Visualizing love and longing in Song dynasty paintings of women.

Abstract

The nature of emotion, particularly how it is manifested, has been a concern of Chinese theorists since the early imperial period. One way that this concern came to be expressed in certain genres of Chinese art and literature was in the conception of elite women as preoccupied with romance. In the Song dynasty (960--1279), painters and poets engage in an extensive dialogue on the meanings of attachments between men and women, with the stages of the love relationship coded as desire, love, longing and heartbreak. An examination of extant paintings from this period reveals that this construction pervades the cultural productions of both court figures and intellectuals. This dissertation analyzes Song dynasty paintings of women in love in light of the construction of both femininity and masculinity, the nature of representation, and text-image relationships, and considers the authorship and reception of these works. I argue that by the Song dynasty, what became valued in the pictorial representation of a female figure was her interior state. Artists had several modes for revealing it at their disposal: these included not only attention to a figure's facial expression and gesture, but also the employment of poetic tropes that seized upon every aspect of the female figure as a potential means of disclosing her feelings. Chapter One investigates the gardens and bedrooms of the inner quarters as gendered settings for the representation of inner emotions. Chapter Two considers the representation of singing girls (courtesans) and the connection of musical entertainment to the performance of desire, arguing that paintings of this performance constitute a metaconstruction. Chapter Three examines self adornment with mirrors and makeup as a means of reflecting a figure's heart/mind and a way of literally writing emotions upon her face. Chapter Four analyzes the erotic connotations of women's work with cloth. I conclude that each of these elements is available for manipulation, not so much to express the figure's imagined feelings as to provide the authors and audience of these images with a figure on which to project their emotions, on subjects that could be much wider-ranging than the vicissitudes of love relationships.