Mirror, dream and shadow: Gu Taiqing's life and writings

Abstract

Gu Taiqing is one of the most remarkable and prolific poetesses of the Qing dynasty. This study attempts to present critical and comprehensive research on Gu Taiqing's writing so to unearth and illustrate Taiqing's own life and mentality, in order to enrich our understanding of the role that writing has played in the lives of the pre-modern women. Overall Taiqing's writing can be interpreted in terms of three categories: mirror, dream and shadow. This dissertation applies these three concepts to build up a theoretical framework as the three concepts bear rich meanings in both interpreting Taiqing's works per se and analyzing the relationship between Taiqing's writing and her life. This dissertation consists of three parts. The first part examines Taiqing's aspiration for ascending to the heavenly world, reluctance to leave the mundane world, and time consciousness and philosophical speculations. The second part focuses on analyzing Taiqing's writings, shi poems, ci poems and the novel Honglou meng ying. Taiqing's poems on traveling, the special imagery and poetic realms in her ci poems are explored in this work. The third part is a study of Taiqing's friendship with other talented woman within and beyond the Autumn Red Poetry Society. This part also addresses issues regarding women scholars and their endeavors to establish a type of immortality through words.