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. The author scrutinizes 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.