Written gardens revisited: Gender and women’s garden poetry in late Imperial China

This dissertation unites two stands of significant phenomenon in late imperial China (approximately 1600-1900): the newfound popularity of garden literature, and an unprecedented prominent gendered tension between the male-dominated tradition of garden writing and the feminized nature of the garden space. Combining methodologies of archival research and textual analysis from the fields of literature, women and gender studies, history, art history, and landscape architecture, this interdisciplinary study focuses on garden poetry by gentry women from the 17th to early 20th centuries. It explores how garden poetry enabled these women, conventionally expected to be confined in the domestic realm, to produce poetic spaces for multiple purposes, such as mediating their subject construction and gender relations, engaging in social-political discourse, and eventually carving a place for women’s voices in the subgenre of Chinese literature. From the perspectives of the domestic space, social and public space, and pictorial space, this study examines poems about family gardens (17th cent.), diverse gardens within a city (17th-18th cent.), and garden paintings (18th-early 20th cent.). It reveals that garden poems present multifaceted aspects of gentry women’s changing lives during the late imperial period, shedding light on their experiences, roles, and aspirations. On the one hand, gentlewomen played the gendered roles defined by the Confucian orthodoxy in the garden, an extension of the inner chamber; on the other hand, they formed different social groupings and strategically engaged in worldly affairs through garden writing. In their poetic output of gardens, the female poets assumed different personae to respond to the Ming-Qing transition, enriched the literary geography of the culturally inscribed Hangzhou city, redefined their conventionally subordinate position in artistic representations of gardens, and provided a female perspective on the modernization of Chinese garden culture. These physical, textual, and pictorial garden spaces, which were embedded in familial, cultural, and political changes, enriched women poets’ creations as authors and afforded their agency as gentlewomen in the late imperial literati circle.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

E Asian Languages & Cultures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Yuefan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cai, Zong-qi
• Hays, David Lyle
• Shao, Dan
• Persiani, Gian-Piero

• Garden Literature
• Chinese Landscape
• Women's Poetry
• Gender
• Late Imperial China

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Yuefan Wang

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124652

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124652