Sentimentalizing virtue: on morality and emotions in Qing shi and Lienü zhuan yanyi

Zhen (Chastity) and jie (moral integrity) were key terms in official discourse on female moral behaviour in late imperial China, when biographies and anecdotes celebrating chaste widows and faithful maidens filled up the pages of local gazetteers and official histories as well as of literati’s writings. In the late Ming period, in the first chapter of his anthology Qingshi (ca 1630, History of Love), Feng Menglong (1574-1646) tried to accommodate these terms into the area of qing (love, sentiments, emotions) arguing for a new interpretation of the relation between qing and li (principle). Shortly after, the work Lienü zhuan yanyi (ca 1668, Vernacular elaboration of the Biographies of Women), included some narratives from the Qingshi in its vernacular elaboration of the Han dynasty classic on women’s education Lienü zhuan by Liu Xiang (ca 79-8 a.C), therefore assigning a place for sentiments in the narrative of women’s morality. In this paper I will analyze the stories gathered in the above mentioned textual sources in order to examine the interrelationship between morality and emotion in seventeenth century Chinese literature.