英文摘要
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This article explores female avengers in the Ming Dinasty's didactic books, discussing how men of letters connected violence to ideal womanhood. The authors of didactic books assumed ideal women to be delicate and passively amenable; however, vengeance involves robustness and violent brutality, which are contrary to female virtues promoted in didactic books.
Since the Confucian ritual theory allowed only men to take vengeance, female avengers frequently became masculine. In their paeans to righteous murderers, scholars and officials presented female avengers as men, calling them nü zhangfu (female man) and nüzi zhi xiong (female hero). In contrast, men who failed to fulfill their obligation to take vengeance were regarded as women. However, illustrations in didactic books emphasised on female fragility with more sophisticated ways in contrast to the text beside them.
By studying female avengers situated in complicated social situations and conflicting moral contexts, this paper intends to illuminate the tactics used by men of letters as they presented a world in which femininity, violence, and morality intersected. I hope that the results will contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of gender and cultural history in late imperial China.
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