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Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Ellen
Young
In traditional Chinese society, any woman who kills her husband
is presumed to have done so for adulterous purposes. In 1930s
Shanghai a case came to light where a woman dismembered her
husband. There was no evidence that the woman had ever had
a lover. This inspired Li Ang to write a deep and harrowing
novel that challenges this demeaning attitude toward the moral
character of women that has been held by Chinese for thousands
of years: any woman guilty of killing her husband is a promiscuous
woman and no other interpretation is possible.
Chen Jiangshui is a pig-butcher in a small coastal Taiwanese
town. Stocky, with a paunch and deep-set beady eyes, he resembles
a pig himself. His brutality towards his new young wife, Lin
Shi, knows no bounds. The more she screams, the more he likes
it. She is further isolated by the vicious gossip of her neighbours
who condemn her for screaming aloud who prefer to construe
the noise as ostentatious enjoyment.
According to an old Chinese belief, all butchers are destined
for hell (an eternity of torment by the animals they have
despatched). Lin Shi, isolated, despairing and finally driven
to madness, fittingly kills him with his own instrument
- a meat cleaver.
The Butcher’s Wife was a sensation in the Chinese
language world with its suggestion that ritual and tradition
are the functions of oppression. It also caused widespread
outrage with its unsparing portrayal of sexual violence and
emotional cruelty. A courageous statement for literary freedom,
the novel ranks today as a landmark text in both women’s
studies and world literature.
‘Li Ang’s novel may start in a feminist
rage against male oppression, but it goes much further than
that.’ - Times Literary Supplement
‘Completely convincing.’ - Sunday Times
‘The story never loses the readers sympathy by descending
into overkill or sentiment . . . The Butcher’s Wife
is mesmeric and unflinching.' - Guardian
LI ANG was born in Taiwan in 1952. After graduating from
college in Taiwan she studied drama in the United States in
the 1970s. Her fiction, which includes the novella The Butcher’s
Wife, is critical of traditional Chinese culture and controversial
for its portrayal of cultural superstition, violence, and
brutally abusive sexuality. |
