This study highlighted the cultural characteristics of the Chinese home based on women’s studies. We focused on the writings of daughters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, examining how daughters’ already-but-not-yet-defined identities impact the existing familial orders through their process of leaving home and getting married and thus enable them to develop self-awareness.
Narratives in the Ming and Qing dynasties transitioned from elegance to vulgarity and from extraordinary to ordinary. Following this trend, daughters in literature had their own voice, with an image of being knowledgeable and ambitious. Literati wrote about the characters of daughters as a metaphor of self-consciousness but restrained the characters concurrently from a patriarchal perspective, thus creating contexts that contained numerous tensional elements such as high-profile assertions, conflicting standpoints, swaying words, and even evasive and empty rhetoric. These contexts reveal that the daughter writings reflected the core thinking of individuals and groups in Chinese culture, meanwhile subtly contributing to a new interpretation of balance between affection and etiquette, which the author may be aware or unaware of, and constructing the daughters’ complicated, back-and-forth process of self-awareness both in reality and in literature.
Chapters 3 and 5 describe the topics of affection and competence, respectively. Feng Menglong’s rewriting of classical Chinese works into vernacular versions was used as a reference. We examined the presentation of representative daughters, namely Zhuo Wenjun(卓文君), Cui Yingying(崔鶯鶯), Shu Xiaomei(蘇小妹), Li Cuilian(李翠蓮), and Hua Mulan(花木蘭), in the narratives in the Ming and Qing dynasties. They respectively represent five types of daughters: home-leaving, disobedient, talented, outspoken, and commanding. This study explored how daughters planned and acted in just or concealing ways when their intelligence, affections, poetic sentiments, articulateness, and visions exceeded customs, how others interpreted and responded according to customs, what “defense” measures they adopted, and how they accepted or tolerated the daughters’ “misbehavior.” Moreover, the relationship between the characters and authors, who collaborated with or counteracted against each other, was investigated to identify how they seek a new way between affection and etiquettes.
The second, fourth, and sixth sections of this research are complementary to each other, supporting the proposed five daughter types. Chapter two illustrates the historical background of the literature in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Through the Four Books for Women (Nu Sishu), dilemmas of filial piety and fidelity, and aesthetics on exemplary women and virtuous ladies, we explored the spatiotemporal backgrounds of the emergence of women’s education in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The backgrounds led to the literati’s diversion from classics or their insistence on protecting the ethical principles in classics, thus forming the conflicts between moral and affection codes. In particular, Feng Menglong’s strategy of rewriting classical works into vernacular versions highlighted the affection codes that catered to the public, pioneering the dialogue between myriad daughter writings. Chapter four presents an intermediary introduction that analyzes the entanglement of family affairs centered on daughters. The relationship between the daughters and their homes as well as the dynamics of their affections was observed to provide a view close to real-life situations. Chapter six summarizes and delves deeper into daughter writing. The flow and transitions in the novels were analyzed. Plots including a deity descending to mortal life and a daughter’s elopement were linked to strengthen the discourse on the linkage and dialectics between the self-awareness of literati and the daughter characters. Case studies on three classics, namely Yu-Jiao-Li(玉嬌梨), Ping Shan Leng Yan(平山冷燕), and Haoqiu Zhuan(好逑傳), were conducted to analyze daughters’ practical strategies of boldness and wisdom under the moral codes of that time, and to present the temperament of the daughters, which is characterized by both men’s ambitious mindset and women’s intelligence and resilience.
This study decoded the dynamic elements in self-awareness encompassed in daughter writing in Chinese culture. Identifying the growth of self-awareness hidden within literature, we proposed hypotheses that before the discourse of the Young China (Shaonian Zhongguo 少年中國) by Liang Qichao(梁啟超), some works of daughter writing had focused on the topic of home with novels as the main carrier, challenging the theory of the old China. However, the writing movement never stepped onto the stage nor did it assert or present specific ideas. The works were either emotional and touching or fake and hypocritical, and they sometimes presented dubious debates or sincere communications. The purpose of the works was not necessarily utter rebellion but a self-questioning process of inward conversations that are worthy of attention.