伊維德

姓    名：伊維德

職    稱：哈佛大學東亞系榮退教授，荷蘭萊頓大學教授

研究領域：通俗文學、敘事文學、婦女文學

論文題目：Ethnic Identity vs. Universal Ethics in the Poetry of Wenhuang Xianghua

論文摘要： Once the Manchu conquest of the Ming empire had been completed by the end of the seventeenth century, Manchu women, like Manchu men, became active practitioners of Chinese poetry and prose. Over fifty Manchu women writers of the Qing dynasty are known by name, and over twenty collections have been preserved. As an example of the Chinese poetry by Manchu women I will discuss the works by Wenhuang 文篁 (1786-1817), collected in her Peilan xuan xiuyu cao 佩蘭軒繡餘草 (printed in 1883). This modest collection comes with a preface by her son which stresses the author’s noble Manchu descent, and a postface by her grandsons which stresses the moral nature of her works. This contrast invites a closer look Wenhuang’s work to determine to what extent her poetry (and the poetry of Manchu women in general) may be characterized as “Manchu”, and what the implications of such a characterization would be. To counteract the ongoing “sinification” of Manchu society, Manchu men were subjected to recurrent government campaigns to maintain the Manchu Way (focusing on the Manchu language and specific martial skills), but no such campaigns were directed at women. The Manchu authorities would seem to have looked favorably on the spread of certain aspects of traditional Chinese morality among Manchu women. But Manchu women lived in a segregated society, in which Manchus enjoyed a different legal status from the Chinese population, maintained their own customs, and lived in their own compounds. As a result the poetry of Wenhuang and other Manchu women poets is “Manchu” to the extent that it reflects the specific conditions of Manchu life during the Qing dynasty. It is such elements that set their poetry off from the poetry of Han-Chinese women of the time.