The Death of Woman Wang

The variations on the Chinese family that one comes across in Jonathan Spence's work The Death of Woman Wang is not the simple, patriarchal, Confucian social unit that one so often sees invoked in descriptions of pre-Revolutionary China. There is no litany here of draconian mothers-in-law, dutiful eldest sons and stern, distant fathers. This may result from the fact that Spence is attempting to give us a realistic view of the world of "small corner of northeastern China during the seventeenth century" rather describing unattained cultural ideals (p. xi). But one also senses from his work that there may have been if not precisely alternatives to the ideal Confucian family in pre-Revolutionary China than at least permissible variations on that ideal. This paper examines the way in which the social and biological unit of the family is presented to the reader in Spence's work, drawing on some additional sources to provide a context for Spence's portrait of the Chinese family.

Yang (1959) provides a description of the traditional family before the Communist revolution: "The relation between parents and children in general and between father and son in particular should be the closest, closer than any other type of kinship relation, including the relation between husband and wife, for this is the nucleus of all family relations and the seat of authority in the power structure of the family" (Yang, 1959, p. 10). Of somewhat lesser importance "is the relation between husband an

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nies him or her through life. But it is also patently obvious that a father's name is not the same thing as a father, and the widows in Spence's book have to learn to act both for themselves and for their children, sometimes against the wishes and actions of other members of their husband's families (Spence, 1978, p. 70 and p. 72). Widows can "with determination and strict moral purpose" both make a living and "bring up [their] children to be either worthy scholars or loyal wives in their turn" (Spence, 1978, p. 59). Poverty and misery can break even the strongest family bonds. As Spence notes, "Huang observed that this pervasive misery and sense of unworthiness coupled with the traditional obstinacy and bellicosity of T'an-ch'eng people, led to stormy family scenes and a rash of suicides" (Spence, 1978, p. 14). Due to this structure, "A father and a son in the same household could be transformed in a moment into violent antagonists; relatives and friends in the same village would get into fights at drinking parties; every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam and killed himself" (Spence, 1978, p. 14). Poverty also breaks the traditional and idealistic bonds between husbands and wives, and Spence des

Category: Literature - T