Flesh and Stone: Competing Narratives of Female Martyrdom from Late Imperial to Contemporary China

• Main Author: Wang, Xian
• Other Authors: Epstein, Maram
• Language: en_US
• Published: University of Oregon 2018
• Subjects: Chinese literature; female martyrdom
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23910

My dissertation focuses on the making of Chinese female martyrs to explore how representations serve as a strategy to either justify or question the normalization of the horrors of untimely death. It examines the narratives of female martyrdom in Chinese literature from late imperial to modern China in particular, explores the shift from female chaste martyrs to revolutionary female martyrs, and considers how the advocacy of female martyrdom shapes and problematizes state ideologies. Female martyrdom has been promoted in the process of the cultivation of loyalty throughout Chinese history. The traditional chastity cult continues to shape the contemporary meanings and conceptions of martyrdom, a value that is still promoted by the Chinese state. My dissertation explores the reasons that female martyrdom has remained a constant value and discuss how the state and print culture have cultivated it and adapted it to construct notions of gender, self, and identity in different time periods. I argue that female chaste martyrdom functions as a bonding agent that holds male community together and consolidates the patriarchal system. The literary narratives of female martyrs simultaneously grant women agency while presenting female martyrs as objects of consumption, which reveals the instability in the role of women as agents/objects. I analyze flesh and stone as metaphors for two different discourses on female martyrdom. Flesh refers to the literary representations of flesh and blood bodies of female martyrs that work to disrupt the state discourse on martyrdom by introducing the embodied individual. From a larger socio-political perspective, the state attempts to lock in the meaning of the sacrifice as enhancing the power of the state by fixing the meaning of female martyrdom in stone monuments. The state-sponsored monuments work to erase the individual in service to an ideology of martyrdom that reduces the messiness of history to myth. This dissertation includes previously published material.