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(Yuan, 42). In the extreme, she is ‘an “evil hag,” a murderess and a bitch with endless lovers’,
built on the image of the ‘dragon lady’ Tzu Hsi, notorious in the Western media around 1900
as ‘the “formidable” empress Dowager’. Tzu Hsi was said to have had ‘the soul of a tiger in
the body of a woman’ (Yuan, 43), was called ‘the wicked witch of the East’, and was reported
to have ‘arranged the poisoning, strangling, beheading, or forced suicide’ of her political
opponents (Yuan, 44). Other members of this class include Yang Kuei-fei, ‘the legendary
Chinese beauty’ and ‘destructive concubine’, who used her wiles and position to gain political
power, and Empress Wu, ‘a cruel woman of fierce ambition coupled with unscrupulous
amorality and immorality’. Yuan remarks that women who have fierce political ambition,
Madame Mao for example, have been called ‘Wu Tzertien’ after this infamous empress. As a
general rule, such women are said to be ‘on the make’ when young, and become ‘old hags’ in
old age, which Yuan argues is a sign of ‘an ingrained misogyny’ in a patriarchal society which
‘finds it difficult to tolerate women in power (Yuan, 44).
The third type is a modern update on the old ‘submissive, desirable Oriental’ stereotype.
‘Delicacy, beauty, fragility coupled with mind and determination’ are the new characteristics
of the Oriental woman in Western literature. This ‘new breed of cultivated, intelligent Chinese
woman’ is surrounded by corruption and deeply sensitive to the political realities. ‘To a
certain extent’, Yuan comments, ‘this portrait accurately reflects the characteristics of
contemporary Chinese women’. Yet, he adds, ‘Western male writers have so far seemed to
find it virtually impossible to move away from the stereotypical Oriental siren whose great aim
in life is to please Western man’ as ‘sex object, seducer, in the end a sort of whore’ (Yuan, 45).
This new female stereotype is especially significant when seen alongside the new
Oriental male figure. In either variant, as the oversexed or the emasculated villain, he is
inferior to the Chinese female and also to his Western male counterpart, so that
the Australian image-maker on the one hand leaves the Chinese woman free
for the Western male to manipulate, and on the other hand makes her
emotionally dependent on the Westerner (Yuan, 48).
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