Mr. Sun’s grasp –or the lack thereof– of the female body seems to be much more sublimated yet is at the end equally revealing of an insidious male insecurity regarding his lack of totalized control over the feminine.
Chiang 2005, Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections, p 96.
Liminality and Lust in the Ming and Qing Dynasties: An Overview
This component of our research is a brief study of how the lives of historical women in the late Ming and Qing dynasties looked, and how those lifestyles were reflected in the eyes of male literati throughout their countless tales of fox spirit seductresses. This page is a study of gender, femininity, history, and most importantly, the dichotomy of lust and chastity within the realm progressively more sexually conservative culture, culminating during the Qing dynasty.
Many anthologized fox stories essentially canonized and solidified the notion that “despite the best efforts of the culture, the feminine is ultimately beyond male comprehension” (Chiang 2004, p 94 ). Foxes, especially those feminized and characterized as temptresses and tricksters, were a handy tool from male literati, the educated elite, that succeeded in stigmatizing the bodies, lives, and activities of real women as the Qing dynasty moved further and further away from the sexual freedom of the Ming dynasty, and closer to a more reserved society, which was almost obsessed with feminine purity.
Throughout our journey alongside women of the late Ming and early Qing periods, we will see just how intimately contradictory the ideals of purity and the eminent and unavoidable threat of pollution interact, and how these themes are displayed, recorded, and enforced through stories of feminine fox-spirits.
Finally, I am inserting a trigger and content warning here for conversations revolving around rape, sexual assault, violent misogyny, and suicide. Please, proceed with caution, seeing as these topics may become graphic and therefore harmful to you, dear reader.
Contextualizing Foxes in the Lives of Women
In the story “Seizing a Fox” by Pu Songling (1640-1715), the main character, a man named Sun attempts to capture a fox which has prowled atop him during his sleep. In his panic, he discovers himself to be literally paralyzed by the fox’s prowl, but somehow manages to wriggle loose and grab it tightly around it’s neck. Sun calls for his wife to help him detain the fox, however, the fox slips out of the wife’s grasp and scampers away, unharmed.
This story, although not directly mentioning that the fox was feminized, plays upon the contemporary understanding of fox-representation in literature, and by instinct, the fox is feminized, and thus, dangerous. Indeed this fox does not appear in order to tempt slumbering Sun, however, she has come to represent the greatest fear of the literati, and the common man: loss of control over the slippery feminine (Chiang, 2004, p 95, paraphrased).
As Sing-chen Lydia Chang hypothesizes in her study “Collecting the Self,” the “uncanny embodiments of the repulsive “other” imply the outer boundaries off the author’s selfhood as he defines his own identity as man and artist against the female other” (Chiang 2004, p 57). Essentially, this means that because we are, as readers, so easily able to “other” something that is animalistic, rather than something that is portrayed as human, then by representing dangerous and threatening women as foxes, rather than as women, we are able to separate their humanity from their existence and therefore mistreat, impose upon, and in some instances even murder them.
This theme is common throughout Chinese fox lore, and even more so when the fox-spirits take the form of both woman and fox.
There are many examples within fox stories wherein the abuse of a fox is excused because of the presumption that the fox is, by default, impure and unnatural. Because of this, there are countless instances of sexual assault and rape within fox-stories, which is then blamed on the very nature of the fox: she is too beautiful, too enticing, too powerful, too threatening — specifically to the male complexes of power over feminine bodies, which becomes directly reflected in the Qing era attitude towards the women in their communities, not just those bound to the page.
Views on Rape in the Qing Dynasty
Because of the ways in which women were socialized during the Qing dynasty, the patterns, execution of, and sentencing for harmful acts, most specifically rape, followed many of the same reasonings as the men partaking in the abuse of female fox-spirits in the Zhiguai tales.
After the fall of the Ming dynasty, Qing dynasty definitions of and restrictions upon sexuality became even more repressive, particularly with the introduction of the 1646 rape law, which establishes that for a crime of rape to be irrefutable, there must be heaps of evidence provided by the victim of the crime. Such evidences included witnesses, visible harm done to the victims body, and torn clothing (Ng 1987, 58).
In addition to having to provide exorbitant and traumatizing amounts of evidence in order to prove the validity of her rape, the victim would have to prove, somehow, that she did everything in her power, throughout the duration of the assault, which more often than not involved the loss of her life.
If you can believe it, the parameters for defining a rape during the Qing dynasty are even more conflated once the vital issue of female chastity is considered. Similar to many of our proceedings today (although not included in legislature, but still practiced) a woman’s sexual history and even profession would be interrogated when the accusation of a rape was on the table.
For example, if violence had been used from the outset of the assault, and instead of fighting off her assailant for the entire duration of the assault, submits “voluntarily”(Ng 1987, 58) to him, the woman would be subject to a punishment almost equivalent to that of her assailant. Another stipulation of validating rape as rape, rather than “illicit intercourse” (Ng 1987, 58) would be verifying that the woman had not already engaged in an “illicit” (extramarital) affair. Again, if found guilty of this, rather than having her rapist found solely responsible for the affair, they would both be dealt “100 blows with a heavy bamboo” (Ng 1987, 58)
Because of the remarkably dangerous and harmful legislation surrounding rape in Qing China, many of the cases and convictions were centered upon the notion and evidence of the victim’s “moral makeup” (Ng 1987, 66). This morality was more often than not determined by how chaste the victim was before the incident, and therefore resulted in the penultimate example of victim blaming that the world has to offer.
Because there was such a “high value” (Ng 1987, 63) placed upon female chastity, it was often a dangerous game one played with life and death, honor and dishonor, when reporting a rape. There was always the imminent potential risk for the report to tarnish the family name and bring further harm to the victim, and therefore there was often worry over whether the consequences of reporting the rape would be worth it in the end.
The rape law of 1646 reflected Chinese attitudes toward female sexuality. Like most other patriarchal societies, the Chinese held (and upheld) a two-sided archetype of women. One side was the chase virgin/widow; the flip side, however, was that of the temptress, the fox-spirit.
Vivien Ng 1987, “Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China,” p 64.
Fox-spirit stories are not only stories, but influenced historical representations of women, and how that archetype is so dichotomous when observed within a society that almost worshiped the concept of chastity as a moral value.
The fox temptress archetype was so prevalent throughout Qing China, that it, as we see, becomes reflected in extremely strict rape laws. Because of the belief that a woman’s yin vital essence (the life force which could be drawn out through sexual encounters) was bottomless, and therefore “voracious,” and a man’s yang essence was severely limited (also his life force which could be drained through sexual encounters) and therefore extremely precious, rape laws had to be especially careful to ensure that a woman was not secretly a lustful temptress, and truly was harmed by someone whose life essence was limited (Ng 1987, 64).
The Cult of Chastity: Martyrs and Matriarchs Made of Suicide
Chastity, being so vitally valuable during the Qing dynasty, developed a cult following, which is now known by scholars as the “cult of chastity.” So, when a woman’s most valuable possession, which was her chastity, was stolen or challenged, the most virtuous solution was for women to simply end their lives in the ultimate act of resistance.
The inability, during a case of rape, for a woman to defend her chastity with her life was then, effectively “made a punishable offense” (Ng 1987, p 64). Chastity was so much the issue of importance when it came to rape, that laws were not made to specifically address and punish the rape of an unchaste woman.
Fangqin Du and Susan Mann write that “a woman’s ultimate moral obligation [was] her obligation to the patriline into which she married” (Du and Mann 2003, 219). This meant that if her chastity was challenged, through rape, sexual assault, or otherwise, as was her patriline, and as was their honor as a family name. This devotion to the combination of husband, chastity, and honor resulted an epidemic of female suicide throughout the late imperial period.
The Ming-Qing period honored two female values: purity and martyrdom. The first virtue…referred not simply to sexual purity but to absolute fidelity to one husband, expressed in a refusal to remarry and lifelong devotion to the parents and heirs of the deceased spouse. The second…meant that a woman’s absolute commitment to fidelity and sexual purity might require self-sacrifice ending in death or suicide.
Fangqin Du and Susan Mann, 2003, Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan,”Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China, 220
Since one’s purity (chastity and moral makeup) did not solely depend on ones sexual history, but ones history with the patriline, purity was fickle and precious, often more precious than one’s life.
In my research, I personally discovered that the act of suicide simultaneously acted as proof of autonomy, even within such a restrictive, oppressive society, but also reinforced the concept that women were the property of their husbands, and therefore could not live in betrayal of them (their chastity and purity belonged to their husband) or without them.
In the instance of the death of a husband, wives, in order to prove their devotion to both purity and filiality, would commit suicide following their husband in death. This prevented the risk of tarnishing their purity through remarrying, and allowed them to prove their worth to their parents-in-law, and to the community at large.
However, differentiating from the Ming era, where absolute suicide in the face of loss (of chastity or of life) was placed on the highest pedestal, suicide during the Qing dynasty was often praised only after the woman established an heir the the patriline, took care of her parents-in-law, and throughout all this time refused to remarry. Only after this, would her suicide be praised as a righteous example of purity, establishing her as an eternal, tragic matriarch within the patriline, and the greater history of China.
Historical Accounts
Taken from Fangquin Du and Susan Mann’s chapter “Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China.”
The Five Lienu of the Song Family
The five Song women, four daughters and one granddaughter, belonged to the family of a tenant farmer. Because the women were attractive, the owner of the land the father tilled tried to coerce them to become his concubines. One night, in 1695 the five young women committed suicide together. When the case was brought to the county magistrate, who feared the power of the landowner and dared not report it to his superiors, the girls were buried instead in a tomb provided by the government, over which was a stone tablet with the inscription “Tomb of the Five Song Lienu” (Du and Mann 2003, pp 235-236).
The Widow Zhang
The Widow Zhang, who was the wife of Fan Tingzhu in Xiangcheng, Hubei Province, was raped and killed by two bullies who were registered military men from the same county. Her neighbors brought the case to court, but the county magistrate was afraid of the power of the two bullies and their families, so he blamed the widow’s death on alleged advances by a younger brother-in-law. So many people protested this obvious fabrication that the magistrate was forced to alter his final report on the case, changing the verdict to “insoluble” (Du and Mann 2003, p 236)
The Lady Li
Lady Li was betrothed to a man named Wu Du and reared in the Wu family from the age of eleven. Six years later, Wu Du drowned in a well. Although the marriage ceremony had not yet taken place, Li pinned up her hair in the manner of a married woman and began to serve Wu Du’s mother as her mother in law. She also asked the family to adopt a son for her to rear. When at last she had sent her younger brother-in-law through school and arranged a marriage for her younger sister-in-law and her own adopted son, she announced to her late husband’s older brother: “Now my late husband’s parents have died, and our family has enough people to carry on the rites for them in our ancestral hall. The person in the well [Wu Du] has waited a long time. I should follow him.” Twenty-one years after her fiancee’s death, on his birthday, she jumped into the same well and drowned herself. Lady Li’s biographers make it clear that her suicide, following this extraordinary record of faithful service, was an especially virtuous deed (Du and Mann 2003, p 236).
The Lady Zhang
When Lady Zhang, wife of Liu Kun, became aware that the city where she lived had been sacked and her husband had died, she killed her two daughters and told her late husband’s concubine, named Wu, to hide the three-year-old heir so that he could carry on the Liu family name. The concubine first arranged for her son’s nanny to carry the boy away to safety, then she committed suicide together with her late husband’s wife (Du and Mann 2003, p 236).
Bibliography
Chiang, Sing-chen Lydia. Collecting the Self: Body and Identity in Strange Tale Collections of Late Imperial China. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Du, Fangqin, and Susan Mann. “Competing Claims on Womanly Virtue in Late Imperial China.” In Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan, edited by Ko Dorothy, Haboush JaHyun Kim, and Piggott Joan R., 219-48. University of California Press, 2003. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp3b9.17.
Ng, Vivien W. “Ideology and Sexuality: Rape Laws in Qing China.” The Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 57-70. doi:10.2307/2056666.
Image Bibliography
“42: The Analects for Women.” Images of Women in Chinese Thought and Culture: Writings from the Pre-Qin Period through the Song Dynasty, by Robin Wang, Hackett Pub. Co., 2003, pp. 338–339.
“Spring Morning in the Han Palace.” Qing Dynasty Ceramics, Porcelain | China Online Museum, www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-qiu-ying-han-palace.php.
Page written and created by Billie D-M., Chloe W., and Lydia M.
