The vilification of women who challenged or undermined the patriarchy in the narratives comprising the mainstream Chinese “literary-historical tradition” is well documented. What makes Rebecca Doran's Transgressive Typologies such a useful and unusual accomplishment is the author's adept capacity to illuminate and clarify that “negative canonization” without sacrificing the peculiarities and individuality of remarkable women who dominated court and politics in late seventh- and early eighth-century China – China's one and only female emperor Wu Zhao, her daughter the Taiping Princess, her granddaughter the Anle Princess, her daughter-in-law Empress Wei, and the prodigious talent Shangguan Wan'er. Over the centuries following their brief reign of “gender anarchy” these women were depicted as the personifications of transgression, caricatured as promiscuous, ambitious, self-aggrandizing, and avaricious.
With an uncanny knack for succinctly encapsulating the narrative structure of this tradition, Doran observes that in the routine gendered presence of terms like “female disaster” (n ühuo 女禍), “sexism is written into the very rhetoric conceptualizing history and female historical figures”. At another juncture, through the speech of an “upright minister” contemporary to these women, the author evocatively renders the rhetorical dichotomy at the heart of the “literary-historical tradition”, the good vs. evil Confucian morality play: “On one side we have yin/female, coldness, non-Chinese ‘barbarian’ groups, chaos, lawless banditry, false officials, and bribery; set in distinction to these totally negative forces are yang/male, warm, Chinese, orderly, upright, and incorruptible”.
Built on the themes of gender and legitimacy, the book is structured in five chapters. The opening chapter examines “layered historical precedents and archetypes of the feminine”, both positive and negative, from the era before the redoubtable quintet of subversive women emerged on the scene. Not surprisingly, the author finds that in the centuries prior to the Tang dynasty (618–907) women who wielded power were eulogized for being virtuous mothers and dutiful wives as long as they eschewed personal ambition and power while maintaining steadfast, selfless “devotion to the patrilineage and the patriarchal system”; in contrast, women in positions of influence (dowagers, regents, consorts) deemed to have compromised the interests of the patriarchal system were summarily branded as transgressors. This formula prevailed, ossifying into a narrative literary and historical template employed for centuries.
Naturally, over the decades they dominated the court, female emperor Wu Zhao and the other women were keenly aware of this well-established tradition that calumniated women in power, and sought to distance themselves from past anti-exemplars. Chapter 2 scrutinizes the tactical “self-representation” these women employed to legitimize themselves. While future Confucian voices criticized their lavish estates as monuments to (a distinctly female) extravagance created at the expense of the common people, the poetry and florid prose from the Jinglong era (705–710) that Shangguan Wan'er, the Anle Princess, Empress Wei and the Taiping Princess presided over, depicted the estates as paradisial wonderlands and apotheosized the women as incarnations of the Moon Goddess Chang'e or the Weaving Maid. Writings from their time elegantly touted the women's mastery over the natural world, lauding flowers blooming in response to imperial presence or the miraculous appearance of auspicious signs auguring cosmic approval of their rule. Shangguan Wan'er, political powerbroker and the ringleader of the Jinglong aesthetic realm, poetically cast herself as a high-minded recluse, transcending the piffling earthly concerns of the material and social world that she robustly commanded.
The remaining three chapters document the manner in which the male crafters of the “literary-historical tradition” retrofit this period of “gender anarchy” into a tidy Confucian parable. Downgraded from cloud-striding immortals, the women were denounced as shrewish, jealous, and insatiable, patently unfeminine, written into the gendered overarching didactic narrative as transgressive types presiding over an unnatural era rife with inauspicious omens, glib sycophants, conspicuous consumption, and deviant behaviours.
The monograph is not without weaknesses. Let me briefly point out two. First, the author claims to “confine analysis to reconstruction in secular sources”. Yet in numerous instances, Buddhist examples are cited. In the early Tang when imperial power found expression through each of the three faiths/teachings (sanjiao 三教), Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism, where were the boundaries between religious and secular? What does secular mean?
Also, though the author notes that Liu Xiang's first-century bc work Model Biographies of Women contains a chapter devoted to “evil women”, more might have been done to doff a cap to the prototypes, to the original anti-mothers of transgression. Among others, “Biographies of pernicious favorites” (niebi zhuan 孽嬖傳) includes Moxi, the mannish consort of King Jie who sashayed about wearing a sword as she oversaw carnivals of jugglers, actors, and pygmies as the Xia state fell; Daji, hostess of wine-saturated orgies set to a repertoire of licentious music, who brought down the curtain on the Shang dynasty, goading the final king into a rutting frenzy of depravity and cruelty; Baosi, a concubine who, with the ruler besotted in sexual thrall ignoring affairs of state, took the rightful queen's place in the Western Zhou as the state crumbled. Surely, subsequent depictions of transgressive women in the dominant literary-historical tradition owe as great a debt to these progenitors as to any of the later empresses or dowager-regents the author cites in the opening chapter.
These remarks do not detract from what is an impressive achievement. This book carves out a niche, filling an essential gap in Tang religious studies (Timothy Barrett, Antonino Forte, Chen Jinhua, Suzanne Cahill), history (Richard Guisso, Denis Twitchett), and literature (Stephen Owen, Jia Jinhua). The precision and skill with which the author deconstructs gendered representations in the Chinese literary-historical tradition reveals a great deal about the machinations of that dominant tradition. This study also dramatically amplifies our understanding of the aesthetics and culture of a neglected era: the topsy-turvy period between Wu Zhao's deposal in 705 and Xuanzong's execution of the Taiping Princess in 713. Doran's relentless interdisciplinary sleuthing – encompassing official histories, collections of miscellany, anecdotal compilations, poetry, and official court documents – makes this work vital for scholars of East Asian literature, history, art history, archaeology and gender studies.
