I Thought I Would Have Some Happy Days: Women Eloping In Eighteenth-Century China

I THOUGHT I WOULD HAVE SOME HAPPY DAYS: WOMEN ELOPING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA* Paola Paderni The family, and gender relationships in particular, are important recurring themes in the literature of the Qing period. Actively supported by the state, Neo-Confucianism was fundamentally based on the Three Bonds: sovereign-subject, father-son, and husband-wife, which, along with the older brother-younger brother and friend-friend relationships, formed the Five Relationships . Of these five, the father-son and husband-wife bonds were the main axes of the family system. These unequal relationships based on gender and age were essential to Qing society, providing the cultural basis for the sovereign-subject bond from which the state derived its power. In the eighteenth-century, Chinese society was becoming increasingly mobile . Social boundaries were more blurred and less dependent on personal dependency bonds. These hierarchical principles were therefore necessary in order to legitimate differences and inequalities found in society, as well as in the family. The husband-wife relationship served this general function better than the others because it was seen as biologically determined, and hence both natural and inevitable. It could not be questioned through an act of rebellion, as in the case of the sovereign-subject bond, nor did it make allowance for role changes, as in the case of the father-son bond.1 The importance attributed to this bond explains why contemporary literature on the family placed so much stress on keeping women under control. Women were, after all, presented as the major source of family conflicts, embodying the destructive force of the libido. The authors of "household instructions" (jiaxun) insisted on the importance of keeping women confined to their quarters, sep- *This research was funded by the Italian Ministero dell 'Universita e della Ricerca Scientifica. The author would like to express her thanks to the staff of Beijing's First Historical Archive for precious help in finding the sources. She wishes to thank also Robert Antony, Giovanna Fiume, Giulio Machetti, Paolo Macry and the two anonymous readers of Late Imperial China for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Translation from Italian by Gabriele Poole. 1GaIeS 1989:801-02 Late Imperial China Vol. 16, No. 1 (June 1995): 1-32 1 2 Paola Paderni arated from servants and strangers. Sexual anxiety underlay these precepts, which were justified as necessary for the preservation of family morals.2 Throughout the centuries the Confucian model has pervaded the entire Chinese culture, and, as anthropologist Barbara Ward has argued, family themes in particular have played a central role in the formation of a unitary Chinese identity.3 The Qing Code (Da Qing liili), like the codes of former dynasties , reinforced and codified social hierarchies by differentiating penalties according to the wrongdoer's position within the family and, more generally, his or her social status. What the Qing state considered as a crime was any act that appeared to question its authority or the existing social order. The Qing legal code dedicated an entire section to marriage. Ideologically, marriage served the state and society by guaranteeing patrilineal descent, creating alliances between families, and differentiating social roles according to gender.4 Marriage in China, as in fact in all patriarchal societies, entailed an agreement between two families; what mattered was not the individual's future but the advantages the families could derive from the marriage, whether it be wealth, prestige, or simply support. Any act that went counter to this principle was considered to be dangerously deviant behavior. To run away from one's husband or father was a crime, because it challenged the family, the institution on which the state based its power. Such deviant behavior is the subject of this essay. If human behavior is more than a simple application of the rules and norms established by the system, our task is to investigate how, in everyday practices, given values were adapted, modified, and circumvented through strategies that were influenced by extraneous factors. Our aim is to shed light on a world that was clearly variegated, impassioned, violent, and "quite deviant from the harmonious Confucian family model."5 These deviations did not necessarily constitute a deliberate challenge to established norms...