Contrary to persistent gender stereotypes that relegated females to an intuitive and sentimental existence, educated women inhabited a world rich in both intellectual and emotional meaning. in fact, it was the act of reading that joined the cerebral and sentimental into a closed circle. in the preceding chapter, I offered an objective overview of the sociocultural position of the woman reader in the print culture of seventeenth- century Jiangnan; in this chapter I examine the subjective meaning of reading -- of dramas, poetry, and each other's works -- to the woman herself. in particular, I focus on the craze of women for The Peony Pavilion, a tribute to love by the great late Ming playwright Tang Xianzu, to illuminate two significant results of reading: how reading romantic fiction helped shape women's self-perceptions, and how women projected their self-perceptions onto pages of commentaries and poems, fueling a cult of qing among the reading public.
The Obsessive Reader: the Three Women's Saga
Ming and Qing women did not read to master a canonical tradition in order to compete in the civil service examinations, nor did they leaf through books casually just to pass the time. They read for edification, often with an intensity that bordered on fanaticism. Drama and other fictional works were particularly engaging, for they gave shape to the reader's aspirations while offering solace for the imperfections experienced in real life. From pages of fiction woman readers built their own floating worlds in which intellectual stimulation conjoined with emotional and religious gratification.
Specifically, the meanings that the obsessive female reader found in fiction and drama can be understood in four ways, as this chapter will . . .