Recognition And Chasing: A Study Of The Qing Dynasty 's Female

Memorial biographies of the female refer particularly to those realistic writings composed by scholars in loving memory of their close female friends or relatives. While they overlap with biographies, prefaces, epitaphs, and memorial tributes dedicated to late female figures, they have their own distinctive features. To be specific, they include not only the sentimental and commemorating part of a biography or preface for the fair sex but also a detailed biographical account peculiar to eulogy verses. They also incorporate reminiscence essay, a new literary genre in the Qing Dynasty.The fact that writers of memorial biographies have close relationship with their subjects distinguishes them from biographies in a general sense. The intention of honoring and commemorating the female separates memorial biographies written by scholars of the Qing Dynasty different from writings that tend to present an idealized image of the females. Most of them are at once imbued with true affections and written in plain and unadorned language. As a medium for the expression of private feelings, it pursues a direct style in its detailed description of emotions, thus detaching itself from the spare style in traditional prose writing. On the other hand, due to the influence of rules of etiquette and ethics, it is somewhat restrained in its narrative and emotional expression, different from the bold and unconstrained style of popular literature. The memorial biographies of the female that I collected from nearly 1,000 volumes of collection of prose works of the Qing Dynasty were written by authors ranging from emperors, public officials, scholars without official titles to talented damsels, covering the entire literary intelligentsia of the time. The leisure enjoyed in their private realms, impoverishment that they have suffered, strong affinity to their female kin, and lingering affections for their lovers all find vivid expressions in the memorials. These accounts may not present the "truest" picture of one’s life; a close observation of what is in and behind the author’s words, however, will enable us to better understand the mentality of scholars.The first chapter gives a brief review of memorial biographies of the female in their adoption of and breakthrough in conventional memorial biographies essays. Chapter two devotes itself to an examination of female subjects described in memorial biographies and concludes roughly three types of writing on morality, talent and human nature with the purpose of discovering how scholars in the Qing Dynasty portray the "ideal women". With the study of women’s daily life in memorial biographies as a starting point, Chapter three attempts a comparison between the subtle nuances of reminiscence essay and traditional memorial biography and how the shades of difference affect the author’s point of view. Chapter four and five summarize the features of memorial biography in terms of its narrative and emotional expression through an in-depth analysis of a selection of texts.