"Killing the Adulterer": Masculine Revenge Fantasies in Seventeenth-Century China

Abstract:This paper provides an overview of the judicial practices on adultery cases that led to homicide in seventeenth-century China. I argue that the lifting of the punishment for the husband who killed only the adulterer in the Ming Code did not lead to immediate changes in judicial practices. On the contrary, the officials deviated from the letter of the code and encouraged, or even urged, the husband to kill both the adulterer and the wife, embracing the idea of "double killing"—killing both the wife and the adulterer "on the spot" and "immediately"—as an assertion of masculinity, a restoration of conjugal morality, and a proof of the killer's motive. The officials' shared view that illicit sex was a heinous crime was consistent with the surging popularity of the chastity cult and moral heroism. Layered legal institutions and multiple applicable statutes related to adultery and homicide also offered convenient space for manipulation by the ruling elites. Therefore, even when the conditions of the homicide did not meet the prerequisites for impunity, some judges argued for a lenient punishment or even impunity for the husband, at the expense of the law.I then analyze a court case story by the editor and publisher Yu Xiangdou (active 1588–1637), whose crime stories with innovative format combining narrative with formal legal documents were widely read and circulated since the late Ming. As a prolific commercial publisher attuned to the tastes of the literati, Yu provides a mildly critical perspective on the statute and its unintended moral consequence that is rarely seen in the more orthodox writings by officials.