The Political Aspect of Misogynies in Late Qing Dynasty Crime Fiction

In most Chinese traditional court-case narrative, women often serve as negative social actors, and may even be the alleged cause of the degeneration of men’s morality as the result of their seductiveness. In the late Qing Dynasty novel Digong’an, centred on the upright official Digong, there is strong evidence of misogyny by the author. Two female characters stand out from the story: one kills her husband with the help of her lover, who is partially justified by the latter being under the woman’s negative influence; and the other is Empress Wu, to whom the moral downfall of the Tang Dynasty is attributed. Both women are subject to insult and threat throughout the novel. The author’s attitude substantially relies on the sexist rhetoric prevalent in the Confucian idea of an ordered society, which usually took a negative outlook towards women partaking in public life. But for the latter we should also take in account that at the end of the Qing Dynasty a woman was, in reality, ruling the empire “from behind the curtain”. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to deconstruct the author’s misogyny, in order to shed a light on his criticism and connect it with a somewhat more political discourse.