlet her poetic sensibility and artistic talent (C8). A short authorial postscript to the eight
paintings, dated 1859, summarizes Chen Yunlian’s last effort to direct her intended readers, her sons
and grandsons (adopted or by concubines), to recognize her contributions to the Zuo family and to
say to her husband: “J’accuse!” – by the means available to her – poetry and painting.
In another extraordinary move, in a note to a line in her poem about a visit with relatives in the
capital in 1860, Chen Yunlian records that, because her hands were afflicted with a disease that
caused her not to be able to stretch them, she could not hold a brush and therefore asked her
husband’s sixth elder brother Chaosheng to inscribe the eight colophons she had written. 22 The dirty
laundry is displayed for all to see in the eight autobiographical paintings and Chen Yunlian’s narrative
and emotional outbursts she recorded in the colophons.
Coda
Chen Yulian manipulates the poetic genre and the organization, form, and structure of her poetry
collections to construct a self‐narrative in which her poetic and artistic talents, illness, poverty, and
economic labor are inextricably intertwined with two conflicting narrative versions of her conjugal
relations with her husband, Zuo Chen: one representing a harmonious, companionate couple, the
other a “broken” marriage between an abandoned, resentful wife and her philandering husband. The
reality of the latter was no doubt a common occurrence within the polygynous system of late
imperial China. Chen dealt with her loss and bitter memory by writing them into a life story that
articulates her gendered discontent forcefully. What is so unusual in her case is how she cast aside
the virtues of modesty, restraint, and acceptance expected of gentlewomen in her society and
turned one strand of her poetry collection and its framing devices into her personal vehicle of
resentment and published and publicized revenge at her profligate husband.
Keywords: Paratext, Poetry collection, Life history, Women, Late Imperial China
Grace S. FONG
Professor of Chinese Literature
Department of East Asian Studies
McGill University
grace.fong@mcgill.ca
Notes
1
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
2
I use the collection in the Harvard‐Yenching Library, whose digitized version is available online in
Ming Qing Women’s Writings http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing.
3
Fang Tinghu, in Chen Yunlian, Xingangge shicao, “Xu,” 1b. Citations are to the online digitized
1859 edition http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing/search/resultswork.php?workID=97&language=eng.
4
Although nowhere stated in the paratexts, the 1851 four‐chapter edition, which is now
“embedded” as part of the 1859 edition, may have been printed to celebrate Chen Yunlian’s
birthday.
5
Chen, Xinfangge, “Zixu,” 1a. This pronouncement comes from the “Shun dian” in the Shang shu.
However, Chen refers to the Zuo zhuan as the source.
6
Chen, Xinfangge, “Zixu,” 1b.
7
Chen, Xinfangge, “Zixu,” 2a.
8
Chen, Xinfangge, “Zixu,” 1a‐2b.