When the history of China entered the Ming and Qing dynasties, the figures of talented women did not seem to appear in poetry so frequently. Perhaps because the constraints on women in the Ming and Qing dynasties were relatively deep, "a woman without talent is moral", so even if there is a daughter of literary talent and eight buckets in the family, the parents are not happy!
Tang poems and Song Ci, these two shining pearls in the literary world, have emerged many female poets and female lyricists who have been passed down through the ages.
During the Tang Dynasty, Li Ye, Xue Tao, Liu Caichun, and Yu Xuanji were the most famous, and they were also known as the "Four Great Female Poets of the Tang Dynasty".
In the Song Dynasty, there was Li Qingzhao, the "first talented woman in the ages", and her equal name was Zhu Shuzhen.
The most famous of the Ming Dynasty is Qin Huai Bayan. The most famous of the Qing Dynasty is probably Nalan Rongruo's lover Shen Yuan. Our protagonist today is a talented woman of the Qing Dynasty, born in a rich merchant's family, and the husband's family is also a rich party. But she is proud and arrogant, and she has been seeking a confidant all her life, but in the end she is depressed, and she is a talented woman - Wu Zao.
Wu Zao (1799 ~ 1862), female, a famous female writer and lyricist of the Qing Dynasty, the character Pingxiang, self-proclaimed Yu Cen Zi, Zhejiang Renhe (now Hangzhou), ancestral home of Yi County, Anhui.
He is the author of a volume of "Flower Curtain Words", a volume of "Xiangnan Xuebei Words", "Drinking and Reading Riot Songs" (also known as "Qiao Ying"), "Flower Curtain Bookhouse Poems" and so on. It can be found in the "Linxia Yayin Collection", "Xiao Tan Luan Room Hui Carved Girl XiuZi", "The Complete Book of the Continuation of the Four Libraries", and "The Second Episode of Qing Ren Miscellaneous Drama". "Yilin", "Hangzhou Fuzhi", "Xiling Boudoir", "Essays on the Two Autumn Rain Temples", "Qing Dynasty Boudoir Poets' Sketches", "Painting Records Zhiyu", "Mingyuan Poetry" and so on.
In the eyes of others, Wu Zao is a person born with a golden key.
The father was a silk merchant on the rich side, who regarded his daughter more than his eyes, and grew up in the strong love of his parents, dressed in fine clothes and carefree. At the age of twenty-two, he married a large family in Zhumen, whose family was rich and prosperous, who did not worry about everything, and who cherished the daughter-in-law who had just entered the door.
Wu Zao's father, although he was an authentic businessman, was particularly interested in the elegant affairs of books. Her beloved daughter Wu Zao has been unusually wise since she was a child, and Wu's father attaches great importance to her, and has hired famous teachers to teach her to read and write, compose poems and fill in words, play the piano and compose music, and draw and paint.
Wu Zao did not disappoint his father, and in the year of Fang Zhi, he was proficient in poetry, books and pianos, especially in filling in words. In this privileged family situation, Wu Zao's childhood and youth are not only sweet and pleasant, but also full of fun.
Wu Zao is not only talented and affectionate, but also has a superior family, but also looks graceful and beautiful. There should be an endless stream of courtships, but why did she not get married until she was twenty-two? This age is already equivalent to thirty-five years old in modern times in the Qing Dynasty.
The Wu family was a wealthy businessman, and at that time, when talking about marriage, it was the right door to the door, so most of the people who asked for relatives were stupid children. Wu Zao felt that they had no ink in their chests, and shook their heads one by one and refused. Renhe County's talent is limited, some families are poor, some are immersed in hard reading, no one thought that the Wu Shangjia family still hides a big girl with golden rust talent, that is, they think that there will be fears that they will not dare to climb high, so that Wu Zao, who is both talented and beautiful, is actually young and vain, and the marriage has been dragged on until the age of twenty-two.
"The daughter is too old to stay", the Wu family's parents began to be anxious, they tried to persuade hard, and finally Made Wu Zao reluctantly agree to the marriage proposal of the Huang family, a silk merchant in the same city.
The Huang family is a generation of silk merchants, rich enough to rival Wu Zao's mother's family, but it has never produced the seeds of reading. Wu Zao's husband began to do business from a young age, and he no longer touched other books except reading the ledger; but he was particularly envious of his wife's talent, and he loved her in every way, and specially arranged a neat and spacious study for her, so that she could run some books alone in the home.
When she first saw her husband support herself in reading, and also left a study for her to play, Wu Zao was secretly surprised, thinking that her husband was also a person who knew the style and elegance, and it was she who misidentified him. So when her husband returned home from business, she happily took out her new poems and new words to read to her husband, who leaned on the bedside and frequently said good, and when Wu Zao finished reading and then looked at her husband, he was already sitting and falling asleep.
Wu Zao thought in his heart that he was just a vassal of elegance, but in the end he was a vulgar man! You can imagine how disappointed and sad Wu Zao's mood was at that time!
Although her husband did not understand her poetry, he cared meticulously about her life, food, clothing, shelter and transportation, and did not need Wu Zao to worry about it, she was locked in her study every day, single-mindedly weaving her idleness. Except for the occasional piano soothing, most of her worries are tied in the words, the piano is ignorant of the sound of the empty play, the words are still left on the paper, and the present people do not look at posterity.
Because she hates her husband's vulgarity, she has no intention of flattering and even lazy in dressing up. The husband is busy with business all day, and most of the time he comes home late at night, he is so tired that he can only sleep, and he has no heart to pity and love her, how not to make her feel delicate and sad. But to say that her husband did not love her is a bit wronged, it can only be said that he does not know how to comfort her lonely heart.
Seeing that his wife was being tormented by idleness and increasingly haggard, and her husband was very distressed, he did not have time to accompany her, so he advised her to make more friends and change her mood. Wu Zao was really bored, so he accepted her husband's suggestion and began to make some red pink girlfriends.
Over time, through these girlfriends, she slowly got to know some real literati, who were usually the brothers and husbands of these girlfriends. Living among those literati who are elegant and sing poetry, Wu Zao is like a fish in the water, and suddenly becomes active and cheerful. Wu Zao's poems caused a great sensation among the local literati, who called her "Liu Yong of the Dynasty", and the words seemed to be handy, but they contained deep affection.
They often boat on the waves of the lake on the night of the moon, and the depth is not returned; the spring day travels to the countryside and returns drunk.
Wu Zao's behavior is really beyond the woman's routine, but her husband does not interfere, as long as the wife is happy, he does not care about others talking nonsense, because he has his reasons: Wu Zao is a woman who is different from ordinary women, of course, can not use the routine to restrain her. Since her husband connived, Wu Zao became more and more careless. Walking with a group of bearded eyebrow men, although it was dashing, but after all, there was an inconvenience, and she actually complained about her daughter.
Living in an environment of gold and silver, brocade and jade food, her husband is full of admiration and indulgence for her, but Wu Zao's heart is full of sorrow and hatred every day, who can believe it?
However, this feeling of sorrow really exists, Wu Zao complains about his own life, suffering is high in his own talent, and suffering is high in his heart. She was dissatisfied with her heart, and she longed for the romantic feelings she had not been able to get.
In her mind, Prince Charming is a real person who does not eat fireworks in the world, poetry and harmony, harmony with the piano, moonlit boating, flower tasting tea, this is her ideal husband and wife life, and fate has arranged for her to be a dedicated and pragmatic husband.
A woman married to a human woman is regarded as a great rebel, and there is absolutely no one in her family and relatives and friends who can accompany her to talk about poetry, and she can only be alone to appreciate her talents, so the poems are inevitably stained with sorrow. This emotion was revealed in the "Su Mu Sha" of the pile of flocs:
Qulan dry, deep courtyard, still spring comes, still spring goes again;
A remnant of red has nowhere to go, green all over the world, green all over the trees.
Liu Shufei, PingYe Ju, plum yellow, plum yellow when rain;
Xiao Ling's words are too silky, the sentences are sad, and the sentences are sad.
But what was she worried about?
The days were spent in her poetry and lyrics, in search of sorrow and in the shape of a wandering skeleton, she did not love her husband, nor did she give birth to a man and a half woman for him, and her heart was high above life. Ten years later, she is still her, but her husband died suddenly due to an illness. When her husband died, she did not have much grief, some were just a pity and sadness, and she never thought that her husband had any necessity in her life.
Although Wu Zao's lineage has yet to be examined, there is not a single word in Wu Zao's extant works that mentions her husband, whether it is due to her husband's "karma", the barrier to communication between non-readers, or the silence due to early widowhood, which makes his marriage disharmonious. Wu Zao said that there are "sad things, there are hidden things that are difficult to say" is certain. In this hopeless and lonely marriage, it is no wonder that Wu Zao has repeatedly said, "Ask who is the true feeling?"
Wu Zao often compared herself to men, and like a man, she visited a brothel and played a game of eyebrow flirtation with the women of the Qinglou. Because of her unique temperament, she became a "bisexual" personality.
The so-called "bisexual", that is, "bisexual homogeneity", means that the same body has both male and female characteristics. This word is derived from Plato's "Drinking Chapter": ancient human beings were divided into men, women, yin and yang homogeneous people, each with two faces and physiques, and the god Zeus split it in half for fear of the power of human beings, thus evolving into modern people.
Because Wu Zao's behavior was very out of line in that era, some people said that she was "gay".
Later, after her husband's death, it took a long time for her to feel truly lonely and empty.
This kind of emotion was absolutely impossible in the past, but it became a kind of sorrow that she remembered, which taught her maturity and taught her to recognize the true meaning of life: what is around her is the most worthy of love and cherishing.
Although she was only thirty-two years old, she felt that she had reached the late autumn of her life, and then everything should return to peace, to the realm of the green lantern ancient Buddha. Wanting to cry without tears, and with a strong smile, she simply moved to a secluded place in the sparsely populated South Lake, guarding a large piece of snow-white plum blossoms, slowly turning over ancient books, and living such a life:
A volume of "Leaving the Troubles", a volume of scriptures, ten years of heart and ten years of lights, a few autumn sounds on the banana leaves! If you want to cry, you can't laugh, you can't help but learn to forget your feelings, and mislead people to say that they are smart.
In the South Lake retreat, she sorted out her own lyrics one by one and compiled them into two collections, one is the Flower Curtain Words, which collects the words before the age of thirty; the other is the Xiangnan Xuebei Words, which were published in the twenty-fourth year of Daoguang and collected into her works after the age of thirty. Because of the publication of these two collections of words, Wu Zao's word name is far from the south and north of the great river, and she herself still quietly guards the South Lake, no longer letting her heart fly high.
Died at the age of sixty-four.