Tolerance and Intolerance across Gender and Cultural Boundaries:

Xue Shaohui’s Rewriting of Exemplary Foreign Women Stories

 

Nanxiu Qian   Rice University

 

In the aftermath of the abortive 1898 Reform Movement, the late Qing woman writer and reformer Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) initiated a book project, the Biographies of Exemplary Foreign Women (Waiguo lienu chuan). Xue requested her husband Chen Shoupeng (1857-?) to research and orally translate from Western histories and literatures over two hundred fifty women stories, dated from antiquity to 1885. She herself rewrote and compiled them into twelve categories. The book was completed in 1903 and published in 1906, arguably the first exhaustive introduction of Western women to the Chinese readers. 

 

Xue intended this book as part of her continual effort of reform, for “observing the education for Western women” (guan xiguo nujiao), a scholarly response to male reformers’ ardent yet insubstantial advocate of taking the Western model for Chinese women’s education. This paper examines the complex process of Xue’s establishment of her ideal womanhood through classifying, translating, transplanting and sometimes twisting the values of the female West, and negotiating the Chinese and the Western traditions into coherent, accessible and acceptable knowledge and moral guidance for Chinese women.

 

A major focus therefore falls on how Xue negotiated the conflict between the rigid Chinese moral confinement on women and relatively “looser” Western rules. A close comparison of her rewriting of Western women stories with their original sources will show that her tolerance and intolerance of Western values often trespassed cultural and gender boundaries. She might, for instance, tolerate or even embrace very non-Chinese values whereas fervently resist Western moral codes seemingly very similar to the conventional Chinese mores. She could also tolerate and subvert simultaneously a moral/cultural enterprise, either Chinese or Western. In brief, Xue’s vision of a new womanhood defied male reformers’ principles, either “Western means serving the Chinese substratum” (Zhongti Xiyong) or a full Westernization, coming to stand for a feminist creation upon sorting through all established values.