My Views on Chastity

What responsibility do people praising women’s sacrifice accept for themselves? Lu Xun’s My Views on Chastity (我之节烈观) challenges both marital rules and the authority to turn another person’s suffering into one’s own moral achievement. Signed Tang Si, the essay appeared in New Youth, volume 5, number 2, on 15 August 1918; the original issue’s contents list title and signature. The 31 July date ending the Chinese text records composition. Its later inclusion in Grave is a separate publication context.

The title’s jie chiefly concerns a widow’s refusal to remarry; lie involves death as proof of fidelity or demanded resistance to sexual violence. Lu Xun satirizes contemporary moralists’ classifications rather than endorsing them. An earlier bereavement, deeper poverty or more terrible death supposedly increases a woman’s virtue. Suffering becomes a scale on which honor is awarded, making the system’s cruelty visible through its own criteria.

Who acquires innocence by conferring honor?

The opening complaints about moral decline first exempt the complainant from that decline. Even wrongdoers can elevate themselves by condemning others. Praise therefore has beneficiaries: a speaker need not change his conduct to occupy the position of society’s savior. He need only identify women who should sacrifice. Women pay the cost while commentators claim innocence.

Lu Xun then tests causation. Why blame women’s supposedly inadequate chastity for national disasters when men occupy political and military power? Warfare and sexual violence precede the label attached to victims, rather than being caused by it. He also turns opposing premises against the same conclusion. If women are male dependents, those holding power must answer for society; if women are equals, obligations must be shared. Neither premise justifies making the discipline of women substitute for men’s responsibilities.

Honors establish a competition that cannot be entered fairly. A woman whose marriage remains peaceful and who encounters no violence lacks the opportunity to attain its highest rank. The moral exemplar requires a disaster before she can prove herself. This irony exposes the cost of celebration: a society needing new sacrifices to confirm its goodness has insufficient reason to prevent the circumstances producing them.

The essay does not consequently abandon ethics. Lu Xun argues that a moral rule should be practicable generally and beneficial to oneself and others. A rule excluding men and requiring exceptional misfortune cannot serve as a shared standard. Men practicing plural marriage while demanding lifelong exclusive fidelity from women expose an unequal contract. The question becomes who defines obligations and exempts himself from fulfilling them.

How spectators take control of victims’ lives

The passage on violence is especially forceful. Fathers, brothers, husbands and neighbors fail to protect a woman, then join writers and moralists in examining whether she was violated and whether she survived. Punishing the perpetrator slips from discussion. Someone needing assistance becomes the accused; people who failed to help become judges. Lu Xun exposes responsibility being transferred through public commentary as well as an ideology of sexual purity.

Poverty makes widowhood a question of livelihood. The essay distinguishes women with property from those without support: demanding that a widow never remarry, in the absence of economic independence and mutual assistance, can deprive her of the means to live. Posthumous inclusion in a local gazetteer cannot compensate for deprivation. Lu Xun asks whether enthusiastic moralists can even name the women in those biographies, exposing abstract reverence alongside indifference to particular lives.

Refusing the rule offers no necessarily safe exit. A woman judged unchaste may face abuse and exclusion with no single identifiable author. The essay’s pressure of history and numbers means inherited authority and the weight of crowds, not a quantitative study. Compliance and refusal both carry costs. Apparent obedience cannot therefore establish free consent, and an isolated individual cannot casually be required to bear every consequence of resistance.

Silence also has conditions. Lu Xun considers restricted opportunities for women’s education and speech, and stories that punish remarried women through ghosts, destitution or exclusion. Failure to object publicly may reflect the absence of language, listeners and space to survive opposition. Literature does more than mirror a norm: it rehearses the consequences of crossing a boundary, teaching fear before actual punishment arrives.

From celebration to responsibility for shared life

The account of ancient customs, Song and Qing moralists and monopolized speech is a polemical genealogy of authority, rather than an established universal anthropology. Its ranking of societies by civilization also requires critical distance. Rejecting that whole account of origins need not remove the question it poses: why does punishment of perpetrators pass so lightly, while honoring victims becomes a public undertaking?

Lu Xun insists that women do not want this suffering, opposing the presentation of coercion as voluntary devotion. Yet a male critic’s account of every woman’s wishes can erase differences. Condemning enforced widowhood need not condemn choosing not to remarry; challenging chastity tribunals need not belittle commitment. A better assessment asks about room to refuse, material security and the possibility of changing a decision, rather than classifying conduct by its outward form alone.

The ending recasts honored women as people to mourn, then turns mourning into wishes to reduce meaningless suffering, resist its manufacture and enjoyment, and secure legitimate happiness. It refuses to commemorate the dead by reproducing their circumstances. The ethical focus moves from whether women prove purity to whether shared life reduces harm, and what spectators will change in their own conduct.

Lu Xun’s later What Happens after Nora Leaves? connects this judgment to income, household property and social power. Leaving an unjust relationship requires material conditions, as does refusing marital rules. Both essays question the consumption of sacrifice as spectacle. Exposing a system does not authorize the critic to command another person’s sacrifice.

Ding Ling’s Thoughts on March 8 offers another setting: a community publicly committed to emancipation can still continually judge women through marriage, childcare and work. Chastity honors in 1918 and revolutionary life in 1942 are not equivalent. Comparing them reveals changing criteria under which women must keep explaining themselves. Turning praise into equality requires redistributing responsibility and allowing exhaustion, refusal and changes of life.