Introduction
This paper explores the story of two women Li Ti 李媞 (1805–1829) and Huang Xunying 黃巺英 (1788–1829) active in the first half of the nineteenth century in Qing China. They were cousins but developed an extraordinary bond that led to their double suicide. This story is extremely compelling for students of women’s history and women’s writing because its historically reliable textual records allow us to explore female bonding and suicide, not only in the voice of Li Ti herself but also from her family’s perspective.
The primary source for this study is Li Ti’s poetry collections as included in the Shanghai Lishi Yiyuan sandai Qingfen ji 上海李氏易園三代清芬集 (The pure-fragrance collection by three generations of the Li Family from the Yi Garden, hereafter abridged as Qingfen ji), which was put in print by Li Ti’s grandnephew Li Weiqing 李味清 (1880–after 1940) in 1940.Footnote 1 It consists of eight individual collections (bieji 別集) of poetry and prose by six family members from the generations preceding Li Weiqing. Among them are two collections by his grand-aunt Li Ti, Youdezhu lou shigao 猶得住樓詩稿 (The shi draft from the Tower of this Intolerable Life) and Youdezhu lou cigao 猶得住樓詞稿 (The ci draft from Tower of this Intolerable Life). The collections of Li’s writings have preserved 233 shi 詩 and 40 ci 詞 poems in addition to one prose piece she wrote to mourn her late father. Conforming to the conventions of traditional Chinese poetic culture, the poetic titles and attached head- and interlineal notes were provided to indicate the author’s thematic concerns as well as under what circumstances the compositions were made. In other words, these poems can be read as rich autobiographical narratives.
In addition, we find in the family’s collected writings about Li Ti and Huang Xunying by Li Ti’s younger brother, Li Shangzhang 李尚璋 (1810–1870). His narrative shows that he and his sister were very close and he speaks highly of her. Five years his senior, Li Ti was a devoted sister, having played an important role in his upbringing. Not only did she tirelessly care for him like a mother when he was sick, but she also acted as an unflagging guide when they were receiving their literary education at home. Li Shangzhang was profoundly impacted by his sister’s death. He wrote both The Biography of My Late Sister Lixiang (先姊吏香傳) and Forty Poems Mourning Sister Lixiang (哭吏香姊四十韻), in which he provides a close family member’s perspective on Li Ti’s life, her relationship with Huang, and their choice of suicide.Footnote 2
Because of the survival of Li Ti’s and her brother’s writings, the exploration of the relationship of Li Ti and Huang Xunying as well as their suicides is centered on her and her family’s perspectives. By examining both Li Ti’s own narratives narratives of her life and death, as well as the narratives by her family, I attempt to reconstruct her life trajectory, how it revolved around Huang, and how it ended with suicide. I will show how both her own and her brother’s accounts are crucial for understanding this rare case of female suicide in relation to literary talent, marriage, gender norms, and personal sensibilities in the historical context of Qing China. For students of Ming-Qing women’s history and culture, the story of Li Ti and Huang reflects a range of critical concerns that have been more or less explored by scholars already: literary women capable of representing and expressing themselves in poetry; young women delaying or refusing to marry in order to care for elderly parents; mismatched and miserable marriages; strong female bonds beyond kinship; and women committing suicide for various reasons. However, the case of Li Ti and Huang can still heighten our understanding of all these issues to another level.
The sheer survival of Li Ti’s own poems about her life, her relationship with Huang, and their suicides, along with the larger family collections, constitutes a startling discovery. Previously discovered records condition what we know about history, but new discoveries never cease to surprise us. Although the surviving collections of Li Ti’s poetry resulted from many rounds of deletions made by herself (according to Li Shangzhang) and possibly editorial efforts by her brother after her death, there is still a wealth of information and expression that unfold many compelling aspects of the story.Footnote 3 In traditional Chinese poetic culture, poetry is widely adopted as a technology of self-representation, a medium for self-recording and self-expression.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the autobiographical mode of Li Ti’s poems echoes with the biographical mode of Li Shangzhang’s writing in many ways. Both culturally recognized narratives of individual lives, they were produced and meant to be received as factual representations, shaped by their contemporary literary and ideological discourses. What I attempt to emphasize here, however, is how historically conditioned and ideologically mediated sites of self and life narrative such as Li Ti’s still challenge not only the norms of their time and place, but also our scholarly consensus about women’s lives in China’s past.
Scholars in the studies of Ming-Qing women’s culture have demonstrated that there exist fluid and ambiguous expressions of female–female intimacy in the continuum of sisterhood←→friendship ←→romantic love.Footnote 5 In many ways they are derived from the conventions of male literati in representing heterosexual romantic love. Female poets Gu Zhenli 顧貞立 (1623–after 1672) and Wu Zao 吳藻 (1799–1863) are famous representatives of this mode of writing.Footnote 6 Whether in thematic concern or representational mode, Li Ti’s expression of her desire and passion for Huang echoes these women’s voices. However, because of the plethora of poems scattered in their collections, scholars have tended to treat Gu’s and Wu’s voicing of romantic feelings for their female others mainly as the performance of a masculine gesture rather than based on real relationships. Li Ti’s special bond with Huang Xunying is well documented by the substantial textual evidence of the family collection. The large number of poems from the two collections by Li Ti explicitly written about and to Huang, together with additional information (such as the interlinear notes) and cross-references by her brother, provide the first historical (as opposed to literary) record for us to examine a premodern same-sex relationship between women. In the remainder of this paper, I will demonstrate how these two women actively resisted the restrictions imposed by the patriarchal family and social order and explicitly defined an unbreakable union marked by moral commitment to and spiritual connection with each other. I argue that their bond embodies the concept of queerness in today’s usage.
Kinship, Friendship, and More: Li Ti and Huang Xunying
Li Ti and Huang Xunying were cousins whose mothers were sisters. In the biography written for Li Ti, Li Shangzhang describes how these two cousins quickly formed an inseparable bond:
Originally, our maternal cousin Huang Xiangya, whose given name is Xunying, was 13 years older than my sister and lived in Shizilin of Wu (Suzhou).Footnote 7 She swore not to marry so as to take care of her parents. In the year of Xinwei (1811), when my late father returned home because of the death of our grandmother,Footnote 8 my sister met [Xiangya] and immediately felt they had already been together in their former lives. Whenever Xiangya came to visit, they spent all their time together from morning to night, inseparable from each other as if they were glued together. They pledged to have a relationship in life and death. After she returned home, they entrusted their feelings into shi and ci verses, which did not let the mailbox go empty even for one day. They continued like this until both came home from Wu. While they were privately cherishing that their shapes and shadows could accompany each other constantly, they also increasingly steeled their will to follow each other in death should one die.
初, 從母姊黃香崖女史名巺英長十有三歲, 家吳門獅子林, 矢志侍親不字。辛未, 先府君奉諱南歸, 姊一見若逢夙契。香崖來, 得共晨夕, 密若膠漆, 誓為死生交。歸則詩詞寄懷, 郵筒無虛日。至是自吳挈與俱來, 竊喜形影之常可相隨, 而同死之心益堅矣。Footnote 9
Li Ti was only six years old when she developed a deep connection with Huang, who was much older than she. However, if we can take literally Li Shangzhang’s lines written elsewhere about her—“at the age of three she became literate, at ten she was versed in literature”—Li Ti was indeed precocious and able to express her feelings toward Huang in writing immediately after they met.Footnote 10 And if the account of Li in the passage cited above is not exaggerated, the two cousins exchanged poetry every day when they could not be together physically. Although Huang Xunying’s writing is not available, we have Li Ti’s rich account in verse detailing her special relationship with Huang.
While her brother outlines in a factual manner how Li Ti developed a deep attachment to Huang, Li Ti’s own poems express her subjective feelings for Huang as well as her view of the nature of their relationship. Among the 273 poems included in Li Ti’s collections, there are 19 shi and 8 ci explicitly noted in the title as written to or about her cousin Huang Xunying, whom she refers to as Sister Xiangya. The large number of poems Li wrote to and about Huang also demonstrates that Huang was constantly in her thoughts, evident in the recurring poetic titles/themes, such as:
Thinking of Sister Xiangya on the Mid-Autumn Night
中秋夜懷香崖姊
Thinking of Sister Xiangya on the New Year’s Day of the Year Jimao
己卯元日懷香崖姊
Remembering Sister Xiangya While Listening to Rain on a Spring Night
春夜聽雨憶香崖姊
Sister Xiangya Has not Arrived, Her Trip Delayed
遲香崖姊不至
Having Received a Letter from Sister Xiangya, to Which I am Responding [with this Poem]
得香崖書卻寄
In Late Spring, I Think of Sister Xiangya
暮春懷香崖姊
In addition, in the other poems without such titles, Li Ti often includes interlinear notes to reveal to the reader that the line is referencing Sister Xiangya. These poems are an outstanding presence in the collections and outnumber those with any other thematic concerns, revealing that Huang was the most important relationship in Li Ti’s life.
Li Ti and Huang met each other because of kinship, practically the only way for cloistered, elite women to develop social connections beyond core family members, but they became more than cousins or sisters. A deep relationship of multiple dimensions can be discerned in the following song lyric Li Ti wrote, To the Tune Mai Potang (邁陂塘), with the subtitle “Composed when I had a drink with Sister Xiangya on the Day Before the Winter Solstice” (小至日與香崖姊小飲作):
Most of the poems about Huang were written while the two were separated. This is one of a few depicting their moments together, but it is still mainly concerned with separation. The description of plum blossoms and willow sprouts suggests that spring is around the corner, but they will not be able to enjoy it together. However, they take comfort in the fact that they share the same heart and mind even when apart. Tonghuai 同懷 could mean sharing the same thoughts and feelings, or it could refer to biological ties. Viewing themselves as tonghuai plus you 友 (friends), Li Ti makes it clear that her relationship with Huang is based not only on kinship but also friendship.
In addition to friendship, qing 情 and xiangsi 相思 are two key words recurring in the poems Li wrote to and about Huang. Qing in Chinese is a broad term that can mean any kind of emotion, feeling, sentiment, or specifically love and passion, depending on the context. The qing Li and Huang had for each other, as Li Ti suggests in the following lines, seems beyond the general parameters of feeling two cousins would normally have for one another:
In the first two lines, Li is blaming Heaven for being “meddlesome” in bonding them with the strong emotions they have, which suggests the excessiveness or unusual nature of their emotional attachment. The images of the autumn moon and spring wind as well as the pronouns of endearment and intimacy (qing 卿 and wo 我) all fall into the categories of romantic pathos and rhetoric. The mention of the pledge they made before in the last line, without revealing what it was, sums up the exclusive relationship they formed between themselves.
Xiangsi is a much less ambiguous term. Although it can be generally used to describe the mood in which one obsessively thinks of or misses another person, since the Tang it has been increasingly applied to the context of romantic love, expressing constant longing or even lovesickness. By Li Ti’s time, the latter meaning had become commonplace. In any case, xiangsi depicts a state of infatuation, an obsessive attachment. Let us read her song “To the Tune of Two with One Heart (Liang tongxin 兩同心): Thinking of Sister Xiangya” (Huai Xiangya zi 懷香崖姊):
No matter how we might define in modern terms the feelings expressed here, this song expresses the author’s desire for the two women to be with each other in the most evocative language she knew.
Both Li Ti and Huang resisted arranged marriage, although Li Ti was unable to avoid marriage in the end. Li Shangzhang’s narrative suggests that Huang had pledged not to marry before she met Li Ti, but Li Ti’s poem titled, “My Cousin Huang Xiangya [Xunying] Decided Not to marry in Order to Serve Her Parents, Which Moved Me into this Composition for Her” (黃香崖表姊巺英侍親不字慨賦以贈), shows that the two had already formed a special bond:
Comparing Huang to a bright pearl, spring river, and the moon, images that evoke pure, lofty, and powerful spiritual and sentimental qualities, Li expresses her deep admiration for Huang. While Li Ti’s or Huang’s mother (referred as North Hall in the original line) tried to talk her out of her unconventional decision, Li on the contrary openly endorsed her. The third couplet once again contrasts how different she is from others for Huang. Note her expression in the second line of this couplet is not that she claims to be the only zhiyin 知音 of Huang in this world, but that Huang accepts nobody but her. The term zhiyin, literally meaning “[the one] understanding the music,” is derived from the story of the zither player Bo Ya 伯牙 and his only understanding audience, Zhong Ziqi 鍾子期. After Zhong passed away, Bo Ya decided not to play zither again, so he broke it into pieces. Hence the term defines a high level of friendship based on mutual appreciation and moral commitment.Footnote 16 This is the first poem written by Li Ti to and about Huang that appears in the collection, which was most likely written no later than 1819 when she was fourteen years old.Footnote 17 In the title or headnote of the poem, Li refers to Huang with her full name and the official kinship term, biaozi 表姊 (female maternal cousin), but what is expressed in the poem marks the significant change of their relationship from kinship to friendship and even more. Except for this poem in which Li Ti calls Huang biaozi once, she calls her Sister Xiangya in all of the other poems. It is noteworthy that zi 姊 is a kinship term, but it can be used generally in Chinese culture to refer to any female who is senior to the speaker.
Unlike Huang, Li Ti did get married. For her marriage, her brother Li Shangzhang states:
At a young age, she was arranged to marry a certain man from the Fang clan in Tongcheng. In February of the year Dinghai (1827), they married and lived in the Yi Garden of her natal residence. My brother-in-law Chuanlie was by nature a simpleton who could not distinguish beans from wheat even after he reached adulthood. However, he was extremely quick-tempered and violent. Viewing the conjugal relationship as a feud between enemies, he frustrated, abused, and tormented my sister to the extent no human could stand, but my sister took it obediently without any expression of resentment.
幼締姻桐城方氏。丁亥二月, 贅於易園。姊婿傳烈素騃蠢, 弱冠不辨菽麥, 而性極暴戾, 視伉儷若仇讐, 挫虐蹂躪, 人所難堪, 而姊順受無怨色。Footnote 18
Li Ti’s marriage appears to be a childhood arrangement made by the two families involved, and according to her brother’s account she followed through with it and accepted it even after it turned out to be an ordeal. However, Li Ti’s poems tell us a different story. In more than one place, Li Ti does express how she has or should have fulfilled the role of wife or that of daughter-in-law, but she also explicitly complained about her husband and suffering brought about by marriage.Footnote 19 As Li Shangzhang notes, her marriage with Fang Chuanlie was matrilocal at first, but for some reason the couple moved back to Tongcheng of Anhui Province, the husband’s hometown. This was an even worse turn for Li Ti, whose strong reaction to this uprooting move can be seen in her composition of “Random Notes on the Way to Tongcheng: Twenty Poems” (歸桐道中偶紀二十首).Footnote 20 “For twenty-three years I have been the innocent daughter of my parents, / A swallow leaving its nest, I hate that I’m not a man” (二十三年膝下憨, 燕分巢去恨非男). “How many tears have been shed into the green river, / With which my sorrow will flow to Changzhou [the author’s note: I refer to Sister Xiangya]” (多少淚珠彈綠水, 可能流恨到長洲 [謂香崖姊])Footnote 21 These lines and the interlinear note convey not only her resentment of women’s disadvantaged position in marriage in general, but also her sorrow at leaving behind the person for whom she particularly cared.
Almost immediately after she moved to Tongcheng, Li Ti composed a group of “Six Poems Mourning Myself” (自悼六首), lamenting that this marriage had already killed her inside.Footnote 22 Having protested over her mismatched husband (to which I will return later), Li Ti goes on to express her regrets at having married in the first place: “I shouldn’t have degraded myself then to the vulgar earth, / Looking back now I long to be in the Immortal’s Realm” (不合當初下俗埃, 回頭今始憶蓬萊). Furthermore, the last poem in the group suggests that she failed to reciprocate the obligation towards Huang, for they had probably sealed a pact together that neither of them would marry:
Although the subject is missing from the first two lines, which has been rendered by “it” in my English translation, it is Li Ti’s spiritual connection with Huang, where her heart lies. Li Ti then goes on to work three important places in her life into the remainder of the poem: The Country of the Sea (Haiguo) in the third line presumably means Shanghai, where Li Ti was born, grew up, and made her pledge with Huang. The Gate of Wu (Wumen) in the parallel fourth line is a variant name of Suzhou, the hometown of Huang. This line is a bit of a puzzle, but given the context two readings are possible. First, it can describe how Li Ti was urged to move on to her destination when she visited Huang in Suzhou on her way to Tongcheng, Anhui. The one riding on a horse could be her husband or someone sent on behalf of her husband. Alternatively, it can depict how Huang was urged to marry by her family. The horse rider could represent a matchmaker or messenger. In either case, this line hints at the pressure that would break the pledge they had made. From Li Ti’s earlier poem expressing her admiration for Huang’s sworn celibacy, we know that she and Huang were exclusively zhiyin: “This life of yours has only allowed me to be the one who understands you.” Hence the repeated reference to zhiyin in the sixth line is unmistakably a reference to Huang. Li Ti’s sense of fu’en 負恩 (failing to reciprocate the obligation) is towards her, presumably due to the situation in which Huang swore not to marry, but Li Ti followed through with the marriage arranged for her. Mount Wan, a landmark of Anhui mentioned in the last line, refers to where marriage landed her, but her poet’s soul refuses to settle there.
Eventually, as her brother suggests, Li Ti was able to get herself out of her marriage in an extreme way:
In the fifth month of that year, they returned to Tongcheng. In August our father passed away. She heard of the news in November and was so devastated that she almost died. She attempted to hang herself twice but stopped after her mother-in-law took pains to talk her out of it. In May of the year Wuzi (1828), it was decided to have her return to her natal home. Having determined there was no hope to come back alive, she bid farewell to her parents-in-law but was so choked with emotions that she was unable to speak. She arrived home in August. Although it pained her that she was not there when father passed away, she took comfort that she was able to serve mother.
五月歸桐城, 八月先府君棄養, 十一月聞訃, 一痛幾絕。雉經者再, 姑曲慰之, 乃止。戊子五月歸寧, 自分質孱命薄, 此行無生還望, 拜別君姑, 哽咽不能成聲。八月至家, 雖痛父歿之不親見, 而得侍慈闈, 意良慰。Footnote 24
While the brother’s narrative focuses on how the father’s death devastated Li Ti and that it was because of her delicate health that she returned to her natal home, the following song lyric by Li Ti provides a different rationale from her perspective:
This song lyric is attached with a subtitle that reads, “Moved by the Return to My Natal Home; Using the Rhymes of My Late Father’s Poem, ‘Pleased to See Gray among the Black Hair’” (歸寧有感, 用先大人喜見蒜發韻). The term guining normally refers to a married daughter’s occasional visit to her own parents, but Li Ti’s addressed in the song is determined to be a permanent leave from her marriage. By “the worldly bond” (suyuan 俗緣) at the end of the first stanza, she means her marriage in particular. Her reflection in the subsequent lines on her filial responsibility towards the aged mother-in-law confirms this meaning. Then, by suggesting that the husband should find a new wife, she exempts herself from her duty as a daughter-in-law. The song’s concluding lines together with the interlineal note, however, reveal her real commitment was to her beloved Sister Xiangya.
Li Ti and Huang were finally reunited even before she arrived home. An interlinear note from Li Ti’s “Random Notes on Returning to My Natal Home: 24 Poems” (歸寧偶記二十四首) reads, “At the time I came back together with Sister Xiangya from Suzhou to Shanghai” (時自吳門偕香崖姊同至雲間).Footnote 28 Suzhou is between Tongcheng and Shanghai on her route of travel. Whether at their request or out of a family arrangement, Li went to Suzhou first to join Huang for Huang to accompany Li home. The following poems from the aforementioned group appear to record what she saw and thought on their way to Shanghai:
No. 13
No. 23
No. 24
Poem #13 projects Li Ti’s view from their boat journey. While the floating clouds remind her of the uncertainty of destiny, the paired birds affirm the life she desires to lead with her beloved. Poem #24, the last one in the group, echoes the wish expressed in the previous lines— that destiny will allow them to live their dreams. Although this last poem already hints at their determination to die together, it still conveys more a life wish if read in relation to the preceding poem #23, in which Li compares herself to a caged bird set free. The subsequent mention of her absent-mindedness about household matters also shows her attitude towards the mundane world. Hence, by leaving “the Red Dust” (紅塵), she means to transcend, in religious terms, the restrictions and sufferings of human society, not necessarily leave the human world. The term “carefree selves” (閒身) in the concluding line echoes “an outsider” (局外人) in the second, emphasizing that they were freed from family responsibilities. “Allowing a green mountain to bury our two carefree selves” in the context of the group of poems can be just a figure of speech that refers to living up to their lifespans.
The following song shows that if their society had allowed it, the two would have lived their lives together, not only as friends, but more:
This is the first stanza of one of Li Ti’s songs in “Ballad of the Golden Threads: Ten Songs” (金縷曲十闕). She begins by calling Huang her wangxing you 忘形友, literally meaning a friend with whom one forgets their physical being or shape. Following zhiyin and tonghuai you, this may be an even loftier term that defines their friendship. Originally this term was coined by male literati such as Bai Juyi 白居易 of the Tang.Footnote 31 Here Li Ti appropriates it to define her spiritual connection with Huang, who is truly a soulmate for her.
However, the term jia’ou 嘉偶 (a match made in heaven) that she uses near the end of this stanza points to something that is significantly different from friendship. Since the Han, this term has referred to a perfect couple,Footnote 32 typically a husband–wife relationship. And that is the way Li Ti uses it. In this stanza, she reiterates Huang’s rejection of marriage as out of both religious and filial piety. Her lamentation for their ill fate, however, is not simply about marriage in general, but that they were not destined to be husband and wife, hence the wish to become an ideal couple in the next life. Remarkably, she also admits the wish to be a wangnian 妄念, which can be understood as a wild fancy against probability or an improper thought challenging social norms. In either case, the term indicates their awareness of the odds against them being together as a couple, even in the next life, if only Heaven would make that happen.
The Double Suicide
Li Ti and Huang Xunying were never separate again after they were reunited when Li Ti left her husband. For some reason, the two traveled back to Suzhou in January of 1829. It is unknown whether they returned to Shanghai, but eventually they ended their lives in Suzhou in late May. Li Shangzhang briefly describes how this happened:
The next year [1829], out of a plan to avoid the summer heat, Xiangya took my sister to travel back to Wu, and they stayed in Shizilin. Soon after, Xiangya fell out with her mother and threw herself into a lake. My sister also drowned herself. The time was the hour of Hai (21:00–23:00 o’clock) on the twenty-seventh day of the fifth month of the year of Jichou (1829). She was 25 sui and without offspring. Alas! How heartbreaking!
越明年, 香崖偕姊遊吳, 遂居獅林, 為避暑計。無何, 香崖不得於母, 投池死, 姊亦自沉, 時己丑五月二十七日亥時也。年 [二] 十五歲, 無出, 傷哉!Footnote 33
According to Li Shangzhang, it was in order to avoid the summer heat that Li Ti and Huang went to Suzhou.Footnote 34 Shizilin, as Li Shangzhang notes earlier in the biography, is the location of Huang’s natal home. Presumably they stayed in the same house with Huang’s mother. Li Shangzhang does not explain why Huang did not get along with her mother, but suggests that the conflict between the two was a direct cause of Huang’s suicide and subsequently Li Ti’s.
Li Ti’s and Huang’s suicides were recorded from the late Qing to the Republican period in local gazetteers, modern newspapers, and other print media, which mostly appear to be derived from Li Shangzhang’s biography of Li Ti.Footnote 35 However, in the entry on Li Ti in Anhui mingyuan shici zhenglue 安徽名媛詩詞徵略 (A solicited collection of poetry by women from Anhui Province, 1936), the editor Guang Tiefu 光鐵夫 presents an interpretation that differs from Li Shangzhang’s account of how the suicides happened:
Courtesy name Lixiang. Native of Shanghai, Jiangsu. Daughter of Songlin. Wife of Fang Chuanlie from Tongcheng. In her natal home, she developed a good rapport with Huang Xunying, a daughter of her mother’s sister. Xunying’s courtesy name is Xiang’ya. She was twelve years senior to [Anzi] and lived in Suzhou. [Xunying] was determined not to marry but to stay home taking care of her parents, but her mother was not pleased about this. After Anzi was married, the couple had no conjugal love because the husband was not intelligent. She returned home and was reunited with Xunying in Suzhou. They sealed a suicide pact to drown themselves in a lake. The time when this happened was during the [Daoguang] Reign.Footnote 36 Anzi was 25 years old. She authored the Poetry Collection from the Tower of this Intorable Life, consisting of two juan of shi poems and one juan of ci poems (Source: Public Opinion).Footnote 37
號吏香。江蘇上海人。松林女。桐城方傳烈室。在母家時與從母妹黃巽英善。巽英字香崖。長於安子十二歲。家居蘇州。立志侍親不嫁。然不得母歡。安子於歸後。以夫不慧。無伉儷情。歸與巽英會於蘇。相約投池死。時在嘉慶間。安子年二十五歲。著有猶得住樓詩二卷詞一卷 (民碞報)
In addition to the cited biographical note, Guang includes three song lyrics by Li Ti, two of which were written about Huang Xunying. Guang included Li Ti in his provincial anthology of Anhui women’s poetry because of her marriage to a local man from Tongcheng. He makes a strong case sympathetic to the passion between the two women against the institutions of family and marriage. His biographical note emphasizes Li Ti’s mismatched marriage (“the couple had no conjugal love because the husband was not intelligent”). The two poems Guang selected, on the contrary, express Li Ti’s desire for the two women to be with each other in the strongest terms, such as duo qing (“rich in feelings”) and xiangsi (“obsessed longing”). We do not know whether he had additional sources of information, but unlike Li Shangzhang, who suggests that Li Ti died after Huang, he notes that “they sealed a suicide pact to drown themselves in a lake” (相約投池死). Guang’s record may not necessarily be more reliable than Li Shangzhang’s, but the discrepancy concerning such a significant detail begs two related questions: Why did Li Ti and Huang Xunying commit suicide? Was it really a double suicide or not?
Importantly, a self-elegy written by Li Ti on behalf of both Huang and herself can be found in her poetry collections. It is written in the form of a song lyric to the tune, Two Sharing One Heart (Liang tongxin 兩同心), a fitting form to reflect the author’s thematic concern, with the subtitle, “This is an elegy written for Sister Xiangya and myself while we are alive” (生輓香崖姊兼自輓). Whether this was actually written in the moment right before their suicides, this song can be read as an example of jueming ci (verse on cutting off/ending life), a culturally embedded genre of suicide inscription.Footnote 38 It is the most compelling evidence that their suicides were not impulsive, or passionate reactions to a minor incident:
As the subtitle shows, this song is a final statement by Li Ti about the two women’s lives. The reasons that compelled them to end their lives are twofold: 1) life had not turned out as they wished; and 2) death can convey them to a world that allows them to live together happily ever after. While the first points to their disappointment in life, the second shows their deep faith in the world after death or a future life.
The suicides of Huang and Li Ti might have been, as Li Shangzhang claims, triggered by the conflict between Huang and her mother, but Li Ti’s writing reveals a constant and deeper distress that compelled Li Ti alone or together with Huang to premeditate death again and again. Some recurring thematic concerns show that she was deeply troubled by her gender and marriage. For example, in those “Six Poems Mourning Myself” written after she followed her husband to Tongcheng, she laments:
Having realized that her gender was an obstacle for her to achieve what men could, she became cynical not only about her literary engagement but also the meaning of her life:
Unlike her brother’s statement that “she accepts the suffering without expression of resentment” (順受無怨色), she is in fact expressing in this poem her bitterness about the mismatched marriage. By alluding to the story of Xie Daoyun 謝道蘊 who disdained her husband Wang Ningzhi 王凝之 of the Jin (266–420), she echoed the boldest female voice that emerged from the Ming-Qing era.Footnote 42 Ironically, the willow catkin, which symbolizes female poetic talent because of Xie’s famous line, is treated by Li Ti as the metaphor of her ill fate, a trigger for her suicidal ideation.
Li Shangzhang does not provide details about Huang’s conflict with her mother. However, the clues from Li Ti’s poems suggest that Huang’s refusal to marry may have been a major issue. In the poem celebrating Huang’s sworn celibacy, Li Ti mentions that either her own or Huang’s mother did try to dissuade Huang from remaining unmarried. Although out of a claim for filiality, a woman’s celibacy would not be uncontroversial, Huang’s decision was not approved by her family. It also turned out that Huang devoted herself to Li Ti most of the time. From the time she joined the latter in August of 1828, she had constantly accompanied Li Ti until they died the next May. Both their families noticed the unusual attachment between the two. In addition to the brother’s description that they were “inseparable as if glued together,” Li Ti has a poetic line as well as an interlinear note, addressing her aunt, presumably the mother of Huang, “[Mother] at the North Hall, please don’t laugh at us being fools in love [I mean Aunt Yunsheng]” (北堂莫笑情癡 [謂韻生姨母]).Footnote 43 As a younger cousin, Li Ti’s attachment to Huang seems to have been very much accommodated by their families, but people around them such as her aunt, Huang’s mother, did find some “foolishness” in these cousins’ unusual bond. Although the messy details are missing from both Li Ti’s and her brother’s writings, the pressure was likely more than implicit in the urgings from their families, and no doubt the real reason for Li Ti’s outcry that “it is difficult to have the life that we wish.”
To end their oppressed or unfulfilled lives, Li Ti and Huang chose to die, but death for them was not a dead end, but a hope for rejoining each other in their next lives. It is evident from the religious terms Li Ti employed in her writing that she was deeply influenced both by Buddhism and other popular religions. She believed in an ultimate force that controlled the universe, including her destiny, which she calls tian (Heaven) or shangdi (the god above). She also believed in the next life, to which death is an entrance. All these beliefs prompted her and Huang’s premeditation of suicide: “Hereby we are leaving to both plead with the god above / To honor the Orchid Pact we have sealed / And never separate us.” This plea for Heaven’s mercy to change their fate in the last statement echoes that “wild fancy” Li Ti held for them: “But let’s wish to be a perfect couple in the next life. / A wild fancy it may be, / But who knows if Heaven won’t have mercy?” To move the god by sacrificing their lives, their suicides were a quest for a better future that would enable them to transcend the restrictions on both women in general and their individual freedom.
Although Li Ti’s brother shows a positive reception of Li Ti’s deep bond with Huang in his writing, he was aware of the controversial nature of her suicide:
I, her brother Shangzhang, would say: while one’s parents are alive, one should not die for one’s friend. However, I would disagree with those who think my sister’s death is as light as a goose feather. “A true man will die for one who appreciates him.” Yu Rang, Hou Ying, and the Five Hundred Men of Tianheng are cases in point. Didn’t they end their lives that way? If one were to examine her mind, one would find it selfless. However, she could not fulfill moral obligations for both her parent [mother] and others. In the year of Renwu (1822), my sister was seriously sick. Xiangya prayed to Heaven, willing to give up some years of her own life in order to save my sister’s. How could one’s life be shortened so that another’s be prolonged? However, this reflects the same heart they shared. My sister’s life had also been promised to Xiangya. One gave her life to the other, and the other paid it back with hers. Reflecting on what they did, we might say it almost falls into the categories of blind loyalty and foolish filial piety. However, her heart is indeed worth our sympathy. Those who would give a condemning look and throw stones toward [my sister and cousin] because of their way of death should feel ashamed for being inferior to women. Furthermore, shouldn’t the way of friendship be upheld rather than to let it be degraded?! Isn’t that the way it should be?Footnote 44
弟尚暲曰:父母存, 不許友以死。或尤姊之死為鴻毛, 非也。士為知己者死, 豫讓, 侯贏, 田橫五百人, 豈得已哉? 原其心之不容己, 孝與義遂不得兩全。壬午姊病革, 香崖籲天, 願減己寿增姊寿。夫年豈能減, 亦豈能增? 而一心之相印, 姊固許之死矣。彼以死施, 此以死報, 跡其所為, 近於愚忠愚孝者流, 而其心大可哀已。有此死而世之反眼下石者, 當愧出巾幗下。而友道維持不敝, 其庶幾乎?
Their mothers were still alive when Li Ti and Huang committed suicide. Li Ti did attempt suicide in her husband’s home after she learnt about her father’s death, but eventually she took her life for Huang. For many, including her brother, she ignored her filial obligation but gave priority to her cousin. Whether anticipating a possible attack or responding to a real one, Li Shangzhang was conscious of the opinion that “his sister’s death is as light as a goose feather,” meaning that his sister took her life too lightly (qing sheng 輕生). The idiom fanyan xiashi 反眼下石 (literally, “to give a condemning look and throw a stone”), which he goes on to use, suggests that there could be even harsher reactions to how Li Ti and Huang died, which might have generated suspicions of their relationship as having been inappropriate.
While yielding to the principle that one should prioritize one’s responsibility to one’s parents, Li Shangzhang did find an angle from which to defend his sister, youdao 友道, the way of friends or simply friendship. Echoing his sister, he uses similar terms to recognize how this friendship was based on mutual attraction, appreciation, and understanding: suqi 夙契 (a pact carried forward from a former life), tongxin 同心 (sharing the same heart), and zhiji 知己 (one who knows the self). He then goes on to point out how this friendship had developed to its highest level, si sheng jiao 死生交 (the friendship of life and death). In this way, he attempted to illustrate how Li Ti’s suicide was actually motivated by moral concerns. That is why he mentioned how Huang at first vowed to give up some years of her own life to save Li Ti’s. That is also why he subtly yet significantly recounted their planned double suicide as a case of one following the other.
However, Li Shangzhang’s argument for friendship also reveals Li Ti and Huang’s transgression of gender boundaries. Friendship is among the “Five Bonds” as defined in Confucianism (ruler–minister, father–son, husband–wife, older–younger brothers, and friend–friend), but it was not applied to women, as they were confined to domestic and subordinate roles.Footnote 45 In order to illustrate Li Ti and Huang’s mutual pledge to join each other in death, Li Shangzhang cites the famous saying, Shi wei zhiji zhe si 士為知己者死, in which shi originally refers to the male gender. Hence the translation is “a true man dies for one who appreciates him.” In fact, there is a parallel line Li does not quote, “A woman adorns herself for one who is pleased by her” (nü wei yueji zhe rong 女為悅己者容). The two lines are often quoted together to specifically indicate the division between men’s and women’s roles. The historical predecessors Li cited, such as Yu Rang 豫讓 (d. 453 BCE), Hou Ying 侯贏 (d. 257 BCE), and the Five Hundred Men (五百士) of Tianheng (田橫) (250–202 BCE), are all men whose heroic deeds belong to the male-dominated political world.Footnote 46 By exemplifying a friendship of life and death in the domestic world, Li Ti and Huang challenged the institution and ideology of the patriarchal family that only accommodated women as wives, mothers, and daughters. However strong his argument is, Li Ti’s brother cannot explain away the controversial nature of their deep bond and double suicide.
Conclusions
Rather than label their relationship as a lesbian one, I propose describe the extraordinary bond formed between Li Ti and Huang using the concept of queerness as a way of viewing their active resistance to the sexual or gender norms of their time and even their way of diverging from contemporary critical terms such as homosocial or homosexual. The surviving writings about Li Ti and Huang do not show that they were part of a female community. They show no connections with women outside kinship. Although Li Ti’s poems demonstrate a continuum from kinship to friendship and to passionate feelings for Huang, no obvious homoeroticism can be seen in her writing. Queer is a better term because it “maintains a relation of resistance to whatever constitutes the normal.”Footnote 47 To call them queer is not anachronistic. Rather, we are doing them “a new kind of justice” in Eve Sedgwick’s sense to recognize their resistance to the normative roles assigned to women by their society as well as the institution of heterosexual marriage.Footnote 48 No matter how we should define their relationship in modern terms, they represented the most important effective bond in each other’s life, a part they call zhiyin/understanding friend, wangxing you/soulmate, lanqi/sworn sister, or even jia’ou/a match made in heaven, as illustrated in my reading of the poems.
Li Ti’s bond with Huang transgressed the gender roles and structure as defined by the Confucian patriarchy. In studying female friendship, Maram Epstein has aptly pointed out that “friendships among women were inherently subversive since they endow daughters/sisters/wives/mothers with an independent sense of personhood outside the control of the patriarchal family.”Footnote 49 Because of the Confucian system of sex segregation, female bonding within the inner quarters was common and generally acceptable. However, the unbreakable union between Li and Huang subverted the existing social structure and gender ideology. They resisted the institution of marriage in their strategic ways and developed an exclusive relationship that they defined as akin to an ideal marriage. The recurrence of their pledge, whether in terms of meng 盟 (vow) or qi 契 (pact), in Li Ti’s poems indicates that the two women continuously enhanced their bond with moral commitment and spiritual connection, a bond by all means transcended kinship and other normative roles prescribed to women.
The interlinear notes referencing Huang that Li Ti inserted in her poems are worth our special attention. What do they signify? As the author of these poems, she knew what the lines mean. As her zhiyin, the understanding audience, Huang may not have needed this reference either. I argue that this is for an audience outside the two women, even a future audience like us. Li Ti was not only a self-reflexive poet but also an editor of her own poetry.Footnote 50 It is evident that she was trying to transmit her writing to an audience outside her confined circle and to posterity. As the few examples cited earlier in this article show, all the referenced lines are expressions of love and desire for two individuals to be together. Hence Li Ti’s meticulous notes were intended to indicate her unambiguous relationship with and feelings for Huang.
Even more subversive about the Li-Huang bond was their choice of suicide. Their double suicide and the expressed love between the two women provide a striking contrast with those female martyrs who died for patriarchal values such as chastity defined toward their [male] husbands. Women took their own lives for various reasons, but those who died for moral claims tended to be recorded in official histories. China holds stunning written records of heroic female suicides, whether during times of political chaos or peace. While sacrificing one’s life out of loyalty to the country was a male commitment, chastity or the integrity of the female body was by default the moral purpose for female suicide, although their sacrifice could be extended to their dynasty during a time of rebellion or foreign invasion. However, because of the increasing popularity of widow suicide, it became a serious concern in the Qing’s imperial discourse and state policy. More than one Qing emperor issued edicts to discourage women from taking life lightly, even those who sincerely intended to embody traditional female virtue.Footnote 51 Certainly, they would disapprove of Li’s and Huang’s suicides.
Furthermore, by way of suicide, Li Ti and Huang presented a rare case of social protest and the individual quest for freedom. To my knowledge, our historical investigations of female suicide found no other cases that demonstrate such meaning and significance, except for a few examples from Ming-Qing fiction that can be viewed as “for justice, freedom, and independence.”Footnote 52 In examining a few cases in which historically credible women left behind poems before suicide, when their body or reputation were endangered, Grace Fong has illustrated their act of suicide as “an act of agency” and the “verse on ending life” as an embodiment of the author’s immortality.Footnote 53 However, as Fong also points out, these cases are not unproblematic in two senses: first, all the cases were somehow mediated by male literati even if they did not produce some of the women’s self-narratives. Second, what these suicidal women embodied was “the ideology that subordinated women.”Footnote 54 Although Li Ti’s brother Li Shangzhang also involved himself in commemorating Li Ti, possibly editing her poetry collections and defending her controversial suicide, Li Ti’s sizable collections preserved together with the writings by other family members as well as the rich details about her life and bond with Huang are too solid to be fabricated and they are internally consistent. And Li Shangzhang could not possibly have a motivation to do so. His efforts, as we see in his defense of Li Ti, were on the contrary to mitigate its controversial nature. The self-elegy written by Li Ti on behalf of Huang and herself functioned as their Ending-Life Verse, spelling out the fact that their suicidal intention was to transcend societal restrictions and proceed to a better future in which they could pursue their desires and ambitions.
In addition, Li Ti’s self-representation and self-expression in other poems enable us to more fully and deeply understand that her struggles were against the conventional meaning of life as a woman: “Why bother to let me be born into the inner quarters?! / I have an ambition but no way to fulfill it” (何苦生於閨閣內, 有志難伸).Footnote 55 These lines, among others, often surface from the corpus of her poetry collections, voicing her frustrations over a social system that was oppressive towards women. Li Ti obtained a literary education at a very young age, and her talent was recognized at least in the small social circle around her family, but her literary achievement landed her nowhere but in a miserable marriage. She was not alone in voicing complaints about marriage and gender inequality; this had become a distinctive yet recurring theme in Ming-Qing women’s poetry.Footnote 56 Gu Zhenli of the early Qing, for example, had openly attacked gender conventions with her idiosyncratic approach, and she might even have been a source of inspiration for the well-read Li Ti. However, Li stands as a unique tragedy: her sorrow over gender restrictions culminated in her suicide.
Li Ti appears to have been depressed and suicidal, both in her self-representation and in her brother’s narrative. The association of female talent with delicate health and even death, viewing literary talent as a curse on the female gender, was a popular cultural belief in late imperial China. In fact, Li Ti noted that her father discouraged her from pursuing poetic composition for the sake of her health.Footnote 57 Although modern scholars can demystify the phenomenon with a sociological analysis of the Confucian social structure and gender ideology that did not favor women’s talent outside the domestic sphere, the irony is that literary education was indeed a source of depression for women like Li Ti as it led to a realization of their limited place in society. In Li Ti’s case, her depression and suicide were caused by her awareness of the social injustice imposed on her gender.
Li Ti and Huang Xunying ended their lives in the hopes that death could enable them to surpass their social restrictions. Li Ti’s and Huang’s double suicide reminds us of tragic stories in which only death can unify a couple in love, not only that of Liang Shanbo 梁山伯 and Zhu Yingtai 祝英台, the famous heterosexual lovers who transformed into butterflies, but also that of Pan Wenzi 潘文子 and Wang Zhongxian 王仲先, a male homosexual couple who, when faced with a social impasse, dug their own tombs to be buried together.Footnote 58 More relevant to Li and Huang is the latter case. It was the social impasse similar to the one that facing the same-sex couple Pan and Wang that led Li and Huang to end their lives. In reacting to the restrictions imposed by families and society, they determined that death would be the best avenue for fulfilling their transgressive desires.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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