Diverse Images of Yang Wan in the Eyes of Others
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About this event
Speaker: Ms CHEN Jiani 陳佳妮(SOAS): 615185@soas.ac.uk
Yang Wan楊宛 (ca. 1600-ca.1647) is a well-known courtesan of late Ming Nanjing who left us with the possibly only extant series of individual collections by a Nanjing courtesan around her period. Her poetry collection, together with three sequels, is compiled by her husband Mao Yuanyi茅元儀 (1594-1640), a famous literatus from a gentry family of Jiangnan 江南area, to whom she married at sixteen sui . He and his friends devoted prefaces to her poetry collection and sequels, in which they enthusiastically eulogized her talent and diligence. Her poems were also selected into many influential anthologies compiled by literati, both male and female, of different eras. They wrote her biographical notes and poetic commentaries which were circulated and transmitted alongside with the selected poems beyond time and space. She was renowned for calligraphy and painting too, and her name was also recorded in several important books of art history and placed among outstanding artists.
The transformation of Yang Wan’s image from a courtesan in the pleasure quarter to a gentry woman in the inner chamber was one of the most representative in the category of courtesan-turned concubine/wife since her marriage lasted for decades during which her role as a family woman was fully developed. Different accounts demonstrated the transformation of image in different ways and from different perspectives, thus shaped it into a diverse and layered one.
This paper examines Yang Wan’s diverse images shaped and circulated by “others”—most of them are male literati of her time and later generations, and in different forms—prefaces, poems, artistic comments and biographic sketches, etc. The questions with which I am concerned include: How were Yang Wan and the transformation of her identity perceived and represented in various accounts and from different perspectives? What caused the differences and contradictions in the collective project of constructing Yang Wan’s image which lasted several hundred years? What did this image-building project mean to literati of several generations in their distinct historical contexts?
In order to answer the questions above, this paper investigates the different accounts both textually and contextually. By focusing on several turning points in shaping the diverse images of Yang Wan, this paper aims to reveal the process of encoding and decoding a multifaceted and manipulatableimage in writing and reading, as well as to explore the motivations, operations and functions of such image-building project in late imperial China.