True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China [Book Review] (original) (raw)

China Journal, 2009

Abstract

True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China, by Weijing Lu. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. xviii + 345 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover). Weijing Lu's True to Her Word does an excellent job of placing the phenomenon of faithful maidenhood (zhennu) in its late-imperial context. It discusses the practice from the perspectives of the changing tastes for moral extremism fostered during the fall of the Ming, the motivations of the girls and women themselves, and ideological debates. The morality of unmarried girls going against their parents' wishes and swearing lifelong commitment to dead fiances whom they had never met or, even more extreme, deciding to follow them in death, was widely debated in late-imperial China. In analyzing the choice to become a faithful maiden from the perspective of women's agency, this book follows the work of Dorothy Ko on footbinding (Cinderella 's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, 2005), and Janet Theiss on suicide (Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China, 2004) in providing an important revision of the May 4th construction of women as victims of patriarchal Confucian ideology. As Lu demonstrates, faithful maidens knowingly chose to martyr themselves in order to uphold a moral value that held a greater social meaning than their individual lives, and in so doing both established glorious reputations for themselves at the local and imperial levels and sustained the ideological power of the chastity cult. The frequency with which these women and girls insisted on moving to their dead fiances' household also puts to rest the speculation that chastity maidens were trying to resist marriage (p. 13). True to Her Word sets itself apart from most works of late-imperial Chinese history, which treat the late-imperial period as a long continuum, by showing how the Ming/Qing divide had a significant impact on the development of a distinct women's culture. It has long been acknowledged that late-imperial forms of the chastity cult emerged during the Yuan dynasty and the early years of the Ming as a Han reaction to the barbarian marriage practices promoted by the Mongol court. Lu argues that the ethnic and political crises marked by the fall of the Song and Ming courts to ethnic Others created unique opportunities for elite daughters to define what it meant to be Chinese and to defend the supremacy of their native culture and family learning (p. 7). These periods of national crisis raised the metaphorical power of the image of the faithful maiden, as she not only came to represent an expression of individual virtue but became a means for the male literati who honored her to express their own political resolve and faith in Han ethical superiority. Another significant influence on the development of the faithful maiden cult was the changing taste for dramatic, novel and violent representations of virtue during the second half of the Ming. Although Lu links this new culture of virtue to the political upheavals and political moralism of the second half of the Ming (p. 8), she would also have done well to say more about how the spread of print culture influenced both the individual performances of virtue and their representation. …

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