A Study Of Female Lesson Poetry In The Qing Dynasty

The poems are mainly about teaching and admonishing the younger members of the family.Before the Qing dynasty,its creators were mainly men,with few women present,but it was not until the Qing dynasty that the situation improved and gradually flourished.This article uses the poems in The Qing Dynasty Boudoir Collection Series and the Jiangnan Women’s Collection as a source of documentation.On the basis of the content of the poems,it explores the family consciousness and the concept of talent and virtue revealed by the women in the Qing Dynasty when teaching their children.The poems are interpreted in depth,examining the relationship between the poems and paintings,and exploring the relationship between the paintings and the family and the individual woman,in order to understand the rise and fall of certain families in the Qing dynasty and to gain a glimpse into the poetic conceptions of women in the Qing dynasty.The introductory section focuses on five aspects: the origin of the topic,the definition of the concept,the current state of research,the research methodology and the significance of the study.The author’s main focus is to redefine and reinterpret the term "lesson poetry" on the basis of previous research,and to study the content and significance of lesson poetry through the methods of induction and statistics,close reading of texts and comparative analysis.The first chapter focuses on a quantitative analysis of women’s lesson poetry in the Qing dynasty,briefly introducing the social context of its rise and exploring the reasons for its prosperity.In terms of temporal distribution,the creation of women’s lesson poetry continued from the early Qing dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty,especially in the Blooming period of Qing dynasty(1684-1795)and the Mid-Qing period(1796-1842),when the social environment was relatively stable.In terms of subjects,they mainly include children,brothers,sisters,grandchildren,uncles,nephews,aunts,daughters-in-law and maidservants,among whom the largest number of poems were written for children.On the whole,the prosperity of women’s poetry in the Qing dynasty was partly due to the general improvement of women’s literacy in the Qing dynasty,and partly due to the gender division of labor between men and women,with men often going away to study and travel,unable to teach their offspring consistently,so the responsibility of teaching and training fell to women.The second chapter analyses the family consciousness and concepts of talent and virtue that women of the Qing dynasty exuded when lecturing their sons and daughters.The main themes of the poems are to teach sons to study,to encourage them to take examinations,to admonish them to become officials,and by extension,to advise them to cherish their time,to refrain from playfulness,to refrain from missing of their relatives,to be determined,and to be loyal and filial.In these poems,women of the Qing dynasty show a strong sense of family values and inheritance,and regard teaching their sons to become successful as an act of family honor.Although poetry and calligraphy were also covered,they were always mixed in with the training of women’s virtues,and there were fewer poems devoted to the study of daughters.In the poems on women’s virtue,the women of the Qing dynasty often reveal their thoughts on the issue of talent and virtue,either because of the fatalism that talent and virtue are mutually exclusive,or because they were influenced by the traditional notion that no talent is virtue,and they were very cautious about the education of their daughters in poetry and calligraphy.The lessons given to other family members such as brothers,sisters,grandsons,uncles,nephews,aunts,nieces,daughters-in-law and maidservants overlap more with those given to their children,with some relaxation in the attitude of the lessons and a greater focus on the content of the lessons.The third chapter focuses on the paintings about teaching,exploring the reasons for its painting and its content,combining it with related inscriptions and poems,and providing an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the painting and the poem,and further revealing the significance of the picture of the teaching for the family and the individual woman.Many scholars of the Qing dynasty,after they had become adults,would hire painters to draw scenes of their mothers’ hard teaching and invite famous artists to inscribe them.The scene is often cold and sullen,with the figures reduced to a window,highlighting the hardships of the mother’s teaching through the contrast between the large and the small.The inscriptions echo the content of the picture,interpreting the elements in the painting while also linking them to relevant historical facts and old events,giving the picture a deep connotation and ultimately acting as a spur to the family’s descendants.The picture of a woman teaching her daughter is extremely rare,with only one painting by Luo Qilan of a woman teaching her daughter at an autumn evening being recorded in the present day.The painting is associated with the injustice suffered by Luo Qilan in the field of poetry and calligraphy,and inscribes poems by six women,all of whom express support for her actions of educating daughter,making it a painting of fighting for the injustice suffered by women.The fourth chapter focuses on the significance of Qing dynasty women’s lesson poetry from two perspectives: the recording of old family stories and the transmission of poetic ideas.The primary purpose of the poems was to educate the sons and daughters of the family to become adults,but from the actual writing of the poems,they also record many of the family’s past events,and because of their strong documentary and intimate nature,they are of great historical value in understanding the rise and fall of certain families in the Qing dynasty.Secondly,there are many specific guidance for writing poetry in the lesson poems,which although written for the education of the family’s children,also objectively convey the poetic ideas of the women of the Qing dynasty,and are of some reference value for understanding their poetic ideas,as well as for understanding the family heritage of some of the poets and scholars of the Qing dynasty.