True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China (review)

One of the most important, and challenging, tasks that social historians face is to explain behavior that seems mystifying or even appalling to modern readers. Wei-jing Lu has addressed such an issue in her excellent new book, True to her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China. Faithful maiden is Lu's translation of the term "zhen nü," a woman who chooses to remain celibate after the death of her fiancé. Normally the faithful maiden would live with the family of her deceased husband, as a kind of bride to the dead man. Sometimes they would adopt an heir for her and their deceased son. Occasionally, especially if she feared that her parents would force her to marry, she would commit suicide. Faithful maidens were honored by the state, as were widows who refused to remarry. Hundreds of thousands of women were so honored during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries (p.4). Why the Chinese state chose to honor chaste widows is a complex and interesting topic; the choice to honor faithful maidens is even more complex. Lu makes a sharp distinction between widows and fiancées and is not so interested in the external logic of the system as she is in the ways in which what she refers to as the "faithful maiden act" is figured in the minds and imaginations of the maidens themselves.

Lu has examined a wide variety of sources, including writings by faithful maidens themselves, although most of the writings she examines are about them, not by them. There are twenty or so woodblock print illustrations of stories discussed in the volume. One might have liked to have seen more discussion of the prints and the conditions of their production and distribution, to bring them into the discourse of the book more clearly as sources, rather than as decorations. But both Lu and the Stanford University Press are to be commended for including them; they offer the potential for rich speculation. The book, beautifully illustrated, is nothing less than a tour de force. It is beautifully written and includes chronological tables and maps which make it friendly to non-specialists. Anyone who is interested in sexuality, chastity and virtue and the complicated ways those ideas are intertwined with family responsibilities and social pressures should read this book.

The book is divided into three sections—the first lays out the chronological development of the cult, the second examines specific choices made by the faithful maidens, and the third looks at the ideological ramifications of the practice.

There are a number of exceedingly important points made by the book, which I can only glance upon here. First, the decision to become a faithful maiden almost always caused conflict with the young woman's family. Thus, in a very real way, this is a book about disobedient daughters, daughters who chose to live out their own vision of virtue rather than comply with their parents' wishes, despite the fact that obedience to parents was a major component of ordinary virtue for women in late imperial China. Second, the rise of the cult in the seventeenth century coincided with the Ming-Qing transition, a tumultuous time when virtue, male and female, was often conceptualized in extreme terms. A woman's loyalty to her husband (or fiancé) was analogous to political loyalty; praise of women who refused to marry after the death of a spouse or fiancé had clear political overtones. Third, in a society where betrothals were made at increasingly young ages (sometimes prenatally), a girl would often grow up with a consciousness that she was to be the wife of such-and-such a family. Lu recounts a story of a girl who from earliest childhood wore a gold necklace which was a bethrothal gift from the family of her fiancé. Lu argues that these young women profoundly imagined themselves as future wives and that the deaths of their husbands-to-be...