Jealous and Violent: Constraining and Celebrating Wifely Jealousy in Mid-to-late Ming China

Abstract

This essay examines wifely jealousy in mid-to-late Ming China (from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries), focusing on the tensions between maintaining a wife’s superior position over concubines and constraining a wife’s violence against her husband’s offspring as result of a woman’s jealous nature. By examining the Ming standard history (Mingshi) and Veritable Records of the Ming (Mingshilu), this article argues that jealous wives’ violence was policed by the state and was involved with the anxiety of producing heirs. Wifely jealousy was criminalized when it threatened the interest of producing sons for the patriarchal family. In contrast, wifely jealousy was celebrated as an expression of a deep, genuine emotion between the husband and the wife when it did not go against the mission of producing heirs and was considered acceptable under the accepted values of the moral system. Wives’ violence was sanctioned when it emerged from maintaining the hierarchical order between wives and concubines instead of jealousy; “non-jealous” wives maintained their authority over their husbands’ concubines and earned the respect of their husbands by actively bringing home concubines to serve the purpose of producing sons for the patriarchal household.