Book Review

Asia

Victoria Cass has written a short, lively, and engaging study of female archetypes that were deeply imbedded in the structures of Chinese culture and daily life during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Cass focuses on women as outsiders, as revealed in the private and informal language of memoirs, miscellanies, short stories, and novels. Her goal is to place these women/outsiders in their own historical context of "the universals of myth and religion, and the verities of the cultural landscape," "so that they will speak coherently to the modern" (p. xii). In this, she succeeds admirably.	1
Cass opens with a chapter on "The Great Ming," emphasizing the prosperity of the Ming dynasty and the prevalence of male anxiety and warnings about dangerous women. She emphasizes three aspects of Ming culture as directly relevant to her study of female archetypes: the importance of piety and the cult of the family; the growth of urban prosperity with its attendant entertainment districts, cosmopolitanism, anonymity, and relative freedom; and solitude or reclusion as an abiding cultural ideal. Each of these, and sometimes two or all three at once, helped condition the roles of women as dangerous outsiders.	2
Cass notes that the geisha in China was, on the one hand, captive and enslaved but, on the other, highly refined and in some cases even celebrated for her beauty and artistic talent. Although I find it difficult to picture a Chinese courtesan as a geisha, Cass justifies the use of the Japanese term because it literally means "artist," which is what the Chinese ji or courtesan was. In the late Ming, some geishas reached the pinnacle of fame as the romantic partners and aesthetic and moral advisors of the most prominent male literati in the empire.	. . .