Autobiographical in Bo Shaojun\'s One

¶ … Autobiographical in Bo Shaojun's One Hundred Poems Lamenting My Husband."

In "The Biographical and the Autobiographical in Bo Shaojun's One Hundred Poems

Lamenting My Husband," Wilt Idema uses the 81 surviving poems that Bo Shaojun wrote in memory of her husband, Shen Cheng, what he knew of women in her time period, as well as scholarship about Shaojun and other female writers of her time period to examine her life. What his investigation revealed was that Shaojun revealed as much about her life and her priorities in her poems about her late husband as she did about his life. However, her life circumstances also revealed a substantial amount of detail about her life, which was reinforced by her poetry.

The first thing that is clear in her poetry and in her life is that she placed priority on her relationship with her husband. Her husband died prematurely from dysentery, and his early death was devastating to Bo Shaojun. She was pregnant at the time of his death, and their son was born exactly 100 days after Cheng's death (Idema, p.233). However, even when her song was young, Shaojun seemed convinced that she would die because her husband had died. Though she did not do anything to cause her own death, and is instead described as wasting away, she did seem committed to dying. In fact, her death was later characterized as a suicide with the goal of preserving her fidelity to her husband. In some ways, this devotion would seem romantic, except for the fact that she had a small son. One cannot read this account of her life without wondering why she placed greater priority on her husband than she did on her son. Moreover, discovering that the couple had a daughter who passed away prior to Cheng's death, without meriting a volume of poetry in remembrance from her mother, one sees that Shaojun's priority was her husband rather than her children.

This emphasis on her husband rather than her children reflects a value that may have been tied to gender. It is well-established that modern-day China places much greater value on male life than female life, and this is a not a recent development. One has to keep in mind that the practice of foot binding, which literally crippled many Chinese women, actually began around the same time that Shaojun was writing these memorial poems for her husband (Xue). A woman gained much of her identity from her husband. Children were considered less valuable than men, and the way that her overt grief for her husband contrasts with her apparent lack of concern for her children seems to reinforce her internalizing the idea that men are more valuable than women and children.