Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

pressure of her parents to remarry, leading to the unsolvable conflict between the different duties as a widow and as a daughter. However, when she decides that suicide is the only way out of this conflict, it causes her parents to change their minds and to be respectful of her duties, and she is able to continue taking care of her mother-in-law. ¹⁴⁴ The historical and literary model of the widow who destroys her beauty to avoid the king’s desire is another established tradition. Playing this model means to override the role of daughter and affirm devotion to her husband, a way of self-asserting, raising one’s position to that of a heroine, or at least of a formal legal wife (in the case of a concubine). We should not be surprised, because this “disfiguration” (huirong 毁容) is a constant topic of a moral model and a classical example of a manifestation of sentiments as a way of self-representation and reasserting one’s social role. In the Guifan tushuo 閨範圖説 (Illustrated primer for women’s instruction), a moral-historical composition inspired by the Biographies of Exemplary Women of the Han period,¹⁴⁵ Lü Kun 呂坤 (1538–1618) presents several examples of heroines who faced hard decisions.¹⁴⁶ The beautiful widow Gao 高 “takes a mirror, and with a knife cuts her nose (yuan jing dai dao ge qi bi 援鏡待刀割其鼻) to repel the attentions of the nobles and the king of Liang. The young widow Ling 令 not only chops off her hair but also truncates her ears and cuts her nose (duanfa, jie qi liang’er, duan qi bi 斷髮。截其兩耳，斷其鼻)” to resist to her parents’ demands that she remarry. In this case, her disregarding of filial piety is doubled because she not only refuses to obey her parents but also damages her body. Similarly, in the name of their chastity and duty, the widows Huan 桓 and Fang 房 cut off their ears (ge qi er 割其耳, jie er 截耳), and when an innkeeper touches her hand, Lady Li cuts it off with an axe (yin fu zi duan qi bi 引斧自斷其臂) to preserve her purity.¹⁴⁷

Another famous case is told in the story of Zhu Duofu 朱多福, who was engaged to a boy of the same age, Chen Duoshou 陳多壽, when they were nine years old. Six years after the engagement, before the marriage ceremony, Chen fell ill with leprosy and his family was ready to rescind the marriage contract. The young woman, however, was steadfast in