On their dress they wore a body: Fashion and identity in late Qing Shanghai

Positions

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 301-330

  Zamperini, Paola ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250641104     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11-2-301     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. As Gail Hershatter so aptly put it, "The question of who's dressing Hu Baoyu [a Shanghai courtesan often represented in fiction; see below] is more important than who is undressing her" (Gail Hershatter, private conversation, August 2001)
2. This article deals with fictional representations of clothing and their possible meanings; thus it is not an article about the history of fashion and/or the clothing industry in the late Qing period. There are many books and studies dealing with this topic and with the issue of historical changes in male and female clothing during the late imperial and Republican Chinese periods, and it would take too much space to list them all here. See, just to mention a few, Antonia Finnane and Anne McLaren, eds., Dress, Sex, and Text in Chinese Culture (Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute, 1999)
3. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols, China, 1911-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
4. Luo Suwen, Nuxing yu jindaizhongguo shehui [Women in modern Chinese society] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1996), 168-204
5. Luo, "Qingmo Shanghai dushi nuzhuangde yanbian (1880-1910)" [Evolution in women's urban clothing in late Qing Shanghai] (paper presented at the symposium on Chinese women's history, Academia Sinica, 23-25 August 2001)
6. Claire Roberts, ed., Evolution and Revolution: Chinese Dress, 1700s-1900s (Sydney: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1997)
7. Valerie Steele and John Major, eds., China Chic: East Meets West (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999)
8. The main primary sources for the present article are Chen Sen, Pinhua baojian [A precious mirror for ranking flowers] (1849; rpt., Xi'an: Xibei daxue chubanshe, 1993)
9. Han Ziyun, Haishanghua [Flowers of Shanghai] (1894; rpt., Taipei: Huanggua zazhishe, 1983)
10. Li Boyuan, Haitian hongxueji [Lonely goose deserted by the world] (1904; rpt., Nanjing: Jiangsu gujichubanshe, 1997)
11. Luyixuan Zhuren, Hualiu shenqing zhuan [A tale of deep passion] (1895; rpt., Beijing: Shifan daxue chuban she, 1992)
12. Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu [The nine-tailed fox] (1910; rpt., Taipei: Guanya chuban, 1984)
13. Sun Jiazhen, Haishang fanhuameng [Shanghai's lavish dreams] (1903; rpt., Shanghai: Shanghai Guji chubanshe, 1991)
14. Wu, Haishang mingji si da jingang qishu [The wonderful book of the four guardian gods of Shanghai's courtesans] (1898; rpt., Harbin: Beifang wenyi chubanshe, 1998)
15. Yu Da, Qinglou meng [A dream of blue pavilions] (1878; rpt., Taipei: Baihua Zhongguo gudian xiaoshuo daxi, 1980)
16. Zeng Pu, Niehaihua [A flower in an ocean of sin] (1905; rpt., Taipei: Wenhua tushu gongsi, 1990)
17. Zhang Chunfan, Jiuweigui [The nine-tailed turtle] (1910; rpt., Beijing: Renmin Zhongguo chubanshe, 1993). However, the analysis presented here draws extensively on the whole body of late Qing fiction
18. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)
19. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (New York: Routledge, 1994)
20. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
21. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)
22. Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Brian S. Turner, eds., The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1991)
23. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaf and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1989)
24. Jane M. Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 1990)
25. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
26. Ann Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
27. Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (New York: Kodansha International, 1994)
28. Marilyn J. Horn and Lois M. Gurel, eds., The Second Skin: An Interdisciplinary Study of Clothing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981)
29. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the "Ancien Regime" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
30. Kaja Silverman, "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 145-147
31. Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
32. Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985)
33. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)
34. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
35. For an exhaustive and updated bibliography about body and fashion, see Entwistle, Fashioned Body, 240
36. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 190
37. Shigeisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. 166-167
38. Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus (Froben Bale, 1530), trans. B. McGregor, in Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 25 of Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. Jesse Kelley Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 269
39. For the main characteristics of late Qing novels see Ah Ying, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi [History of the late Qing novel] (Bejing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980)
40. Chen Pingyuan, Ershiji Zhongguo xiaoshuoshi [History of the Chinese novel in the twentieth century] (Beijing: Beijing Daxue chubanshe, 1989)
41. S. H. L. Cheng, "'Flowers of Shanghai' and the Late Ch'ing Courtesan Novel" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1980)
42. Alexander Des Forges's groundbreaking work on the Shanghai novel, "Street Talk and Alley Stories: Tangled Narratives of Shanghai from 'Lives of Shanghai Flowers' (1892) to 'Midnight' (1933)" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998)
43. and his "Opium/Leisure/Shanghai: Urban Economies of Consumption," in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press), 167-185
44. Milena Dolezoleva-Velingerova, ed., The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980)
45. Patrick Hanan, "The Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60, no. 2 (2000): 413
46. Hanan, "Wu Jianren and the Narrator," in Shibianyuweixin: Wan Ming yu Wan Qingdewenxueyishu [Change and reform: The legacy of late Ming and Late Qing literature] (Taipei: Wenzhesuo chubanshe, 2001)
47. Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early-Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)
48. Lu Xun, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe [A brief history of Chinese fiction], in Lu Xun Quanji [in Collected works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1989), vol. 9
49. David Der-Wei Wang, Fin-de-Siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997)
50. Henry Y. H. Zhao, The Uneasy Narrator: Chinese Fiction from the Traditional to the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)
51. See Paola Zamperini, "Clothes That Matter: Fashioning Modernity in Late Qing Novels," Fashion Theory 5, no. 2 (June 2001): 203, for a discussion of representations of Western clothing in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Chinese fiction
52. For the role played by Shanghai as a fundamental "chronotope" in late Qing fiction, see Cheng, "'Flowers of Shanghai' and the Late Ch'ing Courtesan Novel"
53. Yingjin Zhang, The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. 180-181
54. For a brilliant discussion of Shanghai as a literary trope and as a modern metropolis, see Des Forges, "Street Talk and Alley Stories," esp. 8-70
55. For more information about Hu Baoyu, a real historical figure, see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 176
56. and Paola Zamperini, "Lost Bodies: Representing Prostitution in Late Qing Fiction" (manuscript), 29-46
57. Pinghuazhuren, Jiuweihu, 107
58. Sun, Haishang fanhuameng, 1276
59. Zamperini, "Clothes That Matter," 203-204
60. See Liu Shangling, Xiyang faming zai zhongguo [Western inventions in China] (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2001)
61. See Antonia Finnane, "Yangzhou's 'Mondernity': Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century," in this issue of positions
62. Wu Renshu, "Mingdai pingmin fushideliuxingfengshang yushidafudefanying" [Popular sartorial trends and customs and elite opposition in the Ming dynasty], Xinshixue [New history], September 1999, 55-109
63. See Des Forges, "Opium/Leisure/Shanghai."
64. For the history and meanings of the term wenming in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, see Fang Weigui, "Jinxiandai Zhingguo 'wenming,' 'wenhua,' guan" [Perspectives on "civilization" and "culture" in modern and contemporary China], www.gwdg.de/∼oas/wsc/ wenming.htm, 11. I am indebted to Eugenio Menegon for directing me to this very useful article
65. The compound wenming was already used in texts such as the Yi Jing [Classic of changes] and the Shu Jing [Classic of history]. Lydia Liu describes wenming in its new nineteenth-century usage as a "return-graphic loan," a kanji term derived from classical Chinese - in other words, a classical Chinese compound that Japanese translators, at the turn of the nineteenth century, used to translate new Western concepts. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 308-309
66. Wenming here is clearly the antonym of yeman, uncivilized, barbaric, foreign
67. Li, Wenming xiaoshi, 67
68. Zeng, Niehaihua, 108
69. See also Hanan, "Missionary Novels of Nineteenth-Century China," 413
70. Luyixuan, Hualiu shenqing zhuan, 19
71. See Paola Zamperini, The Secret des Fleurs: Love, Death, and Syphilis (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming), for a study of representations of death and syphilis in late Qing novels about Shanghai
72. See Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors' Shadow: Kinship, Personality, and Social Mobility in Village China (New York: Anchor, 1967)
73. Liu Xin, The Otherness of Self: A Genealogy of the Self in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
74. See Leo Oufan Lee, "The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations," 31-61
75. for the relationship between popular press and modernity in Shanghai, and Yeh Wen-hsin, "Introduction: Interpreting Chinese Modernity, 1900-1950," 1-28
76. See, for example, Bai Juyi's poem attacking the women of his time who adopted Western fashions: Bai Juyi, "Shishizhuang" [Modern clothes], in Dianziban Bai Juyi shi quanji [Collected poems of Bai Juyi on the Web], vol. 4, at www.bigchalk.com/cgibin/WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/wa/HWCDA/file?fileid= 171853& flt=High_School& pathTitles=/Poetry_of_Tang_Dynasty/ Bai_Ju_Yi_(772_-_846_A_D_)/All_Works_by_Bai_
77. See also Suzanne E. Cahill, "'Our Women Are Acting Like Foreigners' Wives!': Western Influences on Tang Dynasty Women's Fashion," in Steele and Major, China Chic, 103