D
Sociology Study ISSN 2159‐5526 July 2014, Volume 4, Number 7, 634‐640
DAVID
PUBLISHING
The Tragedy of Women Rebels: Figures of Women Rebels in the Literature of Ming and Qing Dynasties Ying Zhenga Abstract In the volume of Chinese literature of Ming and Qing dynasties, there are a lot of well‐known figures of women rebels, who have been highly spoken of by many later critics for their braveness in breaking the conventional and unfair rules made for women in that male‐centered society. In the traditional point of view, the appearance of these literary figures marks the awareness of self‐consciousness of women. But this paper, by analyzing two of the representative figures of them, Miss Du Liniang (杜丽娘) in Tang Xianzu’s drama The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) and the women in the Women’s Kingdom (女儿国) in Li Ruzhen’s novel Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), tries to figure out and distinguish the superficial gender dependence and the real but hidden role of “the other” in these characters. It purports to convince that such processes of rebellion are none the less women’s tragedies, for they serve only to show Chinese women’s unchangeable position of “the second sex” in the traditional male‐centered society of old China, but merely in some new and different ways. Keywords Chinese literary works, Ming and Qing dynasties, women rebels, self‐consciousness, “the second sex” The subject around gender is forever one of the most
appealing topics in human being’s history and in the
modern time in particular. The famous French author
Simone De Beauvoir (1988) has promoted that in the
thousand years of male-chauvinist history of the
western society, women were always playing the role
of “the second sex”. And the English art critic John
Peter Berger (2005) has also clarified in his Ways of
Seeing that due to women’s low social status, they
have always been taken as the object of literature or
other artistic works. Coincidentally or not, these
observations are also true when being applied to the
ancient society of China. As it is, the ancient Chinese
society was mainly dominated by the male-centered
Confucian culture, which gave extreme emphasis to
the superiority of men in social status over that of
women, under the governing of which a lot of strict
rules were established exclusively for women [“the
three obedience and four virtues” ( 三从四德 ) for
example]. And among the Chinese literary works,
stories of women occupied a large proportion.
What is interesting is that in the category of these
literary works, apart from those depicting female
characters who obeyed the “women virtue” in an
explicit way and were remembered for their obedience,
such as the mother of Mencius, the wife of Pang
aZhejiang University, China Correspondent Author: Ying Zheng, No. 7 Shuangfu New District, Chongqing, China E‐mail: zhengyingab@126.com; 15990020776@126.com
Zheng Xuanling in The Biography of Women (列女传), there
were also many depicting figures of disobedient
women, who overtly transgressed those rules and went
against those virtues, but became more famous and
enjoyed even higher reputation later. In the literary
works of Ming and Qing dynasties, the campus of
these rebel figures swelled rapidly, especially in the
so-called “light literatures” such as dramas and novels.
According to the traditional opinion, the
appearance of these rebel figures marked the
formation of self-consciousness of ancient Chinese
women and could be no less prominent than the
growing and developing of feminism in the western
countries, because they think that these figures were
no longer willingly staying in their previous low
position, which was described later by Lu Xun as “the
property of men, the one that could be killed or eaten
fairly, and could be buried alive with men’s favorite
personal articles and daily-used weapons” (Lu 1973:
109), and made a brave rebellion.
But in the author’s point of view, such opinion
might be too optimistic and might be fairly easy to be
challenged, since in that autocratic society in which all
the discourse power belonged to men only, it might be
too hard for any real feminism to come into being and,
on the contrary, what was reflected by those rebel
women figures in these works was deeply and
unchangeably the tragedy of Chinese women as “the
second sex”, but only in some new and different ways.
In this paper, the author is just going to make this
clarified and convinced by analyzing two of the
representative figures of rebel figures.
THE CHOICE OF THE EXAMPLES In the numerous characters of tragic but conventionally
misinterpreted women rebels coming onto stage in
works of that period, the author thinks Miss Du
Liniang in The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) of the Ming
dynasty and the group of women in The Women’s
Kingdom in Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘) of the
635
Qing dynasty should be counted as the typical
examples, for in the traditional point of view, they are
considered as heroines for their success in fighting
against the rules and restrictions for women in two
crucially important issues respectively and they have
gotten what ancient Chinese women had long been
deprived of—the right of independent love and the
right toward social power. And for each of the right
regaining, they reach the utmost success and
summit—the former sacrifices her life for love and in
turn gets saved by her love; the latter comes to the
throne and manages to rule male members, making the
original gender relation completely opposite.
THE TRAGEDY OF DU LINIANG Du liniang is the heroine in Tang Xianzu’s (汤显祖)
drama, The Peony Pavilion, the only daughter of Du
Bao ( 杜 宝 ), “a famous Confucian scholar and
governor of western Shu”. As the apple of her parents’
eye, Du Liniang receives very good care from her
parents and strict restriction from the rules of
Confucian doctrine of “Li”(礼, ritual). Her first text
poem, Guanju (关雎), which is said to be about “the
virtue of consorts” (后妃之德), however, induced the
feeling of love in her youthful heart. After that, she
dreams a shameful dream, in which she is encountered
with a handsome young scholar in her spring garden,
with whom she falls in love at once and shares the
happiness of love. She lost herself so deeply in her
dreaming love that she becomes ill when she wakes up
and finds the impossibility of realizing her dreamt
love. She passes away soon, only leaving a
self-portrait to get her graceful face remembered. A
young scholar named Liu Mengmei ( 柳 梦 梅 )
coincidentally picks up this portrait and dates with her
spirit for several times. Driven by the power of love,
he helps her to come back to life by exhuming her
tomb. And finally, after some struggles and torments,
the two lovers get married, the union of which also
receives the acceptance of the society.
636
In the traditional point of view, the struggle and
rebellion of Du Liniang embodies the beginning of
traditional Chinese women’s self-independence, for
she bravely breaks the rules which her parents, the
representative of the “Li” principle in that society,
have set for her and seek for her true and free love and
her own happiness spontaneously. She is considered
as the avatar of love, the pioneer of women’s modern
awareness, for she does not reconcile to her fate which
is seriously limited by principles made for women in
that society (that women cannot make dicision on
their marriage but be dependent on the order of
parents and the words of match-makers), but wants to
be an independent individual in front of marriage
instead of a slave passively waiting for order. Her
story became very influential among the women in
ancient China that it is said the lady of Yu Er’niang
( 俞 二 娘 ), after reading the story and making a
comparison with her own miserable experience of
marriage, died from sadness, and similarly, in another
novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦), Lin
Daiyu (林黛玉) is also deeply moved by her story and
weeps for her.
But, if we go on this study at a deeper level, we
can see that the figure of Du Liniang has never got the
“self-awareness” as an independent person, and how
she treates herself is not different from how a young
lady is designed and decided by the society (to be
willing to be “the other”), so that all her fights against
fate and life are, only in vain or to make herself a
more attractive, satisfying, and competent “property”
of man; and in other words, her struggle could not be
a real rebellion against and transgression over the
male-centered society. As every coin has two sides,
those points for which she is considered as an
independent person are precisely too, the points make
up her tragedy as “the second sex”.
On Her Pursuit Du Liniang is most widely praised for her bravery in
seeking her own love and happiness. But, as it could
Sociology Study 4(7) be found in the play, what she pursues is actually
confined within how to be a good and ideal wife of
man, which is nothing different from what she has
been hoped to do by the male-dominating society.
Though she is a well-educated and talented girl,
what she wants for future is only a marriage as her
father’s and the society’s will—“when she is married
to a scholar, she must have a common language with
her master”. And though she can draw very well, the
only true usage of this talent in the play is to draw a
self-portrait to let her short life known and her
beautiful face observed by others (men in fact) in the
future. She treats love as the only content of her life,
sighing after her amazing dream that “being unable to
get a good husband, the life would become completely
a waste”; like what Berger (2005) has observed, she
wishes to be the objective of her husband’s
appreciation as after drawing herself a portrait she
expresses her envy of those “beautiful ladies both in
the past or in the present who has a husband to draw a
portrait of her”, and “those draw themselves and could
give their portrait to their lovers”.
Du’s ideality is not self-conscious at all, but a
result of the male-centered society. And in the
author’s point of view, it could be attributed to at least
the following three reasons.
Firstly, though Hedger has proposed that women
pay all their spiritual life and real life to love because
only in that can they find their support for life, the
author thinks the reason more true for such kind of
spontaneous and faithful pursuit of love is that ancient
Chinese women had been deprived of many other civil
rights as a member of the society and after a long
period of deprivation, they had been very much used to
this and became deeply and obstinately self-disciplined.
And with this lack of self-consciousness, they could
only put their concentration on their marriage and give
most of their hope of happiness to their husbands and
their families. For example, in the Confucius culture,
the ideality for a well-educated man should be “To
cultivate oneself and put family in order, then to rule
Zheng the country and to give peace to the world”, but as for
women, even though they could be equally
well-educated and talented, as Du Liniang is, the final
ideality for them could only be half of the men’s, “to
cultivate oneself and put family in order” and that is
all. The distance in between shows clearly their
discrimination toward women—regarding them as
individuals inferior and less competent.
Secondly, in that male-centered society, men
wanted to monopolize the power outside the family so
eagerly that they had to make the other gender less
achieved, and only in this way could they control and
rule the other gender easily and get hold of the power
safely. Because of this, they set a lot of unequal rules
for women and what they allowed women to do was
to treat love, in fact their need for husband, as the only
value, content, and center of their life.
Thirdly, though it is true that men wanted women
to be inferior to them in social achievement, for which
they promoted that “ignorance is a woman’s virtue”
(女子无才便是德), on the premise of controllability,
wished women, especially their wives, to be as
well-educated and talented as Du Liniang, since this
could not only show the nobility of their family, but
also make their family life less boring, just as Miss
Du’s father has taught her, she must be educated so
that after she gets married, she can have common
language with her husband. And Li Yu ( 李 渔 ),
another Chinese literator of Qing Dynasty, has pointed
out,
Even though I have a few wives, but if they are so
ignorant that when I want to talk, they keep silent, when I
want to contemplate, they make noise, or they can’t response
correctly when I make a question, is this any different from
going into a cave of a group of foxes?1
On Her Persistence and Firmness in Pursuing Miss Du is praised also for her persistence and
firmness to her dreamt love. But, to view it in another
way, this persistence and firmness is just the faith to
637
marriage demanded of women by men, but just in
another form.
In the play, as soon as Du Liniang finds her ideal
lover, she is described to be abnormally faithful as she
overcomes a series of difficulties, including the
disapproval of her father and even barrier between life
and death—when it is impossible to get together with
her dreamt lover, she gives up her life and
ungratefully abandons her parents who have brought
her up; when she goes to the Acheron, her soul insists
on appealing to the judge to check for her husband’s
family name; when she gets the oath of her lover that
“being husband and wife, live in the same room when
alive and buried in the same tomb after death”, she
asks him to help her getting revived, saying that “a
few days ago, I died for Liu, and today, I revive for
Liu, too”.
Despite of these, Du does so in a way that men
would like her to do. It is said by Beauvoir (1988)
that “When woman becomes the property of man, he
wants her to show all the humanity” (Beauvoir 1988:
84), and the most obvious points of humanity in Du
Liniang is to be man’s property so spontaneously.
When men wants women to be their property once
and forever, as they always do, they would never be
satisfied if the woman only does so quietly or
compulsorily which would make them a notorious
tyrant. They want to see women to do so or to
become so all at their own will, which is to say that
they do so naturally and willingly as if they are born
to be so.
On Her Challenge to the Premise of Marriage, “Families of Equal Standing” The praise for Du Liniang also comes from her
challenge to the idea of “families of equal standing”
( 门当户对 ) in the ritual system as a premise of
marriage, for she falls in love with a poor scholar in
spite of the fact that she herself is born from an
aristocratic family. But in the author’s viewpoint, this
fictional choice could be seen as another form of
Sociology Study 4(7) 638
selfishness of men, for it is exactly what men in that
society had long been yearling for: If someone was
unable to access fame and gain social status by
himself, he could also pin hope on getting the love of
an aristocratic lady by which he could get social status
and a beauty simultaneously. And from this
perspective, women acted as a servant of men’s vanity,
a ladder through which they could get what they could
not by their own endeavor.
From these three points, we may reach the
conclusion that Du Liniang, though she seems to gain
the right that Chinese women had been deprived of by
her rebellion and transgression, she is still a server for
men’s desires, vanity, and wishes, but only in a
different and more attractive way. And in the light of
this, her social status as “the second sex” and as the
property of men is not changed at all, for she still lives
under the conception which Sun Shaoxian (1987)
described as the conception the criteria of a
male-centered society (Sun 1987).
THE TRAGEDY OF WOMEN IN WOMAN’S KINGDOM In the literary works of Ming and Qing dynasties,
there are quite a few Woman’s Kingdoms, in each of
which women appeared to be no longer in their
position of controlee. And the most absolute one of
this change or reform was taken by the women in the
Woman’s Kingdom in Li Ruzhen’s Flowers in the
Mirror (1818) written in Qing dynasty, where women
not only come into fields of social and public activity,
getting the power outside marriage and family, but
hold the power of governing and controlling male
citizens, which is regarded as the most success of
women rebels in many people’s minds.
In this kingdom, women “wear boots and hats,
dealing with the social affairs”, and men, on the
contrary, “wear blouses and skirts, dealing with the
domestic chores”2. From the emperor to the farmer,
women there play all roles of men in the society of
Lin Zhiyang’s (林之洋) country.
It cannot be denied that women in the Woman’s
Kingdom get the political power and show out their
outstanding intelligence and talent in governing the
society, but this may not prove that women there
succeed in their battle against men, nor does that
country have anything in common with the
female-centered society in primordial period in
human’s history, in which women treated every
individual fairly and mercifully when they were in the
possession of power. And it can get proved from at
least the following two points.
“The Men” in Essence Except the fact that women there could not change
some of their physiological characteristics, such as
being shorter than men and slim in shape, without any
beard or mustache and keeping a female voice, they
are made completely to be “the men”. They call and
regard themselves as “men”, play the role of “men” in
all the social activities and unconsciously or not,
advocate the culture of the male-centered society.
For example, when they are in power, they also
treat the other gender, the “women” in that country as
their objective of observation since “people from all
levels of the society there are economical in their
dressing, but they all like to decorate ‘women’”3, and
ask “women” to get foot binding; they consider “the
men” as the center of relationship, calling these
foreign “women” visitors “wife of my brother” (大嫂)
instead of “sister” directly; they take “women” their
properties, showing no respect to “women’s” willing
when they want to marry them; they use excruciation
on “women” when the latter are not obedient to them;
they make “women” toys, playing with their little feet
and smell the fragrance of “their” bodies; they use
them as tools for reproduction, as the emperor said to
Lin Zhiyang that “if you can give birth to a child in
the future, you will have much luck ever since”4.
From all of these, we can see that the society in the
Woman’s Kingdom, though ruled by the physical
Zheng women, is nothing different from the male-centered
ancient China, the nation Lin Zhiyang and his fellows
come from. And in other words, through women there
have succeeded in their competition against men, get
the possession of social power, ruling male citizens,
they have not any ideology system of their own, but
continue the male-centered system, and use their
power in a masculine way. And from this perspective,
they may be another sort of contributor and advocator
to the male-centered social culture, and strictly
speaking, they cannot be counted as real rebels to that
male-centered society at all.
Viewing from a historical perspective, this may
reflect the very tragedy of Chinese women in a
male-centered society. They have been in the low and
secondary social status so long that they have been
completely deprived of their own culture. Even if one
day they have the chance to win their right or power
back, they know nothing about how to handle it in
their own way, and unfortunately and consequently,
they could only imitate the premier male rulers, using
the power in their way (the only model of social
culture they have ever known and could only come up
with) which might lead to the stabilization of the
male-centered culture.
The Poor Actresses Under the Gender Mask In the male-centered society, power is connected to
man only, and it is all the same in that country. It is
actually by wearing a gender mask that women there
get their “achievement” in social power, and as soon
as they leave their power, they have to be the weak
“women” again.
As it can be seen, in order to achieve their social
power, women in that kingdom can do nothing else
but abandon their own identity, dress up as “men”,
changing their beautiful and comfortable long dress
into heavy boots and large trousers, which may not fit
their short and slim bodies in any way. And on the
contrary, as in the case of “prince” Yin Ruohua (阴若
花), as long as a woman departs from her power, she
639
has to turn into a woman again, to get hair neatly
combed and foot binding, as when “prince” Yin
decides to go away with Lin Zhiyang. And it may be
said that the more successful woman under gender
mask can be in the novel, the less influential they are
in the real world.
From the two points, we can see that in the
Woman’s Kingdom in Flowers in the Mirror, though
women conquer over men and get the social power on
the surface, what they reflect is none the less the
humble position of women, and their “success” does
nothing help to transform the reality in which women
are inferior groups and are only “the second sex”.
CONCLUSIONS From the analysis of the two typical images of the
seemingly “successful” women rebels, Du Liniang in
The Peony Pavilion and the women in the Woman’s
Kingdom in Flowers in the Mirror, we can reach the
conclusion that in the male-centered culture and in the
works of male writers in Ming and Qing dynasties, the
self-consciousness of woman had in no way coming
into birth, and instead, the appearance of these women
rebels indeed reflected the tragedy of women—they
were unshakably in the inferior position of “the
second sex”, no matter what form they were in,
whether they were obedient slaves or “brave rebels”.
In Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy (1877) has written at
the very beginning that “Happy families are all alike;
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, and
if we apply this to the case of women figures in the
traditional Chinese literatures of Ming and Qing
dynasties, it could be that “Happy man are all alike;
every unhappy women is unhappy in her own way”.
Notes 1. “使姬妾满堂，皆是蠢然一物，我欲言而彼默，我思静
而彼喧，所答非所问，所应非所求，是何异于入狐狸之
穴，舍宣淫而外，一无事事者乎？”。
Sociology Study 4(7) 640
2. “男子反穿衣裙，作为妇人，以治内事；女子反穿靴帽，
作为男人，以治外事”。
3. “诸事简朴，就只有个毛病，最喜打扮妇人”。
4. “你日后倘能生得儿女，你享福日子正长”。
References Beauvoir, S. D. 1988. The Secret of Women. Beijing: China
International Radio Press.
Berger, J. P. 2005. Ways of Seeing. Guilin: Guangxi Normal
University Press.
Li, R. Z. 1818. Flowers in the Mirror. Retrieved (http://www.
xiexingcun.com/gudianxiaoshuo/ 008/mydoc036.htm).
Li, Y. 1671. Idle Talk. Retrieved (http://www.saohua.com/
shuku/lidaibiji/lidaibiji513.htm).
Lu, X. 1973. Complete Works of Lu Xun. Vol. 1. Beijing:
People’s Publishing House.
Sun, S. X. 1987. Feminism Literature. Shenyang: Liaoning
University Press.
Tang, X. Z. 2011. The Peony Pavilion (explosive book noted
by Wang Siren). Nanjing: The Phoenix Publishing House.
Tolstoy, L. 1877. Anna Karenina. Retrieved (http://www.
newxue.com/mingzhu/annakalienina/).
Bio Ying Zheng, MA of English Literature and Language, School
of International Studies, Zhejiang University, China; English
teacher, Chongqing Vocational College of Transportation;
research fields: critical discourse studies, comparative literary
studies, and cognitive literary studies.