Wilt Idema’s Heroines of Jiangyong provides English translations of more than a dozen verse works recorded in nüshu, a unique script used primarily by women in the rural Jiangyong area of China’s Hunan Province. Building on research that he first made available in Red Brush, a compendium of works by female Chinese authors, Idema brings a sensitive literary perspective to nüshu texts. The result is a set of translations through which, it is easy to believe, the Jiangyong women’s voices may be heard. According to Idema, the translated texts reveal a particular female ethos—characterized by loyalty, piety, and resilience in the face of hardship—which the tradition of nüshu served to reinforce. At the same time, writing and reading nüshu allowed women to comment upon their experiences and social roles. Heroines of Jiangyong is a valuable contribution to English language studies of nüshu; however, certain methodological issues—the use of intermediary Chinese transcriptions to write the translations and a strictly text-based research approach—restrict the scope of its analysis.
A brief sketch of nüshu’s history, linguistic features, and oral/literary usage may be helpful. Translatable as “women’s writing,” nüshu refers to a type of script that, Idema states, was in use in Jiangyong by the early nineteenth century (4). Though nüshu’s origins are unclear, based on its visual resemblance to Chinese, scholars speculate that it derives from Chinese characters. However, unlike Chinese, in which characters represent semantic units, nüshu is generally syllabic. Thus, in most cases, each nüshu character stands for a particular sound of the local dialect. Though men were not barred access to nüshu, very few ever learned to read it. As a result, nüshu texts represent a female tradition in which women occupied the roles of author and audience. Most works employ rhyming, seven-syllable lines and may be divided into a number of genres, ranging from letters and autobiographical tracts to bridal laments and popular ballads. The texts’ connection to oral performance is also significant. Idema mentions their formulaic phraseology (5), and in his essay, “The Women’s Script of Jiangyong,” Zhao Liming describes the texts as “a type of popular singing folk literature” (40). Nüshu retained an active role in community life until the mid-twentieth century, when government policies discouraged its use.
As one of the only records of literary activity among rural women in pre-Communist China, nüshu has in the last decade attracted attention from a number of English-speaking scholars. William Chiang, Zhao Liming, Fei-wen Liu, Anne McLaren, and Cathy Silber, among others, have contributed to the growing body of English language writing on nüshu. Still, for the English-speaking student pursuing nüshu-related research, available reference works remain sparse. Idema’s emphasis on moral tracts and narrative ballads lends balance to the existing body of research, which deals primarily with other nüshu genres.
In his introductory essay, Idema offers background information on nüshu and an analysis of the subsequent translations. He divides these translations into two sections, the first composed of moral tracts and the second of narrative ballads. The moral tracts, which range from a mother’s advice to her daughter to a humorous description of a lazy wife, delineate proper female behavior. From these examples, Idema extrapolates a female ethos based in fidelity, virtue, and endurance. The second section of narrative ballads, all of which are versions of folktales and songs known across China, employs a thematic arrangement, which the essay describes in detail. In summary, the first set of ballads illustrates “the burdens of the female condition” (9); the second set, which includes two renditions of “Meng Jiangnü,” lionizes female merits such as loyalty to missing husbands; and the third set addresses female virtue and its associated dangers, such as rape. The book then concludes with two ballads, “The Karmic Affinity of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai” and “Fifth Daughter Wang,” which cast a reflective eye on traditional notions of femininity. This arrangement of ballads indicates a tentative movement towards social critique, or, perhaps, it presents a spectrum of female survival strategies ranging from relative passivity in the first ballad to selfless but proactive solution-seeking in the last.
Idema’s analysis of the ballads proves quite fruitful. By considering which narratives the nüshu writers chose to transcribe, which they did not, and the notable features of their renditions, he offers insight into the concerns of Jiangyong women, concluding that they preferred stories in which female characters had active roles and won victories through the combined traits of piety and fortitude. In contrast, they had little interest in narratives about war and seduction. Idema ends his essay with the intriguing suggestion that these ballads might be considered “epics for women” (22).
The book does raise a number of methodological issues. The most basic and also, perhaps, most vexing of these is how to render nüshu texts in English. Idema makes it clear that he neither speaks the Jiangyong dialect nor reads nüshu, and as a result he translates based on Chinese transcriptions of nüshu source works (7). This technique risks overestimating the correlation between nüshu and Chinese. In his book on literacy in Jiangyong, Chiang shows that some nüshu characters are in fact not syllabic but logographic, while others have unique pictographic qualities (58). He also discusses nüshu’s “sequential borrowing of sound and semantic values,” offering the example of a nüshu character for “blow.” Though derived from a Chinese character with the same meaning, the nüshu character has come to denote “bone” and “wind” as well (53). Idema’s use of intermediary transcriptions thus overlooks the potential for wordplay and for multiple meanings associated with individual characters. Moreover, the local dialect possesses significant differences from standard Chinese (Chiang 1995: 22), a fact which further complicates the issue of transcription. Another related difficulty concerns the close ties between nüshu texts and oral performance. Since many texts emerged from song or were intended for performance, an analysis of their sounds and rhythms could yield insight into their meaning (see McLaren 1996). Chinese transcriptions would inevitably obscure such acoustic qualities. Finally, Idema gives little attention to the manner by which his nüshu source works were collected or the methods by which they later were transcribed in Chinese. Though none of these issues compromises the essential value of Heroines of Jiangyong, it is clear that, in the field of nüshu studies, there remain many untrodden avenues of inquiry.
Works Cited
Chiang, William W. ”We Two Know the Script; We Have Become Good Friends”: Linguistic and Social Aspects of the Women’s Script Literacy in Southern Hunan, China. Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1995.
Idema, Wilt L., and Beata Grant. The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004.
McLaren, Anne. “Women’s Voices and Textuality: Chastity and Abduction in Chinese Nüshu Writing.” Modern China 22 (1996): 383–416.
Zhao, Liming. “The Women’s Script of Jiangyong: An Invention of Chinese Women.” In Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future, edited by Tao Jie, Bijun Zheng, and Shirley L. Mow, 39–52. New York: Feminist Press, 2004.
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[Review length: 1168 words • Review posted on May 19, 2009]