Li Qingzhao: A Distinct Female Voice in the Song Dynasty Poetry is an essential part of Chinese culture in ancient China, and there exist numerous marvelous poems, which have considerable impacts on the Chinese world. In order to be prominent and admiring, these poems can’t be too esoteric and detachment; instead, they need to be easily accessible, understandable and memorable for common people. If you have read Li Bai, Du Fu or Su Shi, you might be one step closer to becoming well-versed in one of China’s greatest arts.
But these poets are all male and there’s something incredibly important missing from this list, and that is women. Unfortunately, intellectualism bears no such equal proportions. In other words, there aren’t many prominent female poets in China’s several thousand years of history at all. This makes Li Qingzhao ( a), a Song Dynasty poet with the pseudonym Yi’an Jushi, an impressive one. In Gu Jin Ci Lun, Wang Youhua put Li Qingzhao in a position as high as Li Bai and Li Yu. Compared with other ordinary poets, a male or female, Li Qingzhao certainly did fight a different battle and this experience made her stand out.
To be more specific, even though men were dominant in feudal Chinese society, Li Qingzhao still catches our eyes to be a symbolic poet since her works are more graceful and elegant than her male counterparts; her works are also more bold and unconstrained than other lesser known female poets because of her unique rebellious spirit, which contradicted society’s expectations of women. Although it’s hard to simply talk about Li’s poetry without talking about her gender, her distinct female status has a civilizing influence on her work and seamlessly integrates her emotion into her work.
In general, Ci is a pervasive form of poetry among Song people, and it was developed by the end of the Tang dynasty. In Li Qingzhao’s early period, Northern Song dynasty’s Ci’s wording is elegant and melodic, its content introspective and melancholic, which corresponds to the characteristics and cultural expectations of ancient Chinese women. This trend is called,” FEN” which means “one of the metaphorical way”, and describes how men wrote from women’s perspectives. Another reason for this phenomena is that Ci would be presented with a tune and sung by a chorus girl.
Most male Ci poets, who wanted to portray women characters and their lives, needed to infer and speculate about women’s thoughts and emotions through observations and conversations with the chorus girls, which is the only group of women that they could easily access. However, these chorus girls were just a minority group of women. What’s more, the interpretation on the same object can be different among chorus girls and other girls, such as a noble lady, and among male and female poets.
Compared to Liu Yong, who wrote from his compassion and appreciation for women, Li Qingzhao wrote from her own experience to exemplify outstanding women characteristics. For example, in Li Qingzhao’s “Tune: “Rouged Lips”, she depicts a girl: “Stepping down from the swing, / Languidly she smooths her soft slender hands,/ Her flimsy dress wet with light perspiration-/ A slim flower trembling with heavy dew. / Spying a stranger, she walks hastily away in shyness:/Her feet in bare socks,/ Her gold hairpin fallen. / Then she stops to lean against a gate, / And looking back, / Makes as if sniffing a green plum. (The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao: A New English Translation, Jiaosheng Wang).
In this description, Li Qingzhao vividly and meticulously writes about the shyness and curiosity of a teenage girl, especially the last sentence, which greatly depicts how the girl has both the curiosity toward a guest and her hesitation, since she both wanted to have a look at this stranger of different sex and to hide away. This ambivalence in her thought is so authentic that, if the poet had not experienced this scenario herself, she could not write it in such authenticity.
In other words, this is the scene that male poets would not have the opportunity to know and be familiar with. It is also hard for them to have empathy for those female characters since they are not in their position, whether it is biological or societal. All in all, these characteristics of Ci in Northern Song provide a great opportunity for Li Qingzhao, and she developed her writing style by involving her novel women aspect, personal experience and exquisite emotions into her work.
There are thousands of female poets existing in the past, and they all used women views and their stories to write poems. What makes Li Qingzhao, the most well-known among these women, stand apart from them? Unlike other female poets, who were confined by their gender and society’s beliefs, Li Qingzhao had an uncommon masculine and anomalous rebellious facet to herself. The Confucian Shen Zengzhi commented, “Li Qingzhao is as natural and unconstrained as a man; she is Su Shi or Xin Qiji in a woman’s body. ” Her uncommon background can be one of the reasons that cause difference.
In the feudal Chinese society under Confucian value, women were dominated by men. Women have to succumb to the so called, “The three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues” (Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals, Dong Zhongshu), which tamed most of them and forbid them of making their own voices. In other words, they had to behave as an inferior to their father, husband and even their sons. Women were restricted by these rules. For instance, they didn’t have the equal right as men to be educated. However, Li Qingzhao is the auspicious one.
She was born in a literati family; her family was rich and cultured, and she enjoyed a merry and high quality childhood education (“Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume II: Tang Through Ming 618-1644”, Lily Xiao Hong Lee and Sue Wiles). Most importantly, there was almost no constraints to women’s freedom in thought in her family. Also, unlike most women in the Song dynasty, Li Qingzhao had a fulfilling marriage. For a normal woman in the Song dynasty, marriage was a shackle from feudal society; it was merely a command from parents and elders.
Li, on the contrary, chose her own love and enjoyed the marriage. These experiences led to her extraordinary personality and resulted in her versatile writing style, which rarely appeared among most of the female poets of the same period whose poems were normally based on trivial entertainment and had a great sense of ennui. The liberty of her upbringing can be illustrated in one of her poems called “Fisherman’s Pride: A Dream”, where Li Qingzhao wrote the Milky Way as flowing water, where she could sail her boat; among the stars, she sails to the land of the gods, and is invited by the high Di.
In this poem, she presents an exhaustion for reality and longing for her freedom; this poem, unlike her elegant and restrained style, is written in a purely romantic manner, which exudes her great will for freedom of thought. She uses Peng and Kun, two giant ancient birds in mystery, to illuminate her grand outlooks and visions, and this is unusual in other women’s poems. Moreover, as a woman, Li has the same ambition and patriotism as a man. In the late Northern Song dynasty, when Song’s capital Kaifeng was conquered by Jin, she wrote poems that represented great anger towards the cowardly government and military campaign.
However, the misfortune in her family, such as her husband’s death, and the chaos of Song didn’t break her with sorrow; instead, it brought her poems into a broader scheme. Her poems shift to a sense of patriotism. For instance, in “Lines Written On A Summer’s Dag”, Li wrote “In life we should be heroes among the living/ After death, let us be heroes among the ghosts. / To this day we miss that ancient hero Xiang Yu, who would rather die than cross to the East of the River! “(The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao: A New English Translation, Jiaosheng Wang).
In this poem, she mentions Xiang Yu, a courageous hero in the past, and his story to contrast and criticize the weak-minded government officials of her time. Although, in reality, Li Qingzhao could only dream to be Mulan and fight for the country, she became the Mulan in Ci’s world instead. Li Qingzhao’s poems came from her own experience and were a natural flow of her emotions, which unveiled distinctive features that could not be seen through the male perspective and made her Ci vivid and remarkable. Moreover, Li’s poems also appear to be more masculine than those from other female poets.
Her poems weren’t restricted by her feminine view. The female character in Li Qingzhao’s Ci is not bound by specific existing definitions of women. Under an endless patriarchal society, women’s spirits were based on love, marriage, and family. Thus, it was impossible for male poets to embrace the feminine experience because they had a higher social status than women, and were not able to understand life from a female perspective. On the contrary, Li Qingzhao was the voice for the struggles of women and understood that even though women were expected to follow social expectations, they longed for freedom.