Wang, Ping
2000 Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Notes: 320 pp., 17 b&w photos, 1 line drawing. ISBN: 0816636052Reviewed 18 Jun 2001 by:
Howard James Martin <hjm2@earthlink.net>
Richmond, Virginia, USAMedium: Written Literature Subject
Keywords:Footbinding - China - History
Women - China - Social conditions
Beauty, Personal - China - History
Body image in women - China - History
ABSTRACT: Chinese scholar Wang Ping analyses footbinding, gender relations and eroticism in selected historical works of Chinese literature. The author adopts a postmodern theoretical perspective that treats the topics out of social and historical context. The book is a fresh look at important texts but is more oriented to literary criticism than to anthropological method or theory. In spite of what I think is a flawed approach to the material, and the need for more thorough editing, there is much good in this book.
Aching for Beauty; Footbinding in China is author Wang Ping's revised dissertation. Dr. Wang earned her doctorate in comparative literature from New York University. In addition to this monograph, Dr. Wang is an accomplished writer whose published works include fiction and poetry. She was born and raised in China.In outline, the book consists of eight chapters divided into two sections. The first section, Chinese Eroticism and Female Allure, is devoted primarily to the practice and symbolism of footbinding and to Chinese erotic literature (chapters 1-5). The second section, Footbinding in Women's Literary Traditions (chapters 6-8) analyzes literature women wrote in the Ming (1368 - 1644) and Qing (1644 - 1911) dynasties.
Chapter 1, Three-Inch Golden Lotuses: Achieving Beauty through Violence, introduces footbinding in its physical and processual dimensions and lays the foundation of the cultural analysis that follows. Wang describes the age binding began, how feet were bound and the excruciating effects binding had on the flesh and psyches of young girls. She describes what bound feet symbolized to women and men, in myth, and sexually. She introduces the relationship between mothers, who caused daughters to bind their feet, and daughters, who learned of love and pain. This chapter introduces themes and oppositions running throughout the book. These may be summed up by an attribution of personal motivation and hidden cultural meaning: "...Chinese girls and women were promised an eternal beauty if they bound their feet. By binding and wrapping, they hope to cover up the decadence, decay, violence, and finally, the death of the flesh and of civilization" (pp. 23-4).
The second chapter covers the history of footbinding. The material is compiled from secondary sources rather than original research. References to footbinding occur early in Chinese history, but Wang argues that an important redefinition of the female ideal as a delicate, "refined" creature developed in the Song (960 - 1126), replacing a more robust ideal characteristic of the Tang (618 - 907). That footbinding was popularized in the Song indicates the transition; she argues the practice became entrenched in Chinese culture and art. As patriarchal neo-Confucianism gained influence among the elite, female status declined (pp. 47-48). It is telling that "Bound feet, singing, and dancing became the most desired feminine qualifications among the royal families and literati" (p. 45 and see Mann 2000:845-846,850-851, for similar remarks). Foot binding as a cosmetic, beautifying attribute became a standard during the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271 - 1368) and reached its greatest geographic spread during the Ming and early Qing. Footbinding was first reported to Europeans, in 1570, by Gaspar da Cruz, a Dominican friar (Spence 1998:26). The Manchu, who conquered Ming China and established the Qing dynasty, prohibited footbinding during the reign of Qianlong (1736 - 1796). The practice, however, was not eradicated until reformers and modernizers during the late Qing and early Republican (1911- 1949) periods succeeded in branding it among the public as a sign of Chinese backwardness and weakness relative to the scientific, progressive West.
The third chapter, Footbinding and the Cult of the Exemplary Woman, begins with an argument on "...how the duality of footbinding reflects the duality of the Chinese feudal system..." in which "moral restriction" can be opposed to culturally prized opportunities for "great expenditure" (p. 55). Wang describes how, in contrast with official ideology, the urban/official elite cultivated a notable pursuit of decadence. Bound feet were at the core of highly eroticized imagery, in a ritualized sexual extravagance. Much of WangÆs argument is carried by her analysis of the erotic classic The Golden Lotus. She focuses particularly on gender-specific use, meaning and symbolism of language rather than social analysis (pp. 70-78). An interesting section is the material on the life, family and behavior of a nineteenth century merchant, Hu Xueyan, whose life approaches in misogynist decadence the novels Wang discusses (pp. 67-69).
Edible Beauty: Food and Foot Fetishes in China is the fourth chapter. Wang describes literary euphemisms for bound feet and explains how these constructs mirror and symbolize food. She makes explicit links among food, sex and footbinding by contrasting a menu of sexual positions from a published essay with a list of well-known dishes she constructs. The items on each list have strikingly similar names (pp. 79-81). She develops this comparison into a centerpiece of the chapter. This construct is a rather standard structuralist formula; it can be rendered as 'nature : culture :: raw : cooked'. On page 92, for example, she writes "Like cooking that transforms the raw and savage into something edible and refined, footbinding cooks the wild and primitive force of nature - the female body and its sexuality represented by the feet - into a piece of art, an object of desire". Wang tallies the transformations thus: "For cooking, it {the transformation to food} involves slaughtering, skinning, and dissecting animals, then all the boiling, broiling, grilling, saut‰ing; for footbinding, it {the transformation to beauty} means crying, bleeding, rotting, putrefying, and deforming of the feet" (p. 94, bracketed material added).
Chapter 5 is a rich source of ideas for the analysis of culture and literature for readers interested in WangÆs analytic approach. The main subject is "...ways that the cultural fetish of bound feet acquired erotic, sexual content..." (p. 101), but the range of materials allows for much broader inquiries. In this chapter, Wang considers important Ming and Qing literary works focusing on the practice or placing it in an important position. A particularly interesting source is The Classification of the Qualities of Fragrant Lotuses, an eighteenth century text that inventories the sizes, shapes and styles of bound feet. How male authors fetishize the female body is a major topic. Wang also extends the argument from literary fetishization to encompass gender identity and power relations: "Words, once fetishized through the female body, pave the path that can lead men to power, desire, and masculinity" (p. 112). She pursues a novel psychoanalytic argument that reads footbound women as having been phallusized, which, after eliciting anxiety and fear in males, precipitates outsized compensatory behavior in "...a frantic effort to expand their body size, accumulate more wealth, acquire more political power, and achieve more linguistic manipulation" (p. 120). The last topic is a rather forced argument that draws a parallel between writing and torturing to death by means of small cuts (ling chi). She treats the act of writing and the act of cutting living human flesh as examples of inscription.
The second section (chapters 6-8) is on literary works by women. Although the section is titled Footbinding in WomenÆs Literary Traditions, the subjects are more diverse than this. This section is perhaps mistitled, but its interest is not lessened thereby.
Chapter 6 is Binding, Weaving, Chatting: Female Bonding and Writing. She first points out that men wrote the most about footbinding and then proceeds to excavate what small fragments women wrote about it "...between the lines of their texts" (p. 146) and from their daily lives. She gives accounts of three disparate literary styles. The first (pp. 147-154) is poetry written during the late Ming by two sisters-in-law from Jiangnan in central China whose devotion to each other and whose writings are fascinating. Second are the writings of Shuangqing, a youthful female peasant savant whose poetry is as unconventional as her humble origin. Her work, indeed, her existence, is the subject of continuing debate in the history and analysis of poetry written by Chinese women (Mooney, 2001; Ropp 1998). The third subject is a remarkable script invented by rural women in Jiangyong, Hunan (north central China). This system, called womenÆs writing (nu shu), "...is a syllabic representation of the local dialect, a secret script known, used, and passed down only by and among women for centuries until the mid-twentieth century" (pp. 161-162). Wang nicely describes the complex social and psychological importance nu shu had in the lives of female writers:
And their purpose is also clear: by exchanging letters and singing out their stories with their lifelong female friends, writing serves not only as an important outlet for their emotion and consolation for their pain, but also as an indispensable tool to form a female literary community and support network. Since performing the texts with a group of women is such a crucial part of nu shu, Jiangyong women brought writing even closer to performance and oral interaction. (p. 164)The two main topics of Chapter 7 (From Golden Lotus to Prime Minister: A WomanÆs Tale Living from Mouth to Mouth) are a performance style known as tan ci and a play in this style by the woman author Chen Duansheng (1751 - 1796). Tan ci is a female performance style from southern China in which the stories often focus on women. Rhymed verse with accompanying narrative characterizes the performance. Wang outlines the tradition, how it is performed, how audiences received it, and what audiences it attracted. The work at the center of this chapter is Chen DuanshengÆs story, Destiny of the Next Life (Zai sheng yuan). This tan ci is a study of structural reversals in gendered roles at the elite level of imperial society; the play is enduringly popular in China. The lead character, Meng Lijun, is the center of the tension and resolution of the story. Meng Lijun is a girl/woman who, through personal ability, wile and accident rises to the rank of imperial prime minister (zai xiang): "...the real drama begins to spin around the mystery of his/her sexual gender. She wears menÆs clothing, talks and walks like a man, and administers the country with the capability and wisdom that no man can match, yet her beauty constantly arouses men's desire and possessiveness (including the emperorÆs)" (p. 176). For having written this play and having tackled the issues presented in Destiny of the Next Life, Wang argues Chen Duansheng was "...a true revolutionary and true feminist ahead of her time..." (p. 186); she further characterizes the play as "...a true revolutionary manifesto, a monument of feminist utopian literature, in which women become the center" (p. 197).
In Chapter 8, The Fabric of Masquerade, Wang continues her analysis of ChenÆs play. She focuses on what the masquerades that figure prominently in the play conceal and reveal. She bases much of her argument on the cultural construction of meaning: "What the masqueraders in this scenario have revealed is both terrifying and titillating: gender, identity, sexuality, and class have little to do with origin, blood, inheritance, but can be stripped, erased, and rebuilt at oneÆs will. In other words, a personÆs gender and identity are no longer the work of nature or the divine, but that of culture, the efforts of each individual" (p. 205). While the focus is on the characters and roles in the play, Wang also pursues her argument positing the feminist, revolutionary nature of the play and its author.
The book's concluding chapter is a summary of major themes and does not extend the book's arguments. She summarizes her thoughts about constructions of femininity and masculinity as they are reflected in footbinding and reiterates her ideas about footbinding as a female subversion of the social order. Wang writes: "Footbinding allowed Chinese women to usurp the power and language from the master through imitation, simulation, and inversion and to turn it into their own - female language, female writing, female culture" (p. 226).
Comments
Wang PingÆs approach to her subject is from within the allied fields of postmodern literary criticism and cultural studies. Readers not familiar with theories popular in these fields need to read Aching for Beauty carefully to understand the arguments Wang makes and how they illuminate the works she discusses. Dense thickets of theory-laden prose will impede many. That Wang adopts a postmodernist approach to the various works analyzed is perhaps not surprising given the dominating position postmodernism achieved in the 1980 and early 1990s. One can perhaps rationalize her approach as a matter of what stimulated her intellectually while in graduate school, but it is difficult to disagree with Zha JianyingÆs assessment of postmodernism and Chinese intellectuals:
It was not easy to deal with these critics who considered the previous trends {in Chinese fiction} as products of a 'prefiction period', and who could spew torrents of their newly acquired Western theories to intertextualize, to deconstruct, to postmodernize, as they wrote the sort of article that seemed to have been produced by alien computer programs. It was as though these critics had inserted foreign computer chips into their heads (a Lacanian chip, for instance, or a Foucaldian chip), for what flew from their pens read less like literary analysis - at least to the poor outdated writers - than garbled messages. But, alas, it was precisely their bizarreness and alienness that gave the {local literary} scene a fresh turn and gave them authority. They were, in a way, the radical chic in Chinese writing. (Zha 1996:43, bracketed material added)Aching for Beauty is clearly a product of its intellectual time and the authorÆs discipline; the analysis rarely rises above the horizon of the theoretical outlook guiding the authorÆs thinking.
WangÆs approach to her topics - footbinding, gender relations, eroticism, etc. - denatures the literature and society in which they were produced. With the exception of the secret female writing (nu shu) discussed in chapter 6, the novels, poetry, and performances that are her subjects are important Ming and Qing literary texts. Wang removes them from their moorings and reads them through modern eyes. That she does this allows the great benefit of abstraction. Abstraction reduces detail and can lead to clearly defined models and ideas, but abstraction can also lead to results that do little to illuminate the material at hand. For me, WangÆs words often suffer that fault. Susan Mann's "Myths of Asian Womanhood" (2000), articulated an unease I felt while reading and thinking about this book. Mann was speaking about Chinese authors and their interpreters and remarks on "...current literary theory that stresses readers and audiences as consumers and producers of texts who construct meaning for their own purposes" (Mann, 2000:844).
With the exception of the historical summary in Chapter 2, Wang PingÆs ahistoricism leaves little ground between reductionist functionalism, which is absent from this book, and culturalist exoticization fueled by hyperbolic language, which is all too present. Has Wang "...settled, in sum, on a singular silence in Chinese myths of womanhood" in which Western female authors "...selected the one aspect of Chinese womanhood that was never mythologized in history or fiction outside the pages of erotic novels and æspring picturesÆ used as guides and provocations for lovemaking" (Mann 2000:857, bracketed material added). Or, does Wang redefine her chosen topics and their cultural significance? It is not easy to tell. When cultural practice is extirpated from social context, the derivative is a structure or a model ripe with interpretive possibilities but also possibly sterile. Marina Warner, in her study of fairy tales and their female tellers, puts the thought this way: "When history falls away from a subject, we are left with Otherness, and all its power to compact enmity, recharge it and re-circulate it. An archetype is a hollow thing, but a dangerous one, a figure or image which through usage has been uncoupled from the circumstances which brought it into being, and goes on spreading false consciousness" (1994:239).
Aching for Beauty contributes to the analysis of Chinese literature rather than to ethnographically informed anthropology. To be fair to the work and the author, the analysis was not intended to be an ethnography of literature. The book is so heavily indebted to postmodern cultural analysis that it will find but a small audience outside readers who understand or appreciate this approach. I think this would be unfortunate. WangÆs treatment of important works of Chinese literature is fresh and new; her analysis invites a critical rethinking of how story, meaning and analytical approach can be related. The analysis lacks sociological interest; I would not choose WangÆs approach to analysis. However, much good, thoughtful work appears in this book.
The illustrations and photographs are fascinating accompaniments to the text and illustrate the material well. This book is a revised dissertation; a heavier editorial hand at the University of Minnesota Press would have improved readability. Minor irritants are the absence of a Chinese character list, inconsistent romanizations of Chinese words and typographic errors.
References
Mann, Susan 2000 Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood. Journal of Asian Studies 59(4):835-862.
Mooney, Paul 2001 East Meets West in a Search for a Chinese Poet. Chronicle of Higher Education January 19, 2001, p. A48.
Ropp, Paul 1998 The Curious Case of He Shuangqing: The Great Peasant Woman Poet. Dangdai shixui (Contemporary Historical Review) 1(3). Electronic document. March 15, 2001. http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~sosc1/hist/jourvol1_1/Jour1.html
Spence, Jonathan D. 1998 The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: W. W. Norton.
Warner, Marina 1994 From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Zha Jianying 1996 China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture. New York: The New Press.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Martin, Howard James
2001 Review of Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. Anthropology Review Database. June 18. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=1525, accessed February 10, 2010.© Anthropology Review Database
(available online: http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/)