水浒传, translated into English as ‘Water Margin’, is considered to be one of the Four Great Novels of Chinese literature. It is, along with Dream of the Red Chamber, also one of the two that I know very little about (although I now know a bit more about Dream of the Red Chamber thanks to Hanfu Girl’s series of posts on it). It’s quite a feat of ignorance on my part, considering the impact that Water Margin had not just on China, but also on Japan.

I suppose its reputation has always put me off but the book was a surprisingly quick read. The seventy chapters flew by pretty quickly, helped along by the cliffhangers and the oft-repeated phrase “we will now relate XYZ” that drove me to read a couple more chapters than intended.

If you haven’t heard of Water Margin, it’s a really long book (100 chapters in some editions, but mine has only 70 chapters as the authorship of the last 30 are disputed) that tells the story of how 108 stars were reborn as heroes and their adventures as they gather together at Liangshan marsh. As you can probably tell, there are 108 “main” characters with a lot more supporting ones. Thankfully, instead of 108 stories, we have a few main stories where several characters gather together, break the law, and end up escaping to Liangshan Marsh where they join the outlaws. This allows for groups of characters to be introduced together, although it does have the downside where I only remembered the most memorable one or two characters in that arc.

The story is pretty interesting because the heroes are all outlaws who kill indiscriminately, yet they are considered the good guys because they are fighting against corrupt officials (but are still loyal to the Emperor). The reason why they are considered good guys is because they are considered to fulfill Confucian ideals much better than the people they murder (excepting the innocent bystanders).

Yet it also reads as a deeply misogynistic book. Out of the 108 heroes, only three of them are women and only one of them made any sort of impression of me. More striking are the portrayal of women who play supporting characters – virtuous women are inevitably sexually assaulted and/or commit suicide (or get eaten by tigers) while everyone else is adulterous and somehow a murderer or attempted murderer.

There seems to be double standards at work here – for example, the story of Lei Heng and Bai Xiuying starts Lei Heng forgets to bring money and cannot tip Bai Xiuying. Bai Xiuying and her father make scornful remarks about him, which is rude but Lei Heng retaliates by hitting the old man. Naturally upset at the thing, Bai Xiuying goes to the magistrate, who is her old paramour, and manages to charge Lei Heng with a crime. She knows that Lei Heng is popular so she stays at the court and does all she can to make sure he actually receives her punishment. However, when Lei Heng’s mother starts abusing her, she retaliates, the two women get in a fight, and Bai Xiuying is violently killed by Lei Heng, who is judged to be in the right because he was defending his mother. Yet wasn’t Bai Xiuying doing the same thing when she got Lei Heng arrested for beating her father, a reaction that seems disproportionate to someone saying unkind things about you? This story stuck out to me because I felt like Bai Xiuying and Lei Heng acted from the same motives but one was viewed so much more negatively than the other.

All that said, I did find a paper by Phillip Sun which argues that this portrayal of women stems from the fact that “The highest morality is identified as the fraternal loyalty between comrades”, something which necessitates women to be kept at a distance and hence “carnality is considered unspeakable” and “[s]tories of men injured by women are told repetitiously to serve as warning”.

Another point to consider is that all these ‘evil’ women in Water Margin are beautiful women, something that Cho Kyo pointed out in his book, The Search for the Beautiful women. Bolstered by stories of beautiful women such as Daji leading to the downfall of dynasties, it could be argued that Water Margin is just continuing the tradition of portraying beautiful women as ill omens or evil. As The Search for the Beautiful Woman argues, such stories were written for men, not women and “fiction of the evil beauty type was perhaps naturally born of such street morals. Upon reading such stories, we find a common narrative setting. Namely, the central male character always marries, or takes a sexual interest in, a woman beyond his circumstances. […] In that sense, stories of cruel beauties were originally intended to inculcate in men “the horror of marriage beyond one’s means,” rather than providing a moral that beauty is cruel.” This could be clearly seen in the story of Pan Jinlian, who is married to a husband far uglier than her and is enticed by a more handsome lover for whom she kills her husband (and then is killed by his brother, who is one of the heroes of the story).

Overall, this was an interesting if uncomfortable story to read. I wasn’t fond of how women were generally portrayed in this story, but it was interesting to see how things like mass killing were justified (Li Kui, for example, loves to kill but is valued because he is a straightforward person with no interest in money). It’s definitely worth reading as a study of Chinese culture, its impact on surrounding nations, and as a starting point to see how good and evil have been viewed through history.

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