Apparatus XY

20How, then, did these women poets view this outpouring of emotions, and their seemingly depressive feelings? The poets who (I believe) were suffering from a disordered depression all shared common beliefs about women's relation to emotions. Some believed that women, naturally rich in feeling, suffered more emotionally because they write. It was a vicious cycle: some wrote to express and release their feelings and depression, which may have only increased their depression. Wen Wan (ca. 1050), a courtesan who is known for her writings, both poetic and philosophical, endorsed the belief that giving voice to their emotions meant they suffered more emotionally. In her poem "Describing My Emotions" she demonstrated the emotional cost of being a poet and courtesan:

Those who by nature are rich in feeling suffer from feeling,
Hidden by a dark window, I'm fed up with the courtesan's life,
Don't ridicule me for spending my time on 'chapter and verse'
I don't see why Xie Daoyuan should claim all the fame for poetry. (336)

Miss Wen is saying a great deal about emotions and poetry in these four lines. While she says that all people who are rich in feeling suffer greatly, she is no exception. Part of this suffering is due to wanting more from her life, wanting to be a poet like the famed Xie Daoyuan a poet of the Jin Dynasty (ca. 366 CE), instead of a courtesan, an ambitious remark since at the time Miss Wen was alive in the Song Dynasty. Before and during this time period, there were few courtesans who wrote their own material. Most of their songs for their performances were written by men (Idema and Grant 334). While it did change, however, Miss Wen seems to be defying convention by almost demanding fame in the last line. She knows if she chooses this path of writing, she will continue to suffer from her feelings. She also knows that she will continue to be chastised by writing poems, but why?

21The answer is that many women believed writing could cause physical harm, especially to women, because of the extreme emotional outpouring that is needed, and was one reason for being chastised for it. Zhu Shuzhen (ca 1126), also writing in the Song Dynasty, answers this question in "Self-Reproach-Two Poems." She writes that there are limits placed on her writing due to her gender and that society condemns writing women (256). This may have been true: women who were brilliant and exceptional are sometimes portrayed in literature as tempting fate or not being the ideal Confucian woman who was "virtuous, chaste, filial obedience, and modest" (Pan 88). Miss Zhu does not necessarily dismiss this idea: she believes that a woman poet is placing herself in harm's way and that it is dangerous to write because she is a woman. Miss Zhu says that she writes poetry to cheer herself up but it has the opposite effect of making her miserable, not relieving emotions. If these negative emotions can be interpreted as signs of depression, Miss Zhu or other women poets believed that writing would increase their depression more than it would help.

22 Further evidence for this idea continuing in traditional China is provided by Zhen Yunduan (1327-1356), a poet known for her passionate poems and commentaries. In her autobiographical note, she states that she thinks of herself as a poet and composed to express her feelings and inner nature (Idema and Grant 269). This need to express her emotions have resulted in poems that detail her personal struggles with emotions, including what seems to be depression. In her poem "A Passing Mood," she states that while heaven gave her talent as a poet, the trade off was a shortened life (274). She believed that women poets were destined to die young, because of their emotional upheavals and the physical illness that accordingly could be brought about. Miss Zhen attributes her own bad health to being a poet, a profession that to her lends itself to being depressed.

23The key belief that these women and their counterparts shared was that depression was what talented women suffered greatly because of their emotions. Being born a woman meant you were destined to suffer intense emotions. Adding to this was the idea that being talented and writing also exposed women to emotional thoughts and feelings, which made them disposed to depression. When women were exceptional writers, they stood even a greater chance of falling into depression. The ideas on depression from the women poets were that all women were normally susceptible to depression and the poets and other talented women were even more so. Far from being an isolated construct, this idea was also endorsed by the literary and greater society throughout traditional China.

Medicine and Depression

24While the anecdotal examples from poet's lives provide information on depression in women in traditional China, I required more insight into the medical beliefs and approaches to depression. Ideas on depression from medical books changed greatly, from the gender neutral approaches in the Han Dynasty medical text, the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, to the belief that women were mentally weak and susceptible to depression a thousand years later in the Song Dynasty. From this point on to the Qing Dynasty, medical practitioners through their writings, created the identification of depression in women as an emotional disorder and reframed it in terms to meet their own "theoretic models of pathology" (Kleinman Rethink 7), which held that women's natural make up physically made them more susceptible to depression. Women being depressed, then, were perhaps seen as a "normal" occurrence, as demonstrated through treatments available to them. Women were first treated at home or by a female healer, such as Tan Xiangu, a female physician in the Ming dynasty. When the depression's physical symptoms were too severe, women would then be treated by a male physician. All these examples show that the mode of operation in treatments reflect the overall attitude that women's bodies were the main focus of treatment, while the mind was second because of women's susceptibility to depression as a normal occurrence.