To effectively consider the production of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn as a literary and cultural icon across distances of space and time, a brief look into the literary and writing cultures of Chosŏn and China during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may lend itself to a better understanding of the material and ideological exchanges across the dynasties of the Ming, Qing, and Yi. From there, we will consider the production of cultural, literary, and gendered discourses through the contested portrayals of a transdynastic icon, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn.

Literary Culture in Chosŏn during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

From the beginnings to the middle of the Yi Dynasty (1392-1910), the literary world was officially occupied by and constructed through male voices, bodies, and texts. The majority of literary, political and educational writings were composed in classical Chinese (hanmun 漢文) even after the creation of han’gŭl (the Korean written alphabet) in the 15th century. While poetry written in hanmun, the genre known as hansi 漢詩, likely had its beginnings before the Koryŏ period (918-1392), it continued to dominate the literary scene in Korea throughout the eighteenth century. During that time, literati were scholar-officials who generally adhered to rather conservative neo-Confucian thought and modes of expression. As such, these scholar-officials were the writers and readers of a textual world that tended to exclude women—a world scripted in hanmun, considered public, and gendered male.

Women, for their part, mostly occupied a separate writing world of the “inner chambers”—one composed of letters and poetry in hangŭl, the written vernacular (ŏnmun 諺文). Beginning in the sixteenth century and extending into the twentieth, sijo 時調 or kasa 歌辭 remained popular genres for writing poetry in the vernacular. While both men and women were said to have composed sijo and kasa, women—especially those of the yangban (elite) status—seemed to prefer writing kasa. Among the extant 4,000 sijo, just 92 of them are attributed to kisaeng (professional women entertainers), and only a small handful to yangban women.¹ Kasa were lyric poems (sometimes written in a mixture of hanmun and hangŭl) that could extend up to 1,000 lines and were often set to music. Frequently, a number of people contributed to the composition and performance of a single kasa, a practice that provides an interesting contrast to notions of authorship prevalent in discussions of hansi.

Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn is said to have written both kasa and hansi (though not sijo); yet, among extant writings attributed to her, we were able to locate only one kasa, the “Kyuwŏn ka” or “Song of a Woman’s Sorrow.”² Aside from questions related to the extent of Nansŏrhŏn’s writing activities—Did she write both kasa and hansi, yet only the latter were deemed valuable enough to preserve? Or, did she prefer to write hansi, a genre more related to the public world of the Neo-Confucian male scholar-official?—the fact that kasa as a genre was not popularized among communities of women until long after her death (in the eighteenth century) was likely the primary reason why she wrote hansi. It was simply the most prevalent, recognized, and valued (both for aesthetic and moral purposes) literary genre during her life.

To elaborate on the gendered implications of literary forms and genre in Chosŏn, one mid-eighteenth century scholar-official, Hong Taeyong, wrote that “composing verse [in hansi] and a respect for the singing of poetry are not the proper affairs of women.”³ He adds that even in the extraordinary case of a woman being intellectually and morally capable of composing poetry in hansi, “no intelligent man would consider it [the poetry] worthy of notice.”⁴ In this same text, which is actually a record of an exchange between Hong Taeyong and two companions from the Qing dynasty, Hong criticizes women-poets like Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn. He claims that her hansi, though of high quality, did not express virtue, as they improperly prioritized her talent and “other ambitions” to the “thrice following” (the dictum that states that a woman should follow first her father, then her husband, and finally her son). This exchange highlights the continued perception of the writing world as public, male and ideally separated from the inner chambers of a woman’s work and life.

At the same time, we cannot stress enough the permeability between these seemingly separated figurative and literal spaces of the public, scholar-official textual world and that of the inner chambers. Several examples of women’s writings in Chinese and men’s writings in the vernacular—such as father’s letters to daughters and wives in hangŭl, sijo and kasa composed by men, women’s written petitions in hanmun, or instructional writings like the Naehun (1475) by Queen Songhye, who uses a mixture of hanmun and hangŭl—suggest that the writing world, while rhetorically and ideologically divided along gender (and class) lines, was in practice a space in which gender and writing binaries converged, were blurred, and emerged unrecognizable.

To further complicate static representations of writing culture in Chosŏn, even within this official world of male-dominated literati, tensions and conflicting ideologies as to the import of poetry existed. Most notable is the contention between the Sarim School (士林派) and Sajang School (詞章派), which was also known as the Hun’gu School (勳舊派). While scholars from both schools adhered to Confucian ideology, and therefore regarded literature as a medium for orthodox instruction, Sarim scholars tended to advocate engagement with the literary arts in isolation—apart from politics and the public world. By contrast, Sajang scholars believed that active participation in government was vital to the teaching of morality through literary writings .⁵ As such, Sajang scholars dominated government positions until the late-sixteenth century, during which more Sarim scholars secured positions within the state’s bureaucracy under the reign of King Sŏnjo (1568-1608). These new Sarim scholars, like Pak Sun 朴淳(1523-89), began the process of bridging the gap between these two traditions of literary thought. He proposed that this could be accomplished if writers were to emulate Tang poetic traditions instead of the Song (which had been the literary trend). Pak further argued for the elimination of excessive stylization, urging that the poet restore conventions of “the natural expression of human feelings.”⁶ This movement toward writing in emulation of the Tang poets, specifically Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei, gained momentum through the poetry and literary criticisms of Hŏ Kyun 許筠 (1569-1618) and the poetry of his contemporaries, Ch’oe Kyŏng-ch’an, Paek Kwang-hun, and Yi Tal (also a Hŏ family tutor), who were known as the “Three Tang Talents of Korea” (三唐詩人).

According to Yang-Hi Choe-Wall, these “Three Tang Talents of Korea” sought the skilled expression of emotions and the beauties of the hermit life and nature through simple and uncluttered poetic language. This convention signaled a move away from “customary social and philosophical discourse” toward a more personal mode of literary expression that prompted ambivalent responses from the scholar-officials.⁷ While Hŏ Kyun, the younger brother of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, praised the “Three Tang Talents of Korea” (especially Yi Tal), Yi Su-gwang (well known as a predecessor to the Sirhak School) criticized their poetry as being “nothing more than an imitation of late Tang poems and much inferior to the High Tang.”⁸

The pervasiveness of Tang poetry in Chosŏn literary and official discourse is not entirely surprising. For centuries, the dynasties of Korea and China had engaged in frequent political, cultural, and ideological exchanges from the transmission of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist texts to the physical movements and journeys of bodies—envoys, literati, and scholars. Hŏ Kyun, the younger brother of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, is a fitting example of one who embodied all three. He was variably identified as a poet-scholar of the jinshi status, an emissary to China, a Sarim scholar, an exile, and the first compiler of his sister’s poems. The example of Hŏ Kyun further demonstrates that this interdynastic transmission of ideas and texts is anything but abstract; rather, it was borne of conversations between people such as Hŏ Kyun, and the literati in Ming-Qing such as Zhu Zhifan and Lan Fanwei (the two envoys who wrote prefaces and introductions to Nansŏrhŏnjip).

Undoubtedly, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, being in ideological and physical proximity to these changes, was deeply impacted and influenced by the emergence of a Tang revival in the community of Chosŏn male literati.

Literary Culture during the Ming-Qing Transition in China

Though in many ways the boundary between China and Chosŏn was fluid, porous, and subject to frequent movements, differences did (of course) exist across temporal and spatial dynasties. Indeed, when comparing the status of women in the late Imperial China literary worlds with that of Chosŏn Korea, it is possible to suggest that Ming-Qing China experienced a more visible and traceable flourishing of women’s writing activities, from composition and publication of their writings in multiple genres to women’s editing and compiling anthologies of their own works. While the reasons for this relatively greater visibility of women’s active and influential participation in literary culture in China are numerous, one material correlation, as put forth by Dorothy Ko, may be the emergence of a thriving commercial publishing industry and the beginnings of a consumer economy that lent themselves to “socioeconomic and cultural conditions most conducive to” a women’s culture of writing, readership, and education.⁹

Related to this spread of a publishing market, a milieu of collaboration between men and women surfaced, most noticeably in the growing trend of anthologizing women’s work—both as separate anthologies and within collections that included works by individuals across gender and dynastic spaces. This trend of anthologizing women’s works seems to have also stemmed from a concern that women’s writings of the past were not preserved—often the numerous women who contributed to the Shijing were cited as justification for the inclusion of female poetry. In the context of the Manchu invasions and the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, that both women and men turned their attention to publishing women’s writing may speak to pervasive anxiety concerning interpretations and re-presentations of reality and history. During this period of political upheaval, contestations regarding political loyalty, love, memory, and loss began to take center stage in a variety of treatments of aesthetic, genre, and the nature of male-female relationships.

One of these was the emergence of the courtesan as a living metaphor for the loyalist poet; additionally, the life and image of the courtesan was cast in relation to the fundamental late-Ming concept of qing 情—which portrays love as the necessary psychological stimulus for virtuous action. Male literati believed that romantic love was an essential part of the character of a man, and that loving “in greater measure than others” is what makes heroes because “only those who can make great sacrifices can love truly.”¹⁰ At its core, qing encapsulates the belief that romantic love is able to transcend even death, that it is in fact capable of redefining the boundaries of life and death through the sheer power of the lovers’ devotion to each other. Thus, the scholar-courtesan relationship was idealized through the image of a talented literatus who will only know fulfillment when he finds a talented devoted lover-courtesan to match him. It was this relationship that became the symbol for a romantic and idealized vision of love and loyalty to a passing dynasty.

The concept of qing was furthermore inextricable from genre and the changing image of women—the love of a woman was no longer seen as posing a threat to morality, but rather became an intricate idealization of devotion, courage, political loyalism, and literary talent. Indeed, the image of a talented courtesan or gentrywoman engaging in the literary arts became a pivotal arena in which literati defined, clarified, and re-envisioned the changes in their lives. Kang-i Sun Chang has written extensively on how these modes of conversing with ideologies, genre, writing, and gender converged in the legendary relationship between Chen Zilong and the courtesan, Liu Shi, who was also an active reader-writer and participant in the literary and anthologizing world of late imperial China. The written poetic exchanges between these two individuals have also been credited with a revival of interest in the Song genre of ci poetry, or the song-lyric.

Readers and writers who traveled between the Choson and the Ming/Qing, either physically or through textual exchange, had to grapple with contexts that were always significantly different, but also similar enough to cause one to forget that they were different. What did the presence of differences among so many similarities mean for women, and, specifically, what did they mean for Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn and her readers? Numerous anthologies of women in China attest that women were not only prolifically writing, reading, and otherwise engaging in writing culture, but also that they were being recognized, and thereby inserting a female subjectivity into a literary world that they were actively creating, standardizing, and modifying. One scholar has estimated that over 3,000 women’s anthologies were compiled and edited during the Ming-Qing transition, with a total of collected works of an individual (bieji 别集) at 1,500 during the Ming and 5,000 during the Qing.¹¹

Some late-Ming women literati such as Liu Shi and Wang Duanshu—as authors, editors, readers, and literary critics—strived to erase the aesthetic male-female boundary by critiquing women’s and men’s works on an equal plane talent/merit, by writing poetry that defied female-specific conventions of humility and modesty, or by compiling and publishing works by women. The act of compiling women’s works for preservation and transmission by women creates a space in which a textual, historical, and literary female subjectivity could be explored. Thus, it may not be all too surprising that Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn emerges as one such site—both in text and the imaginary—of exchanges and contestations across time (through dynastic transitions) and space (through the late-Ming, Qing, and Chosŏn). Literary aesthetic, proto-national identities, political loyalties, and womanhood were all subject to revision and negotiations.

Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn, A Transdynastic Icon

In Zhu Zhifan’s introduction to Nansŏrhŏn jip, Nansŏrhŏn is first clearly and obviously identified as a woman of the inner chambers. This fact seems to be the underlying basis for the large amount of (suprised) praise that is given to the quality of Nansŏrhŏn’s poetry. The act of her composing such magnificent poetry is characterized as being in the tradition of Ban Zhao’s and Xu Xianfei’s virtuous textual and political acts. The suggestion of the fusion of heaven and earth, or the meeting of male and female energies, in the act of a kyubang woman composing poetry both reiterates gendered spaces of writing and justifies their preservation. Nansŏrhŏn’s poetry is likened to “precious jade stones.” It is important to note, however, that the texture and aesthetic of her works are distinguished from the “simple love stories that entertain the brows of women.” It seems as though Nansŏrhŏn’s poetry is the expression of balanced aesthetic: it is “graceful without being artificial, full of strength without losing its form.” In this appraisal, Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn is represented as an “authentic” poetic talent, albeit in the guise of a Korean woman.

By contrast, Liu Shi’s introduction is a scathing critique that not only accuses Nansŏrhŏn of plagiarizing Tang poets, but that also faults her own Ming contemporaries for having clouded aesthetic judgement in their evaluations of the poetry of a “foreign woman”—praising her poetry merely because her identity is “new and strange.” Nansŏrhŏn is clearly marked and identified as a Korean woman, but her status as an accomplished and authentic poet is contested and nearly obliterated in this instance. In contesting the validity of Nansŏrhŏn’s status as poet, Liu Shi provides examples of lines copied verbatim from Tang poems—a kind of rhetorical-literary tactic that asserts not only her own poetic expertise but that also seems to flout male constructions of evaluating poetry on the basis of gender or “new and strange” rather than pure aesthetic and literary value. Of greater interest though, is the emergence of the concept of “authenticity” in the sense of author-ownership in this text. Liu Shi not only questions Nansŏrhŏn’s poetic ability, but also muses upon the transmission of Tang and Chinese texts into Korea, publicly and textually questioning whether these texts “were taken there [Korea] as exotic curiosities, little known to the world, and so Korean writers thought they could claim those poems for their own?” If we recall, in Korea there was a rekindling of interest in emulating Tang poetry, a literary trend that arguably deeply influenced Nansŏrhŏn. Liu Shi—as a reader, writer, Ming loyalist, courtesan, and poet-critic concerned with elevating the status and equality of (some) women’s poetry—constructs a discourse on transdynastic spaces of literary value, authenticity, and ownership of written expression that best suits her project. Even more noteworthy is the fact that she melds this discourse of the individual and a proto-national community into her construction and critique of Nansŏrhŏn.

Wang Duanshu’s commentary on Nansŏrhŏn in the Mingyuan shiwei chubian reveals quite different concerns than either Zhu Zhifan or Liu Shi. A gentrywoman who was active and prolific within the literary world during the Ming-Qing transition, she does not seem entirely concerned with inscripting an explicit identity of place onto Nansŏrhŏn (as, we have seen, Liu Shi does) but rather muses upon the nature and inherent virtue of women and of women’s poetry. Furthermore, the poems that Wang Duanshu mentions are quite different in content and texture than the “Songs of Immortals” that Liu Shi implicates in her biography. Wang Duanshu’s reading of Nansŏrhŏn is one of a (woman) who wrote with “gentle wisdom” and “deep feeling” in a pure language.

While the above readings only begin to touch on the particulars of the diverse accounts of Nansŏrhŏn as a woman, a Korean, and a poet, in the Chŏson, Ming, and Qing dynasties, at least we can see that the image of Hŏ Nansŏrhŏn as a transdynastic icon was hotly contested and constantly changing. In fact, the assessments of Nansŏrhŏn often seem to say more about the individuals penning them than they do about Nansŏrhŏn herself. These assessments were produced by individuals reading and writing in times and places that were always overlapping, but never quite the same, and they reflected the anxieties that seem to inevitably arise therein.

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