The Story of the Stone: An Analysis - Essay Example

The Story of the Stone: An Analysis I. Thesis ment Women of ancient China (asof during the Qing Dynasty period) were repressed in their sexuality. This is because of the strict Confucian values that society placed on proper decorum in the relations between the male and female; The Story of the Stone is a good and reflective example of this situation as the protagonists are portrayed as always demure but like in other cultures, people always find ways to circumvent these societal prohibitions but for those who did not, they ultimately suffered for as a result of their repressed emotions. II. Introduction The final imperial dynasty of China, the Qing, was an ‘outlandish’ one ruled by the Manchus. Even though more than a century of firm, powerful governance and authority at the beginning of the period established a solid foundation for the Manchu dynasty, hints of angst and hostility were a part of the Chinese response all through its nearly three centuries of power. Likewise, the Qing illustrates the notable flexibility or stability of the Chinese political institution. The emperors of the Qing dynasty promoted several components Manchu culture and language in China (Hershatter 67). Among these was the male haircut showing an almost bald head and a long braided pigtail, which is also known as the Manchu ‘queue’. This unique haircut was made compulsory for almost all Han Chinese as a symbol of obedience and resignation to their new leaders. The ‘queue’ continued to be a sign of the Qing and their subjugation until the revolution of 1911. Western artists at times applied the ‘queue’ as a symbol of a repressive, regressive government (Hershatter 67-68). The 18th century was recognized as the highpoint of the Qing dynasty: their kingdom was well-built, its boundaries were protected and the agricultural economy was sufficiently stable to prevent famine or food scarcity and keep the taxes of peasants low. Several of the early rulers of the Qing dynasty were reformers who supported new strategies of governance but reinforced them with liberal social and economic reforms. There were also improvements in the arts and culture. During this period, women carried on the cultural tradition of obedience and submission to their husbands or to the males at home (Yates 29). The more powerful military of the Qing facilitated better progress and peace, wherein women served an important position; they were permitted to work as traders in local stores, and they made numerous the products that helped the growth of global trade. Nevertheless, in this period, more emphasis on ‘chastity’ resulted in new social systems and norms. For quite some time, women were prohibited to ‘bind their feet’, yet this prohibition did not endure, and the practice of foot-binding kept on until the 20th century (Hughart 44). Educational opportunities for women were also limited, with just the richest women permitted to go to school or be taught in creative fields like literature. III. Discussion Sons remain to be more valued than daughters—and the tradition of eliminating a female infant was still informally ignored by the government. In the military, sons were highly valued and at times being adopted by royal couples to preserve ancestries that had not bred male successors. Yet, daughters were more frequently used as status symbols; ‘foot-binding’ remained and daughters were at times paid to power or land transactions. In general, life was not the same for families in farming communities and in urban regions (Barlow 87). Farming families do not have the opportunity to build social networks and all family members performed a fixed task to subsist every day. Daughters in agricultural families were fortunate; they were excused from the practice of foot binding due to the demands of their job; hence women in the farming communities were in better physical shape and had longer lives. In the meantime, sons were usually recruited into the Qing military, and families depended on their capability to reproduce to maintain their farms (Jaschok & Miers 109). The Qing Dynasty realized the value of farming households to the economy, and sheltered them from the local exploitation or mistreatments of rich or influential elites. The influence of Confucian ethics on sexual relations between the two genders Women were situated at the lowermost of the Confucian hierarchy. Passive submission or obedience and standard behavior were demanded of them. By tradition, noble women and men lived independently or separate from each other. Men had many spouse, but women were prohibited from seeing other men besides their husbands, family members, or masters. Abortion was condemned, excluding in instances where the wellbeing or life of the mother was at risk. Homosexuality was not encouraged, but not particularly criticized as immoral or sinful (Wang 92). Apparently, social relations are seldom interactions between equals, within the Confucian perspective, but rather tend to be exchanges between higher class and lower class, or, between superiors and inferiors. Confucian laid down a full array of human interaction, which was known as ‘Five Relationships’ that comprises four relationships: (1) ruler and subject; (2) parent and child; (3) husband and wife; (4) elder sibling and younger sibling; and (5) friend and friend, which is the only human relationship that does not require hierarchy (Wang 92-94). In the perfect Confucian home, which is a small-scale version of the state, women were obliged to show submission or obedience mainly, and at all phases of life. Young girls were obliged to follow or obey their fathers; wives were obliged to submit to their husbands; and widows were obliged to submit to their adult sons. Women were not allowed, as stated in the customary Confucian principle, to work or act as an independent individual, without the supervision of men. It was due to such social norms that social reformers in China in the 20th century criticized Confucian principles quite forcefully. Even though Confucianism emerged in a male-dominated society and continually has accepted patriarchal ideals, to a certain extent, this image of women in Confucian culture does not certainly mirror the historical experiences of Chinese women from the emergence of the Confucian philosophy until now (Yu 78). Instead, it portrays the lives of women as witnessed during the final period of customary Confucian cultural history in China. Before such time, women experienced a somewhat higher level of autonomy and liberty in Confucian cultures, and certain women in fact occupied important positions as Confucian scholars, even though this was not common, somewhat due to the submissive role of women shown in different visions of society suggested by Confucian scholars (Chang & Owen 88). When the extensive Confucianization of China started during the Song dynasty, it had already been usual for Confucian scholars like Zhu Xi to declare assertions like, “To do wrong is umbecoming to a wife, and to do good is also unbecoming to a wife. A woman is only to be obedient to what is proper” (Chang & Owen 89). Cheng Yi and other neo-Confucian scholars during the Song dynasty endorsed female quality by recognizing women who refused to marry again after the demise of their husbands. These ideas ultimately resulted, during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods, in the Confucian body of female virginity. The connection of Confucianism with such forms of social beliefs and traditions contributed to the emergence of radical scholars in East Asia. Until in recent years, only a small number of radical Chinese women would have thought of promoting Confucianism, rather than viewing it as a morally corrupt feudal principle with no benefits to give to women. Nevertheless, the current restoration of Confucianism as a mainstream principle in mainland China has been motivated, partly, by the considerable effort of powerful women like Yu Dan, a professor at the Beijing Normal University (Yates 106). However, the very reality that a woman is at the core of the recent Confucian resurgence in China reflects considerably the ability of Confucianism to expand outside its previous limitations. The perception of the ideology as vigorously going beyond its original settings is held in common by numerous purported ‘New Confucians’, who have supported the similarity of Confucianism and contemporary outlooks about gender. As in quite numerous other regards, Confucianism has been inclined to embrace a realistic opinion of debatable or controversial matters like abortion and homosexuality (Edwards 119). Similar to almost all pre-modern societies, early modern China did not view individual identity as being based on the sexual practices of a person. Hence, no equivalent to the contemporary Western concept of ‘homosexuality’ can be seen in early modern East Asia. Traditionally, Confucians had nothing much of an opinion about ‘homosexuality’, and did not criticize men who enter sexual relations with the same sex, provided that these relationships did not affect their familial obligation to generate successors to sustain family ancestries (Mann & Cheng 71). It was not until the latter part of the 19th and 20th centuries, when interaction and exposure with contemporary Western social ideals became common all over East Asia, that communities in these customarily Confucian cultures started to embrace organized biases toward homosexuality. Nowadays, a large number of cultural traditionalists in East Asia have embraced both the modern Western concept of homosexuality as a classification of individual identity and the previously widespread, currently disowned, Western opinion that homosexuality is a sickness of the brain or a psychological problem. It is obvious how a philosophy like Confucianism—which, particularly recently, when its social impact was at its peak and widespread, has promoted established gender separation that benefit or confer power to traditionally ‘male’ virtues and practices over traditionally ‘female’ virtues and practices—could be matched with prejudice against homosexuality (Li 81). Also, it is vital to mention that an obsession on homosexuality as morally intolerable and socially abnormal is strange to the Confucian ideology and demonstrates the impact of Western cultures much more than native ideologies in East Asia. Power of parental authority and approval on arranged marriages Aside from the abolition of marriage privileges for young women and men in the “dictations from parents and facilitation from the go-between,” (Li 92) one more severe restriction on free marriage was the notion of “equal match between the male and the female regarding their economic and social conditions” (Li 94). Correspondingly, the marriage determined by arrangement between the parents was called “marriage contracted by heteronomy”, (Weidner 82) and a marital arrangement based on economic circumstances was called “marriage calculated by price” (Wang 44). In both of these instances, there was no freedom given to the involved man and woman. And these marriage practices remain very influential in rural communities in present-day China. During the Qing period, even though the children were grownups or occupied important positions elsewhere, the marriages arranged by their parents remain binding and imposing to them (Wang 44-45). If they expressed their own marital decisions, intention to invalidate the arranged marriage made by their parents, they were punished severely under the law. However, if the parents encroached upon the rules or agreements in the marriage for their sons or daughters, they were also likely to be punished. As an ordinary traditional law, children within the household did not hold rights to make a decision about their marriage; only their parents owned the privilege to enter into an arranged marriage for their children. The notion of “uniting two clans by marriage” (Hershatter 86) was wholly exclusive for parents as ‘head’ of the family. Per se, such rights were converted into male-centered authorities to dictate the marriage procedure and its value. This right was also known as the “powers to manipulate marriage” (Hershatter 87), apparently connected to the clan rulers in every early legitimacy and agreement. The authority to arrange marriage in the ‘Qing Codes and Cases’ was uniquely specified to the rule of ‘head of the household’ (Barlow 112): The marriage of both male and female descendants should be exclusively manipulated by their grandparents and parents. In this case whereby both grandparents and parents are dead, the relatives at the grandparents or parents generation should be responsible for the marriage of the offspring of the clan. And if a widow remarried to another family with her own daughter, the mother was legally accountable for her own daughter’s marriage. Nevertheless, the control or power over the marriage of the children by the adults in the family was slowly reduced by their affiliation to the parties in the code of five-types. Specifically, the codes of ‘zhancui’, ‘qicui’, ‘dagong’, ‘xiaogong’, and ‘sima’ were lawfully answerable for their choice in controlling or dictating marriage of the clan, and violation of the codes in dictating marriage for the members of clan must be chastised in accordance to the explanations of the decorum (Barlow 112-3). Adolescent life in the Qing Dynasty (chaste and erotic romances) As stated in the periodization of periods in the ‘Tushu jicheng’, the Qing compendium, The Story of the Stone covers the phases of adolescence and young adulthood. Nevertheless, the Western idea of becoming an adult is “alien to the Confucian view of life,” where getting old is seen as an enduring or lifelong mechanism. The characters of Ying-ying in “The Story of Ts’ui Ying-ying” (CP 112) and Decima in “The Courtesan’s Jewel Box (CP 130)” consistently prove that the inferior status of women in China is a social construct deeply embedded in the history of Confucius-based China. Meaning, the inferior roles and status of women are not determined by women’s natural attributes but are imposed upon society. In fact, the earliest China was not a patriarchal society but a matriarchal one. Women held the highest position and esteem in their families. But Confucius’ teachings subordinated women’s roles and status to men. Society was made to expect women to be respectful, obedient, subservient, and serving to men in their families from childhood, to marriage, and to widowhood. Women were domesticated. Their importance and roles were confined to household tasks and to bearing sons to ensure their family’s patriarchal lineage. Since then, the matriarchal China was turned into a patriarchal society. (Carroll 15) Both characters of Ying-ying and Decima clearly illustrated that women were regarded not only as men’s sexual objects, but also as possessions that can be sold. Hence, women were valued based on their sexuality and wealth, and not on what qualities, traits, and virtues they possess. A woman of virtue, of intellect, and of beauty from a relatively wealthy family, Ying-ying was actually better than Zhang in economic status and even in letter writing. Yet her value and role in the story was reduced simply to her sexuality. Meaning, how desirous she could be to a man, even to a man with high principles and virtue like Zhang. In fact in introducing Ying-ying, the first thing that the author had given attention to was her physical appearance. It was Yin-ying’s desirable physical appearance that had stirred Zhang’s attention, making him infatuated to her and making him defy tradition and do the improper – to seduce Yin-ying. This part of the story mocked the Chinese marriage tradition by showing its irrelevance in the consummation of a sexual relationship. It also mocked man’s claimed superiority showing that a man’s weakness is actually the woman which society claims to be inferior to him yet causes him to forget his principles and defy social norms. However, the story refused to recognize the impropriety of Zhang to be his own weakness. Instead, Zhang pointed the blame at Yin-ying, describing her bewitching beauty as cursed wickedness. Unfortunately, even Yin-ying, herself accepted that her role and value as a woman is her sexuality. Hence instead of denouncing Zhang for not deserting her, she belittled herself. Worst, even she regarded her physical beauty as her mere worth that she refused to see Zhang because she felt ashamed of facing Zhang in her haggard state. The story portrayed Yin-ying as a woman with letter writing skill, which Zhang himself admitted to be better than his. But this portrayal of Yin-ying in the story was not meant to recognize the equal intellect of women. Rather, it was only to further emphasize the inferiority of women to men by showing that the relevance of women’s intellect was again related only to their sexuality. During that time, Chinese women were not allowed to get formal education, to have careers other than becoming good subservient housewives, and to get involved in politics (Carroll 15). Hence, not only the body of women but even their intellect was meant to satisfy the desire of men. In short, a woman has no sense of her own identity. Her identity is dependent on man. A woman of beauty, of pleasure and of wealth, the famous courtesan, Decima – which means the tenth daughter (Chao Pian 315) was in a better financial situation than Li Jia, the heir of an elite family whose vices and lust left him a poor man. Decima wisely used her beauty in accumulating wealth. But she ended up throwing everything she had worked for and drowning herself in the river, just because of her disloyal lover. Yet in her death, Decima was able to get her revenge against Li and the salt merchant who caused Li’s disloyalty to Decima . Women in this story, as consistently characterized by Decima were reduced to a commodity that can be traded – a practice highly common in early China. In fact, Decima was sold into a brothel where she was forced to sell her body to merchants and influential men for sexual pleasure. Then, she fell in love with the financially broke weakling Li with whom she bought back her freedom at the cost of 150 taels of silver with her own money (150 taels of silver) and with the help of Mr. Liu, ending only to be sold once again by her own lover Li to a salt merchant, who immediately lusted for her upon hearing her singing. However, unlike the character of Yin-yang, who did not denounce her lover, Decima in her dramatic act of suicide angrily denounced Li and the salt merchant as she threw first her jewels into the river and then showed more of her greater treasure before drowning herself, leaving Li in total madness and the salt merchant frightened to death. At this point, Decima’s character shows the dangerous wrath of a woman. Though tragically presented, Decima’s death showed her courage to get free from her oppressive situation even if it caused her death. Because it was only in death that she could punish the two men. Understood in a wider social context, Decima’s act of suicide symbolizes the necessity for women to renounce the role and value society had imposed on them in order to create their own identity equal to men. The death of decimal conveys that for women to do this could mean death because they are going against a deeply rooted unequal social structure in China. The Story of Stone is a story of love and the human spirit. It is also about women’s struggle in a patriarchal society. The two defining moments in the story are Ying-ying’s rejection and later approval to be the mistress of Chang, and the decision of Change to abandon her after he had successfully seduced her and became his lover. It is a story of love because, obviously, it revolves around the effort of Chang to win the affection of Ying-ying, and how they reciprocated each other’s love. However, it is a tragic love story, for their love affair does not result in marriage. The story is interesting exactly because it encourages the readers to open their minds and make assumptions about the possible reasons underlying obvious contradictions and evident excuses. Indeed, this story has numerous original qualities that it becomes worthy of a place in the history of Chinese literature. One of its original features is the thorough portrayal of the human spirit or psyche of the female character as manifested by her reluctance to give in to the seduction of the male character. After Chang proclaims his affection through poetry, she tempts him into seeing her at night, and afterward scolds him for preying on the debt of gratitude that her family owes him. After Chang loses hope of ever earning her affection, she all of a sudden yields and surrenders herself to him. She is hence portrayed as having dual personalities—one personality conforms to the principles of decorum for young women, and the other personality pursues individuality and goes against the moral restrictions. Her dual personality reflects the profound idea of the author about the female spirit in a patriarchal society. The author portrays Ying-ying as a lonely, miserable young woman, but, at the same time, a brave and assertive individual. Her refusal to yield to Chang’s advances is a sign of courage on her part, and a resistance to male domination. However, male dominance still wins in the end. Prior to Chang’s departure for the civil service exam, Ying-ying predicts exactly that he would be abandoning her permanently. She bases her prediction on thorough evaluation of the situation. She tells Chang: “To seduce someone and then abandon her is perfectly natural, and it would be presumptuous of me to resent it. It would be an act of charity on your part if, having first seduced me, you were to go through with it and fulfill your oath of lifelong devotion” (I-wen chi 142-3). From this very statement, it is obvious that she surrenders to the dictates of male superiority, to the principle that a woman should be contented with what a man can give her, and to the belief that a woman should stay modest. The story reveals that in a Confucian society, young women, like Ying-ying, were predestined to a life of subordination and wholehearted, unquestioning obedience. The story of Ying-ying is a tale of love within the context of an oppressive patriarchal society. Literature has always been one of the ways by which consciousness is shaped. Such has been the case, even for the awakening of feminist consciousness in Latin America. As Jehenson describes: Latin American literature, which has almost defined the second half of the twentieth century (Caillois) with a plethora of critically acclaimed Latin American authored books, plays, short stories, and poetry is noted by post-modern critics – Michael Collins, Ihab Hassan, and Linda Hutcheon – an embodiment of post-modern experimentation, and is epitomized by French feminists, like Héléne Cixous models of “écriture feminine” (Feminine Writing). However, what makes American literature during this period remarkable are those written by Latin women authors, who have crossed bravely the boundaries of a well-established masculine culture not only by engaging into the literary world believed worthy only for men, but more so for what they write – “... their transgressive and contestatorial nature, and their critical reconsideration of hierarchical opposition, that make their texts revolutionary, conflictual, and dialectical...” (xi). Two Latin women authors worth of critical attention are Maria Lusia Bombal (1910-1980) – a Chilean fiction writer, who towed the dangerous literary path of revealing women’s innermost desires and power defiant of the realistic tradition in Latin America (Maria Luisa Bombal, par. 1), and Maria Luisa Bemberg (1922-1995) – an Argentinian self-professed feminist, whose critically acclaimed films had consistently depicted untraditional women, making her one of Latin America’s most significant female filmmakers (Maria Luisa Bemberg, par. 1). Though both writers tackled femininity from entirely different angles, indeed, both have contributed to a better understanding of women, as they have shaped a new consciousness that brings readers to confront long-ignored problems confronting women, such as ‘sexual abuse, abandonment, oppressive marriages, and the pressure of new-found independence’ (Mujica 44). To which Griselda Gambaro remarks, “... a work is feminist insofar as it attempts to explain the mechanics of cruelty, oppression and violence through a story that is developed in a world in which men and women exists” (qtd. in Jehenson xiii). But more than this, they were able “to change taken-for-granted views” (xiii). Silence is consent to abuse, as the famous saying goes. However, this is not the case in Bombal’s second novel The Shrouded Woman originally titled La amortajada , which just like her first novel House of Mist originally titled La última niebla (1935), utilizes silence as one of women’s strong weapon against patriarchal oppression and domination (Weldt-Basson 68). If in the House of Mist, Bombal “… reveals a repressed, melancholic woman who buries her past in the deepest recesses of her mind in order to survive in a hypocritical, class-conscious society” (Mujica, The Shrouded Woman 1); in The Shrouded Woman, she reveals the duplicity of silence in her protagonist. Ana Maria, whose failed attempt to regain Antonio’s lost love suffered in silence: “In vain she had used up all the unconscious method of passion to reconquer Antonio; tenderness, violence, reproaches, mutism, amorous assault” (Bombal 142-143), has learned to use the power of silence to her advantage. In silence she takes refuge, shrouding her vulnerabilities: “… he used to sink himself into the contemplation of that silent girl who knitted while stretched out on a long straw rocking chair…” (133); in silence she finds her strength, keeping herself intact: “… a silent hate that instead of consuming her fortified her” (145); in silence she contemplates and questions women’s relegated destiny – domesticated and inferior to men: “Why, why must the nature of woman, be such that a man always has to be the axis of her life? Men, they succeeded in putting their passion in to her things. But the destiny of women is to stir up the pain of love in an ordered house, in front of an unfinished tapestry” (143); in silent knitting, she finds her effective weapon against Antonio’s indifference and womanizing: “If only you had pulled on the thread of my wool, if you had undone my fabric, mesh by mesh… entangled in each one was temptuous thought and a name I will never forget” (133); and it was in her final silence that Ana Maria reveals her all. The shrouded woman in her death is no longer shrouded, yet remains unknown; in the silence of death she became free, yet remains imprisoned in her longing to be truly loved. Observably, in The Shrouded Woman Bombal depicts women not as the expected vigilant and aggressively feminist fighter women, but a simple domesticated woman who defies norms in search of her happiness. What she explores here though is the strong weapon entangled in women’s domesticity that women unknowingly inherently possess – “the subversive and communicative role of weaving and knitting” (Vallejos-Ramirez, qtd. in Weldt-Basson 70). Using thematic silence in her novel, Bombal compel readers to view as a social problem the socially accepted day-to-day domestic roles confronting women. Hence, the formerly unquestioned socially determined roles of women are viewed from an entirely different perspective – a feminist perspective. But aside from this, Bombal also implicitly condemns patriarchal authority which she expresses in the actions and thoughts of her male characters: (1) Ricardo – Ana Maria’s first love, who abandoned her in her distress and misery. This imply man’s treatment of women as mere sexual objects; (2) Ana Maria’s sons, who accept her only as a mother, which sole existence is relegated only to her family and nothing more. Never had her sons bother to understand and accept her as a woman. In fact, they loathed her youthful escapades as she searches for her longed happiness as a woman. As her sons’ gestures in her wake suggest: They “seemed not to wish to recognize any right for her to live anymore” (96); (3) Alberto, whose possessive and insecure love of his wife, María Griselda, imprisons her to his world: “How is it possible that she too calls her son: María Griselda’s husband! Why? Because he is jealously watchful of his beautiful wife! Because he keeps her isolated and far away at the southern estate!” (117); and (4) Ana Maria’s lawyer who denied her of the new life she longed, betraying her to Antonio – her unfaithful husband – all for the sake of a double-standard paternalistic society: Maria’s plan to divorce Antonio is a disgrace to her and not to Antonio: “Consider that there are measures that a lady cannot take without lowering herself” (144); but Antonio’s infidelity and womanizing is never condemned at all. If Bombal took up women issues in the context of domestic and sexual relations, Bemberg took it up in a more direct, more political, and more dangerous manner, by attacking the all-too powerful theocracy in defense of women. Her critically acclaimed film, I, the Worst of All, set in Mexico in the 17th century, illustrates the different aspects of women oppression by the hierarchical church. Thematically, the film centers on the Catholic Church’s misogyny as embodied by the fanatical Archbishop of Mexico (Lautaro Murua) whose hatred of women made him aptly described as, "Satan found a refuge in the printed word" (Holden, par. 7). Centering on misogyny, Bemberg vividly depicts the infuriating truth that even within the walls of the church, which claims to be the refuge of humanity, women oppression is in fact deeply imbedded in the tyrannically patriarchal organization and culture of the church. The nuns are forced to hide their faces with their long veils and are not permitted to sit with the Archbishop at a table. Such emphasize the unequal position of the clergymen and the nuns in the church. The clergymen are the masters that nuns should serve; while the nuns are essentially slaves who in all aspect have no right to regard themselves of equal stature with their master. Thus unlike clergymen, nuns have no life except for what the church tells them. IV.Conclusion “The Story of Ts’ui Ying-ying” is not simply a love story as it may look like; likewise, “The Courtesan’s Jewel Box” is not simply a tragic love story as presented. Rather, both are compelling socio-political stories that speaks about the anti-feminist society of the Confucius –based China. Both characters similarly depicted the institutionalized low status of women in their society. Ironically however, it was Decima – a mere courtesan, who had the courage to denounce men and to free herself from this oppressive state of women and not the virtuous and intelligent Yin-yang. Decima was also the wise, who used her beauty to take advantage of the rich and influential men; while Yin-yang, the intelligent allowed herself to be exploited by Zhang and ending up miserable in another husband’s arms. Truly, both stories depicted women as mere objects of men’s lust and greed. Women were regarded inferior of men even if they were in truth far better than their men. 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