Living under the Same Roof: A Genealogy of the Family Romance between Mother‐in‐law and Daughter‐in‐law in Modern Chinese Hi/story

It appears that feminism can never be free from ‘a passion for difference’, with differences between men and women as well as the differences among women being regarded as ‘the twin pillars of feminist difference discourse’ that were developed in tandem in the United States.1 According to Susan Stanford Friedman: ‘the initial stress on sexual or gender difference in the late 1960s and the 1970s gave way by the 1980s and 1990s to an emphasis on difference among women, a shift increasingly distinguished with the terms second and third wave feminism’.2 The essentialist notion of universal sisterhood of all women under the same patriarchal oppression has begun to give way as feminist scholars draw attention to women's heterogeneities by integrating the analysis of gender with other intersecting forms of oppression. Such a trend is evident in the declaration of the Combahee River Collective: ‘We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking’.3 Consequently, multi-axial differences among women and their ‘double jeopardy’ or ‘multiple oppressions’ have attracted unprecedented attention in feminist studies. Nevertheless, the issue of age as a central axis of dominance has been understudied in feminist scholarship. As Kathleen Woodward points out, with increasing attention being given to race, class and sexuality, ‘only age has remained invisible, not subject to analysis’.4 This paper aims to contribute to current feminist studies of differences among women by examining the age and generational difference between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, an issue especially prominent in a patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal-exogamous culture such as China, but which has received little attention from Western feminist scholars.5 I will examine their common (as women) and respective (due to age and other intersecting differences) power relations with regard to men and the state to see how interlocking oppressions based on gender, age, generation, class and space are articulated through this particular intergenerational dyad. Since I am trained in the fields of Chinese and English literature and position myself as a literary scholar, my focus will be three symptomatic (as well as problematic) literary texts written by men in different historical periods: Song of Mother-in-law and Daughter-in-law (1640–1715), written by a Confucian scholar named Pu Songlin; The Liberation of Meng Xiangying (1945), written by a communist writer Zhao Shuli and Enjoying Later Life in Comfort and Happiness (1993), written by a contemporary writer Lu Wenfu. I also draw on history, law and anthropology to locate my analyses of the literary texts in a concrete time-space continuum so that the literary and the non-literary can serve as each other's ‘thick description’.6 In so doing, I adopt the approach of New Historicism and call attention both to the historicity of literary texts and to the literariness of history. Examining these three literary texts written by men in relation to various supportive sociohistorical documents, I argue that due to changing historical forces that always favour some women over others in line with their age, generation, class and other multi-axial differences, the traditional pattern of mother-in-law dominating daughter-in-law in the Confucian narratives of late imperial China has been gradually reversed. Although this means that younger women are empowered, older women are nonetheless disadvantaged. Thus the gender stratification in the polity and economy has persisted in modern Chinese culture