| During the Six Dynasties literati poets including sovereigns repeatedly wrote boudoir laments. Although the boudoir lament forms a mainstay of the Six Dynasties, critics and scholars, however, have rarely paid special attention to them up until now. My study draws mainly on Intertextuality Theory, Formalist criticism, Feminist criticism and New Historicism. On a close scrutiny, it is found that the corpus of boudoir laments is intertextual compositions rather than mimetic writings. The poets continuously infused new components into traditional themes participating in dialogue with the cultural aesthetics and literary fashions. The boudoir laments in mode shifted from dramatic to lyric and the image of the "longing wife" changed from a pathetic figure to an erotic fetish. For boudoir laments, the poets employ special artistic devices. Nature imagery and status personal pronouns are geared to enhancing lyric effect. Especially, the points of view employed, in the first person and in the third person, suggests that voyeuristic pleasure possibly motivated the poets to write boudoir laments. The longing wife is male construction. For the Six Dynasties poets to compose boudoir laments was to construct the ideal feminine. From the characterization of the longing wife, we can infer how femininity is defined by the poets representative of the dominant groups. The reconstruction of the social context leads us to understand the reason why the poets had a great fascination for boudoir lament. It is sensualism and misogyny prevailing in the whole society, from the ruling classes to the folk, that made the poets obsessed with the longing wife aesthetically and ideologically. |
