La morte le si addice. Etica ed estetica del suicidio femminile nella Cina imperiale

My thesis offers a diachronic analysis of the portrayal of female suicide in traditional Chinese literature. Main sources of my research are: Confucian exempla from Han dynasty collected in the text Lienu zhuan (Biographies of Women) by Liu Xiang (79-8 a.C.); a selection of biographies of virtuous women (lienu) from the Ming dynasty collected in the Imperial Encyclopaedia Gujin tushu jicheng; and, as the main literary source, the anthology Qingshi leilue, published at the beginning of the XVIIth century and traditionally attributed to Feng Menglong (1574-1646). For the analysis of these sources, my thesis relies on a structuralist approach that aims to identify the continuity of the materials, and to determine the evolution of a unitary thinking on female suicide. Chapter I offers some introductory observations on the themes of deaths and suicide in China. Chapter II examines the meanings of the concepts of zhen (fidelity, chastity) and jie (integrity), and their evolution in the historical and didactic traditions. It focuses on the analysis of Liu Xiang's Lienu zhuan, and in particular of the fourth and fifth sections "Zhen Shun" (Purity and obedience) and "Jie yi" (Integrity and righteousness), in which suicidal acts figure more conspicuously. Chapter III analyses the development of the State-sponsored system of rewarding virtuous conduct, and its relation to the adoption of women's behaviour as a paradigm of virtue. In this system, the increasing emphasis on violence and suicide reflected an important shift in the ideological and social levels, which affected women, and above all widows, during the transition from Song to Ming dynasties. The spread of the chastity cult moved the attention on women' s behaviour from "intellectual virtues" to "moral virtues". On the representational level, it meant a larger attention to the registration of stories of suicide in response to acts of coercion (second marriage and sexual violence), considered as a violation of a woman's integrity. During the Ming, these stories became a favourite theme in literature, from memoirs to historiography, from fiction to drama. The second part of chapter III presents data from the analysis of a selection of Ming biographies of virtuous women, originally recorded in local gazetteers and later collected in the Encycloaedia Gujin tushu jicheng. It identifies a fixed set of narrative units characterized by a significant recurrence, and a model of basic structuring within each biography. In chapter IV, the research is widened to contain a selection of stories from the anthology Qingshi leilue and related original and derivative sources. On a structural level, it follows the model illustrated in chapter III, presenting a new investigation of the ideological system inherent in the stories. Results are summarized in a tentative analysis of four case studies. Defining the three key steps of the practice of writing on suicide, chapter V presents some final observations on its gradual movement from norm to fiction.