Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China

In the "transitory" communities of Chapter 7, we finally meet the elite courtesans who are often mistakenly thought to have been the only literate women of pre-modern China. The elite courtesan and the gentry wife, defined in normative texts as poles apart, were in fact members of much the same literary culture. In the unsettled seventeenth century, they sometimes even formed transitory friendships with each other. Ultimately, however, the educated gentry wife was supported by a much more stable network of literary communities.

I have only two reservations about this book, and neither undermines the power of Ko's synthesis. First is the question of periodization. Were all the phenomena Ko describes quite so new in the seventeenth century? Historians of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) like to talk about their publishing boom, and there are Song Dynasty woodblock prints of women readers whose iconography is quite similar to the Ming Dynasty prints Ko reproduces. Second, sixteenth-and seventeenth-century gentry men not only valorized gentry women's writing, but were not above seizing upon the piquant image of the woman writer (private realms exposed!) to produce "women's writing" themselves. Such questions have long been raised about one of Ko's central examples, the "Three Wives' Commentary" on the drama Peony Pavilion. Given the indisputable wealth of authentic women's writing and ritual (including writing on Peony Pavilion), and such clear evidence of women's literary communities, exploring the occasional male opportunism that arose would only serve to underscore how large women's writing loomed in seventeenth-century Chinese culture.

The modernizers of early twentieth-century China needed to paint "Confucianism" in the darkest possible colors, and Ko shows in her Introduction how their agenda required a simple model of the oppression of women, admitting none of the complexities she describes. Ironically, this oversimplified model, central to the self-representation of "modern" Chinese women, denies them centuries of intellectual lineage that could empower them today.

Katherine Carlitz University of Pittsburgh

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