Obedience and Control in Marriage

Obedience and Control in Marriage is one of the book’s central relational conflicts: marriage promises shelter and recognition, yet the same institution becomes a language through which Lu Xun and other powerful men demand compliance. The concept is decisive because the story repeatedly tests whether care can remain care once it is attached to ownership, financial leverage, sexual entitlement, or the threat of punishment. Its most revealing counterforce is Su Xiangwan’s insistence that obedience cannot erase judgment, temper, or personhood.

Marriage as Contract and Leverage

The relationship between Su Xiangwan and Lu Xun begins under the shadow of the five-hundred-million contract marriage. When Su Xiangwan proposes divorce, she says that she will take none of Lu Xun’s property or alimony and will convert the five hundred million in capital into shares before returning it, together with the interest. Her proposal treats the marriage as an account that can be settled, but Lu Xun answers by reducing its value to the sexual access he believes he purchased. The exchange exposes the imbalance beneath the contract: even when Su Xiangwan tries to reclaim economic independence, Lu Xun frames the marriage through possession and the supposed price of her body.

The same logic appears in Lu Xun’s treatment of obedience as an exchange for protection and abundance. During a meal, Su Xiangwan explains that she once ate so much chili that her sister helped her stop, then asks whether she has been obedient. Lu Xun replies that if she can be equally obedient to him, she can have the whole world. The promise sounds generous, but its condition is disciplinary. Material security and emotional approval are offered not simply because she is his wife, but because she conforms to his request. Su Xiangwan therefore answers that she knows her place in his heart and can behave well, yet remains a person with thoughts and character rather than a puppet without a mind.

The Performance of the Good Wife

Lu Xun makes obedience a performance that must continue even when the marriage is strained. When Su Xiangwan asks whether he will return home with her, he says that he has another appointment, then tells her that the most important thing in the world is an obedient woman and that she must persevere even if obedience is only an act. His language turns marital conduct into a role that must be maintained regardless of private feeling. Su Xiangwan withdraws, wishes him a happy night, and is left disappointed and suspicious; her reaction shows the emotional cost of being required to perform trust while receiving grounds for distrust.

Yet the novel also presents moments in which Lu Xun describes control as reassurance. While Su Xiangwan sits on a swing, he gently pushes her and explains that he would feel more at ease with her beside him, partly because her absence would make her imagination run wild. His statement combines concern, jealousy, and surveillance. Her presence is valuable as companionship, but also as a way of managing uncertainty. The scene gives the controlling relationship a softer surface without removing the underlying assumption that her movements and thoughts should remain within his reach.

The language of obedience is reinforced by older family expectations. Shen Hui says that Su Xiangwan is weak and should drink Chinese medicine to recuperate, while also urging Lu Xun to do the same as autumn approaches. Su Xiangwan responds obediently when Shen Hui supports having children earlier. In this domestic setting, obedience is not limited to Lu Xun’s direct commands; it is also attached to the roles of wife, daughter-in-law, and future mother. Care, medical advice, reproductive expectation, and marital duty overlap, making the woman’s body a site of family planning and supervision.

Punishment, Threat, and the Limits of Protection

Other relationships make the coercive underside unmistakable. Lin Yanche threatens Su Qingrou that if she leaves his manor, Jin Zhengnan will never leave the Hospital. The threat is not merely an argument between partners: it uses a third person’s medical vulnerability to confine a woman physically. When Su Qingrou protests that Jin Zhengnan is only her friend, Lin Yanche responds with accusations of sexual betrayal and contempt. The scene demonstrates how jealousy converts the language of marriage into an instrument of imprisonment, while the woman’s attempt to leave becomes the occasion for retaliation against someone she cares about.

Su Xiangwan later sees Su Qingrou’s silent tears and the deep and shallow kiss marks on her body. Her pain is intensified by a photograph of Lin Yanche and Song Yuner embracing passionately, taken at the same time. The evidence links sexual coercion, humiliation, and suspected infidelity rather than presenting them as separate domestic problems. Su Qingrou’s body records the violence that the controlling relationship tries to conceal, while the photograph turns private domination into a wider web of betrayal.

The confrontation between Lu Xun and Mo Beiyu shows that protection cannot be separated from accountability. After Su Xiangwan is found unconscious by the roadside, Mo Beiyu condemns the man who tortured his woman to such a state and says that, without his sister’s intervention, Lu Xun might already have received a notice to identify a body. He then challenges Lu Xun by asking what qualification a rapist has to stand in sunlight. Whether or not Lu Xun’s authority can absorb the accusation, the scene strips away the romantic vocabulary of marital protection and names the danger of treating a wife as someone over whom a husband possesses sexual and physical rights.

Kinship, Marriage, and Suspicion

The concept also depends on unstable boundaries between marriage and family. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is the child his uncle adopted and therefore his cousin, and that he arranged a residence for her near the theater when she came to Cloud City to perform. Su Xiangwan objects that he should have told her directly, comparing the omission with the earlier problem involving Song Yuner. The dispute shows that marital trust is shaped by information as much as by conduct: an unannounced woman in a husband’s orbit becomes threatening because the wife is expected to remain both vigilant and accepting.

Su Qingrou proposes a small engagement ceremony with Jin Zhengnan, primarily to benefit their two companies, and dismisses concern about Lin Yanche by reminding Su Xiangwan that they have a brother. Here, formal relationships carry commercial and defensive functions. Engagement is not presented only as romantic commitment; it is also a public arrangement that may protect two companies and create a family position strong enough to resist another man’s control. The story thus contrasts the restrictive power of marriage with the strategic protection that official status can sometimes provide.

Lu Xun’s own argument about kinship is deliberately provocative. He maintains that a relative who is related only by name remains a man or woman, not a blood relative, and remarks that if every relationship were like Shen Yiyun’s, there would be no peace for him to manage. His reasoning rejects the idea that a kinship label automatically eliminates sexual suspicion. The result is paradoxical: he invokes marriage to demand trust and obedience, yet treats nominal family ties as insufficient boundaries when judging other men and women.

Possession, Agency, and the Marital Name

At the same time, the marital name can become a source of recognition as well as control. When Lu Xun asks Su Xiangwan what relationship she has with him, she calls him her husband while pulling off his shirt flirtatiously. He remains uncertain whether she knows which man she is addressing, suggesting that the title has emotional and social force only when joined to conscious recognition. In this moment, Su Xiangwan uses the marital identity herself; she is not merely receiving Lu Xun’s definition of her role.

That ambiguity is central to the book’s treatment of obedience. Su Xiangwan can accept tenderness, companionship, family connection, and the dignity of being Lu Xun’s wife, but she resists the demand that these things require surrendering her will. Her fever, weakness, and need for assistance make dependence physically visible, yet dependence does not make consent automatic. The repeated contrast between being obedient and being a puppet distinguishes cooperation from erasure.

Obedience and Control in Marriage therefore operates less as a stable moral rule than as a contested system of power. Lu Xun repeatedly presents obedience as the condition for intimacy, calm, and protection; Su Xiangwan exposes the hidden price by asserting her mind and temper; and the stories of Su Qingrou and Song Yuner reveal the extreme consequences when marital authority becomes confinement, threat, or sexual coercion. The book’s most consequential distinction is between a wife who chooses to remain within a relationship and a woman compelled to remain there because money, family, illness, reputation, or violence has made departure unsafe.