For the Love of Writing: Song Lyrics Featuring Literary Activities by Shen Cai (1752–?)

Abstract

In traditional China, writing was essentially a male prerogative, and it was seen as a serious transgression of gender boundaries for women to write. This explains the absence of women’s literature in most of traditional Chinese literary history. Even during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911), when women writers became an important part of the literary landscape, their writings remained a controversial issue. However, it is precisely because of the institutional, cultural and social obstacles that women writers faced as they navigated the male domain that women’s literary works are such a clear testament to the strength of their subjectivity.

This paper deals with the genre of the song lyric, which has had a long tradition of representing feminine beauty from an androcentric attitude, emphasizing qualities like fragility and passivity. The paper focuses on the song lyrics of Shen Chai (1752–­?), many of which depict literary activities such as reading and writing. Given the special status of writing in traditional Chinese culture and the well-established literati female modality, this paper aims to investigate how Shen Cai viewed women’s engagement in writing, and how she remolded the conventional image of the lovelorn female persona into a cultured, erudite subject.