SOURCE: Wu, Yenna. “Condemnation: Other Fiction.” In The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme, pp. 106-23. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

In this excerpt, Wu focuses on cruel, violent women in seventeenth-century novels, including The Saga of Emperor Wu of the Liang, Marriage Destinies, and The Forgotten History of Buddhists. Such women contradict the social values of Confucian and Buddhist morality with outrageous and grotesque crimes, but many authors drew a complex portrait of the virago that was not without sympathy.

While cruel palace women and officials' wives often appear in fictionalized histories, viragos from among the common people are more likely to surface in novels proper.

In excoriating the femme fatale, The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) expresses the fear of potentially destructive women by both the elite and the populace.¹ Relatively few women appear in the novel that stresses the ethic of sworn brotherhood. Among them, two contrasting types...