Many of her poems had been written at imperial command to commemorate a particular state occasion. Shangguan is considered by some scholars to be one of the forebears of the High Tang, a golden age in Chinese poetry.
Li lived during one of the more chaotic times of the Song era, when the country was divided into northern China under the Jin dynasty and southern China under the Song. Her husband was a mid-ranking official in the Song government. They shared an intense passion for art and poetry and were avid collectors of ancient texts.
Li was in her 40s when her husband died, consigning her to an increasingly fraught and penurious widowhood that lasted for another two decades. At one point she made a disastrous marriage to a man whom she divorced after a few months.
An exponent of ci poetry—lyric verse written to popular tunes, Li poured out her feelings about her husband, her widowhood and her subsequent unhappiness.
But her earlier works are full of joie de vivre and erotic desire. Like this one attributed to her:. I finish tuning the pipes face the floral mirror thinly dressed crimson silken shift translucent over icelike flesh lustrous in snowpale cream glistening scented oils and laugh to my sweet friend tonight you are within my silken curtains your pillow, your mat will grow cold.
Literary critics in later dynasties struggled to reconcile the woman with the poetry, finding her remarriage and subsequent divorce an affront to Neo-Confucian morals. Ironically, between Li and her near-contemporary Liang Hongyu, the former was regarded as the more transgressive.
Liang was an ex-courtesan who had followed her soldier-husband from camp to camp. Already beyond the pale of respectability, she was not subjected to the usual censure reserved for women who stepped beyond the nei —the female sphere of domestic skills and household management—to enter the wei , the so-called male realm of literary learning and public service. Liang grew up at a military base commanded by her father. Her education included military drills and learning the martial arts.
In , she met her husband, a junior officer named Han Shizhong. With her assistance he rose to become a general, and together they formed a unique military partnership, defending northern and central China against incursions by the Jurchen confederation known as the Jin kingdom. In , Jin forces captured the Song capital at Bianjing, forcing the Chinese to establish a new capital in the southern part of the country.
Three years later, Liang achieved immortality for her part in a naval engagement on the Yangtze River known as the Battle of Huangtiandang. Using a combination of drums and flags, she was able to signal the position of the Jin fleet to her husband. The general cornered the fleet and held it for 48 days. Liang and Han lie buried together in a tomb at the foot of Lingyan Mountain. Though it may not seem obvious, the reasons that the Neo-Confucians classed Liang as laudable, but not Shangguan or Li, were part of the same societal impulses that led to the widespread acceptance of foot-binding.
As such, Liang fulfilled her duty of obedience to the proper male order of society. The Song dynasty was a time of tremendous economic growth, but also great social insecurity. In contrast to medieval Europe, under the Song emperors, class status was no longer something inherited but earned through open competition. So by the time Pearl Buck was writing in , after the Qing Dynasty had fallen, the practice had become unfashionable. This change in fashion suddenly had a perverse side effect: a lot of girls who had had their feet bound in order to become marriageable suddenly found themselves abandoned by their husbands because foot binding was no longer fashionable.
Worse, in bigger cities some people would catch women with bound feet and cut off their bindings, a humiliation because these women would never, ever show their bare feet to anyone—not even their husbands.
For them, the process that began with a lot of pain and tears likewise ended with pain and tears. By the time Mao Zedong took control of China in , foot binding was gone except in a few remote, mountainous areas in the country.
Was there any push-back in support of foot binding among traditionalists? In Shanghai there were several debates between advocates of foot binding and advocates of natural feet—debates that were well-attended by both men and women. At first, those who supported foot binding won these debates, but eventually those that opposed it prevailed. One reason was this: Unbound women would show off their beautiful bare feet, which stood in such stark contrast to the disturbing, ugly images of bound feet, which only looked good in artisan-crafted embroidered shoes.
Are there any surviving people with bound feet today? I've heard from a few people who saw some old ladies in Guangxi Province in southwest China who had bound feet, but people like that are very rare these days. Recently, though, a Western man actually approached me and asked me if I would be willing to bind his feet for him. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic.
Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. Humans took millions of years to evolve into bipedal walkers, relying on several points of the foot shifting weight and balance as we take each step. Foot-binding reduced these points to only the big toe and heel bone; the arch was shoved up to make the foot shorter, and the other toes were bent under the ball. In many cases the arch was broken completely. Girls whose feet were bound would never again be able to walk fluidly, severely limiting their ability to move through the world.
Many cultural accounts of foot-binding have been written, especially from a feminist perspective , and many academic studies mention the process. Cummings went to Beijing in to study why older Chinese women had 80 percent fewer hip fractures than American women of the same age range.
They invited more than women to a lab at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where participants performed a series of regular motions e. During those travels, he had never once seen a woman with her feet in the same condition as those of the second study participant.
Read: The peculiar history of foot-binding in China. Soon after, another woman came in with a crutch and an odd kind of shoe. Then more women with bound feet started coming in. The women he met spent much of their life in or very close to their home, their disability preventing them from venturing farther out.
0コメント