Violence, Society, and Gender
The culture of a people can be said to encompass behavior, art, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. These other products of human work and thought can be taken both upon individual and collective bases. What thoughts and beliefs exist individually will eventually form a collective total, but the aggregate mean of these products is generally an indicator of what composes the collective thought about a given subject or issue. This aggregate mean, although convenient for a broad generalization or classification of a subject, provides only a glimpse of the possibly extremely divergent nature of the individual thoughts. As the possibility of such a divergence increases with the admission of a larger influx of data, it becomes necessary to sacrifice comprehensive totality for functionality. For such a reason, then, one might study a culture by means of individual thought on only a very localized scale, to avoid the facts subjection to an interminable process of quantification.
Such is the mechanism of Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang, as he seeks to explore the issues of society and gender, in the book’s second half. Spence uses individuals within T’an-ch’eng county to serve as representatives of people from all of China, thereby extending the scope of his discussion while limiting the data to a realistic and useful specificity. To endeavor to study the culture of all of seventeenth-century China collectively would be too great a task for a single book, but to treat the study through the focused method employed by Spence expeditiously facilitates the process. Issues of society and gender would very unlikely have been extensively discussed or recorded by contemporary scholars of the seventeenth-century, so Spence’s use of both historical records and fictional insight both give credence to developing a more complete picture of these issues. Spence’s historical information comes from two sources: Local History of T’an-ch’eng (1673) and the personal memoirs of a scholar-official, Huang Liu-hung, composed in the 1690s. The fictional works Spence uses come from a local writer of T’an-ch’eng county, P’u Sung-Ling. Through these three sources, Spence pieces together a view into Chinese life that is complete enough to render a capable understanding of Chinese cultural history and simultaneously does not overburden the reader with redundant, extraneous information.
Spence begins his discussion of social issues in chapter four through an anecdote by P’u Sung-Ling, in which he shares how his family had not gotten along, resulting in P’u’s own personal misery This theme of misery is a continuation from the first half of the book and does not abate even at the book’s conclusion. The theme is of such preponderance exactly because of the harshness of life suffered by the Chinese people during this time. Continuing, Spence incorporates another of P’u’s stories, involving the man Ts’ui Meng, known as “Ts’ui the violent.” P’u’s character was obsessive in his temper and anger, quick to fight and a very fearful person. The purpose behind Ts’ui’s story was to exhibit a strong man who was able to help bring about justice for the weak and oppressed, but the manner in which Ts’ui often carried out his justice was repeatedly brutal and violent. For example, as a punishment for supporting an evil, murderous man, Wang, Ts’ui violently “cut off the noses and ears of the twenty bandits, and then let them go.” Spence’s inclusion of this story does not, alone, implicate a general acceptance of violence in Chinese culture, but it does allow suspicion of a popular dependence upon individuals for the deliverance of justice, as the legal officials were subject to bribery by the wealthy Indeed, if the poor were to have any justice, it would apparently have been necessary to be vigilantes. Ts’ui embodied this idea, and P’u was probably realistic in his treatment of the need for individuals to protect themselves against the wealthy and powerful, and against a negligent legal system.
Spence followed the fictional account of Ts’ui’s violence and vigilantism with a historical account of a local gangster family, the Wangs, who had likely been the prototype for P’u’s story. A corrupt land deal prompted conflict and, eventually, several murders by the Wang family. In response, the victims were afraid to directly accuse the Wangs, due to an ineffective legal system that offered no hope of justice to those without the capacity to “buy” it. Eventually, the magistrate gets to the root of the case and arranges for an assault upon the Wang family, but the process of receiving justice is again marked by violence. An abbreviated battle ensues between the magistrate’s men and Wang’s men, resulting in the deaths of a few of Wang’s men. The recourse to violence, in order to simply arrest Wang, is an example of social instability, as the government had to forcibly enact its legal procedures by veritably making war upon the accused, due to the accused refusing to submit to the legal system’s authority. An explanation for this could be that Wang expected to buy his way out of the situation, as the wealthy traditionally did. Through only a few examples of legal injustice, Spence clearly illustrates a very problematic matter in seventeenth-century China, and the way violence became a tool to help stave off the ill effects of this injustice.
Spence’s discussion of the issue of gender begins in earnest in chapter five with a brief overview of the importance of honor and virtue, especially among women. In the Local History, officials listed biographies of women who lived “correctly,” embracing the virtues of “chastity, courage, tenacity, and unquestioning acceptance of the prevailing hierarchy—unto death, if necessary.” The statement “unto death, if necessary” implies that an automatic inferiority marks women; the mere fact of considering a wife’s death to be necessary at the loss of her husband shows the “prevailing hierarchy’s” disregard for the usefulness of women as individuals, that is, apart from a male counterpart. But, what exactly is the “prevailing hierarchy? To singularly discount the social order as being a male-dominated system would be to overlook the fact that women’s roles, though subservient, did affect to help prop up the order, as it existed. Women may not have wanted to be “inferior” to men, but they had neither the option nor the ability to change the system. Also, without women’s cooperation within this fundamental framework of society, Chinese life would have certainly ground to a halt, not to mention a likely incursion of violence against women, due to the violent realities of life intrinsic to the era.
Spence saves the story of woman Wang to conclude his book, for the obvious reason that this example, more than any other, shows the true misery of life in this era. As the most constant themes throughout Spence’s book, misery and suffering embodied the unfortunate realities of life for countless Chinese men and women of the seventeenth-century. The lot of women, though, was decidedly more difficult, as subordinates and inferiors to men. Woman Wang married and, within a year, ran away from her husband with another man. This was an act that warranted very severe punishment for a woman, as would be expected in a society as rigidly male-dominated as China’s. However, the punishment woman Wang ultimately receives from her husband is not based upon the law, but upon his desire for retribution against her, and for retaliation against his neighbor, against whom he had a grievance. Lost in this process is woman Wang; a tragic death to conclude a miserable life, she was brutally murdered and cast out in the snow. Although Spence’s treatment of this story in no way suggests that uxoricidal tendencies abounded, once again, the problem of violence suffuses through daily realities of life at this time. Already in a state of inferiority to men, women were thus further subjected by fear of violence, presumably with little or no recourse other than to withstand any assaults with the “courage, tenacity, and unquestioning acceptance” required by the social order.
From limited inspections of a select group of anecdotes and historical record, Spence creates a coup d’œil of a China unfortunately mired in frequent turmoil. While Spence’s selection of information to include in The Death of Woman Wang probably does not adhere strictly to a middling path, possibly gravitating more toward the extreme accounts available to him in the records, Spence nevertheless imparts the idea that life was not easy in seventeenth-century China. To objectively disregard the aggregate mean of the data available to him would have been to treat the subject improperly, but Spence’s use provides the details necessary to understand the reality of day-to-day life. From this study of daily life, a broader understanding of the overall schematics of Chinese culture develops.