This panel is centered around the issue of women’s suicide: using a variety of Ming and Qing sources (fiction, funerary essays, legal cases, official documents, and poetry), the presenters look at the issue of women’s suicide and the ways in which it was culturally constructed and socially practiced in late imperial China. The papers show the challenge of reconstructing the discourse of suicide and its problematic relationship to power, morality, gender, and class. In the materials analyzed by the presenters, we find literati deeply critical of suicide side by side with men praising such an act, the changing state and official attitudes toward chastity martyrdom, women using the male rhetoric to decode their experienced life, fictional writers representing the gesture of terminating one’s life as a triumph of sensual passion rather than martyrdom. These conflicting and yet related representations enhance our understanding of the polyphonic nature of cultural and political practices in late imperial Chinese society.

The panel, while traditional in its presentation of papers, will be experimental in discussion: instead of one discussant, the panelists will discuss each other’s work. The participants believe this format to be an effective way to promote exchange of feed-back among the participants and to generate discussion with the audience.

Katherine Carlitz, University of Pittsburgh

In this paper, I suggest that the Ming dynasty valorization of passion or Qing made a powerful contribution to the diffusion of chastity norms. I draw on the lives of the poets Kang Hai (1475–1541) and Wang Rusi (1468–1551), whose friendship and devotion to wine, women, and song were and still are legendary. Less well-known is the fact that the two men were connected by ties of fidelity and family tragedy: they married their children to each other and witnessed a daughter-in-law and her sister-in-law commit suicide when their young husbands died.

At Kang Hai’s request, Wang Jiusi wrote funerary essays for all of these young people. Kang Hai and Wang Jiusi also collaborated in commemorating a virtuous singing-girl who had been taken as a concubine by one of their friends, and committed suicide when he died on his travels. In Kang’s and Wang’s songs and funerary essays, singing-girls and young gentry women-suicides are evoked in much the same language. They are all constructed as vessels of Qing: the girls of good family defy their elders in order to consummate their suicides, and Wang’s songs for the erstwhile singing-girl are filled with evocations of sensual satisfaction. In writings like these, the norms of the chastity cult were made not restrictive but alluring, and I suggest that this helped them conquer the imagination of the governing-class—a prerequisite to diffusion throughout the whole of society.

Janet M. Theiss, University of Utah

During the first 150 years of Qing rule, the suicides of women were the subject of unprecedented quantities of legal and ritual legislation and a frequent topic of debate in official and literati discourses on law, ethics and social order. Every emperor from Shunzhi to Qianlong attempted to ban widow suicide by denying widow martyrs state honors and extolling the value of chaste widowhood. While such bans may have spurred a decrease in numbers of widow suicides, other state policies worked to validate, if not encourage, other forms of female suicide. Over the course of the 18th century, some eighteen new substatutes were created under the statute on causing a person to commit suicide to elaborate new categories of suicide in response to adultery, sexual assault, verbal harassment or indecent gossip, each of which carried distinct penalties and state honors for the victim.

This paper will examine the 18th-century discourse on female suicide which surrounded this burst of legislative activity. I will argue that debates about the prevention or valorization of female suicide were an integral component of the broader discourse on moral reform and the role of state activism in its promotion which were hallmarks of High Qing political culture. The female chastity martyr confronted literati activists with an unresolvable contradiction: she expressed utmost commitment to the core virtue of the moral order they wished to promote, yet for many her death was an extreme, unnecessary and inhumane act with potentially disastrous practical consequences for local social order.

Paola Zamperini, Arizona State University

Traditional Chinese fiction abounds with images of chaste and virtuous women willing to become martyrs and forfeit their lives for the sake of their husbands, fiancées, parents, and children. But just as many are the women who are willing to kill themselves because they have been scorned or avenge themselves of the wrong they have suffered at the hands of a worthless scoundrel. In other words, there are fictional heroines who can use suicide as a vehicle to convey to eternity, as it were, the strength of their passions, from love to hatred, from jealousy to thirst for revenge.