Rewriting the inner chambers: The boudoir in Ming-Qing women's poetry

My dissertation takes the social and symbolic location of women---the inner chambers [guige or gui]---as a point of departure to examine Ming-Qing women's unique approach to the writing of poetry. In Ming-Qing China, women continued to be assigned to the inner, domestic sphere by Confucian social and gender norms. The inner chambers were not only a physically and socially bounded space within which women were supposed to live, but also a discursive site for the construction of femininity in both ideological and literary discourses. The term gui embraces a nexus of meanings: the material frame of the women's chambers; a defining social boundary of women's roles and place; and a conventional topos evoking feminine beauty and pathos in literary imagination. Working with the literary context of boudoir poetics, yet also considering other indispensable levels of meanings epitomized in the cultural signifier guige, my dissertation demonstrates how Ming-Qing women poets re-conceive the boudoir as a distinctive textual territory encoded with their subjective perspectives and experiences. Compared with the poetic convention, the boudoir as inscribed in Ming-Qing women's texts is far more complex as its depiction is informed by nuances in their historical, social and individual experiences.