Women and the aesthetics of illness: Poetry on illness by Qing-dynasty women poets.

摘要

This dissertation studies women's poetry on illness in late imperial China as a means to approach the larger question of how women engaged with the male discourses surrounding their bodies and illness. My primary concern is how these women poets responded to an aesthetics of illness that dominated some of the current cultural and intellectual trends and that spoke to elevated (male) sensibilities through women's illness.; I study the conceptualization of women and illness in late imperial China as a process in which cultural and intellectual sentiments merged with medical assumptions and the literary imagination to produce the cultural notion of "women of talent and beauty" (cainu/jiaren) who, precisely because of their talent and beauty, were considered fated to die young. In order to better understand this aesthetics of illness, I borrow insights from scholarship on women and illness in Victorian England. I have also found Susan Sontag's notion of "illness as metaphor" to be a useful lens through which to explore these questions.; My close reading of a small but illustrative selection of cases from the Qing period (1644-1911) shows that it was the idea of "illness as metaphor" that shaped the cainu/jiaren both as a cultural ideal and, further, as an essential part of the literary identity that women poets established in their poetry-pathographies. Either by self-consciously acting out the tragic stories of the cainu/jiaren, or by writing them into parodic counter-stories, these women poets actively participated in re/fashioning their own cultural images. I also find that it was changes in the concept of "illness as metaphor" during the late Qing that brought about important changes in what this cainu/jiaren identity meant for women and that, in turn, determined how women and illness were reconceptualized. In short, I argue that women poets' engagement with the aesthetics of illness revealed itself most clearly in the formation of their cainu/jiaren identity. It is my central thesis that "illness as metaphor" and the cainu/jiaren identity hinged upon each other and that changes on one side invoked and involved changes on the other.