290 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
lic, extolled female self-sacrifice in widespread morality tales, encouraged
ultrafeminization of women, and supported a widening custom of foot bind-
ing. The causes of these changes were various and are in dispute among schol-
ars, but a few likely causes can be mentioned.
The successful Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, followed by the
Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century, each resulting in alien dynasties,
put Han Chinese culture on the defensive and generated various cultural
responses. Even earlier, the cosmopolitan Tang with its prevalent (foreign) Bud-
dhism was also a major source of anxiety and identity crisis for Confucian Chi-
nese elites. What did it mean to be Chinese after the Tang and in contrast with
later Mongol and Manchu rulers? In what did Chinese cultural superiority con-
sist, if not in the political strength to resist invasion? New notions of both male-
ness and femaleness emerged, according to Patricia Ebrey; male models
characterized by barbarian men were replaced by a new literati male “who
could be refined, bookish, contemplative, or artistic but need not be strong,
quick, or dominating” (Ebrey 1990:221). Hunting declined in popularity. As
males moved toward the “effeminate” pole, women became even more deli-
cate, reticent, and confined. Women became visible symbols of Han identity,
vulnerable to rape and pillage by aggressive, ultramasculine warrior cultures.
A recognizable genre emerged in the late Ming: the young heroine who is
dedicated to Confucian virtues and undergoes horrific ordeals in their defense.
Katherine Carlitz recounts some of these stories in “Desire, Danger, and the
Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in Late Ming China” (1994). In a fifteenth-
century play called Five Relationships Completed and Perfected, a concubine travel-
ing to join her master is captured by an invader who demands her in marriage.
Her mother exclaims that no Chinese can marry a barbarian; she bites her fin-
ger, writes a poem of fidelity in blood, then drowns herself. A late Ming wife,
touched on the arm by a bandit, bites off and spits out the flesh of her arm.
These motifs were not random themes; a Qing dynasty bibliography lists
36,000 stories of virtuous women, one-third of whom commit suicide or are
murdered while resisting rape.
There were not just stories but actually recorded increases in suicide
among women. In 1405 a Confucian conduct book for women included
detailed instructions on self-immolation. Thirty-eight concubines committed
suicide at the death of the first Ming emperor. Resisting rape and resisting pres-
sures to remarry were other idealized reasons for committing suicide. As Cor-
litz argues, “woman’s body is a site or theater used by the imperium to
constitute itself, asserting the impenetrability of its borders, undergirding the
idealized Chinese pyramid of loyalties” (1994:104). Woman’s body was “a site
where the drama of resistance to invasion could be acted out.”
But the most renowned stage for the enacting of culture on the woman’s
body in late imperial China focused on the foot. In western Hunan, little girls,
like little boys, were presented with writing brushes. For the boy, it represented
the beginning of his life as a reader, writer, scholar, speaker: the power of the