Peijie Mao (Associate Professor of Chinese) published her article entitled “‘Free Divorce?’ Love, Marriage, and Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Women’s Press” in Conjugal Relationships in Chinese Culture: Sino-Western Discourses and Aesthetics on Marriage, edited by Chi Sum Garfield Lau and Kelly Kar Yue Chan (Springer, 2023). The book reviews the presentation of conjugal relationships in Chinese culture and their perception in the West, and explores the ways in which the act of marriage is represented/misrepresented in different literary genres, as well as in cultural adaptations.
Abstract
The decade following the founding of Republican China witnessed intense public debate about marriage reform and free divorce. Did freedom in love guarantee individual satisfaction and marital happiness? Were couples in arranged marriages capable of creating romantic relations? Was it unethical for an educated man to divorce his illiterate old-style wife to pursue his “true love” and happiness? This paper explores and contextualizes the competing discourses about free divorce in early Republican China and examines how different literary genres interacted in advocating, questioning, and complicating the morality of modernity in the arenas of courtship, marriage, and divorce. I will first examine the essays collected in the Shanghai-based women’s press on marriage and divorce in the early 1920s, which presented divorce as a social problem while endeavoring to propose possible solutions. I will then scrutinize a controversy that appeared in the women’s press in 1923 concerning the case of Zheng Zhenxun, a Chinese professor who decided to divorce his old-style, uneducated wife, who was considered not compatible with him. Zheng’s personal account of his marital problem and the subsequent public debate about his divorce posed questions regarding the new ideas of individual freedom and romantic love. They also problematized the traditional understanding of the marriage institution and representations of femininity and masculinity, revealing how the discourse of marriage reform was inextricably tied to the changing notions of morality, individualism, and gender relations that signaled China’s transition to modernity.
