Lu Xun’s Marital Rule Requiring His Wife’s Obedience

Lu Xun’s Marital Rule Requiring His Wife’s Obedience is a repeated standard within the marriage between Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan. Lu Xun presents an obedient wife as the proper companion for a powerful husband and expects Su Xiangwan to comply even when she regards his demands as excessive. Su Xiangwan does not simply reject the marriage or accept the rule: she sometimes cooperates, sometimes resists, and repeatedly exposes the conflict between marital devotion and personal autonomy.

Definition and Domestic Logic

Lu Xun states the rule most directly when he tells Su Xiangwan that the most important quality in a woman is obedience, adding that she must persist in performing it even when the obedience is only an act. The formulation makes submission both a behavioral requirement and a performance. It is not enough for Su Xiangwan to remain physically present as his wife; she must also display the attitude that his authority expects.

The rule is softened by Lu Xun’s qualification that obedience need only prevail most of the time. That concession does not abandon the principle. Instead, it establishes a flexible threshold through which Lu Xun can tolerate occasional resistance while retaining the power to judge whether Su Xiangwan has crossed the acceptable limit. His response to her objection is that any man would want an obedient woman beside him, turning a personal demand into an apparently universal marital norm.

Su Xiangwan’s Resistance and Negotiation

Su Xiangwan answers the rule by insisting that she is not a puppet. She acknowledges that she can be good and can obey, but maintains that she possesses thought, character, a brain, and her own temper. Her position is not simple defiance. She accepts that intimacy may involve compromise, yet rejects the idea that being a wife requires surrendering independent judgment.

This negotiation becomes especially visible when Lu Xun’s tenderness carries an undertone of threat. His fingertip moves gently across her cheek, but Su Xiangwan experiences the gesture as a warning that could become physical coercion in the next moment. The scene reveals why obedience cannot be treated as a harmless romantic preference: the demand is backed by Lu Xun’s power, and even affection can be perceived as an instrument of control.

When Lu Xun tells her that obedience most of the time is sufficient, the apparent compromise preserves the hierarchy. Su Xiangwan is allowed exceptions, but Lu Xun remains the person who defines the rule and determines whether her conduct is acceptable. The marriage therefore operates through an unstable cycle of resistance, accommodation, and renewed supervision rather than through genuine equality.

Obedience, Possession, and Marital Security

The rule is reinforced by Lu Xun’s possessive understanding of marriage. He asks Su Xiangwan to accompany him because he feels at ease with her beside him, but the reassurance also places her presence within his emotional requirements. Her companionship is not merely an independent choice; it becomes part of the condition under which he can feel secure.

When Su Xiangwan asks whether he will return with her, Lu Xun refuses because of another appointment and again invokes the obedient-woman ideal. His refusal leaves her disappointed and suspicious, showing the cost of a system in which obedience is demanded while transparency remains incomplete. She is expected to perform trust and compliance even when Lu Xun withholds information that would make trust easier.

The same possessive logic appears when Su Xiangwan proposes divorce. She offers to return Lu Xun’s five hundred million in capital by converting it into shares and even offers to return the interest, while refusing property and alimony. Her proposal attempts to separate the marriage from its financial foundation. Lu Xun answers by mocking the idea that her worth could equal five hundred million merely because he has slept with her, reducing the dispute to sexual and economic valuation rather than addressing her stated wish for independence.

The Rule Under Pressure

The consequences of the obedience rule become darker when Lu Xun uses threats against people connected to another woman. Lin Yanche threatens Su Qingrou with harm to Jin Zhengnan if she leaves the manor, demonstrating a broader pattern in which male authority is enforced through control over a woman’s movements and relationships. The threat is not Lu Xun’s own act, but it forms part of the same narrative environment in which intimate relationships are governed through coercion rather than freely given consent.

Su Xiangwan’s physical vulnerability further exposes the limits of the obedience ideal. After developing a fever and becoming so weak that she can scarcely use her strength, she asks Manager Wu to buy antipyretic medicine. In another crisis, Mo Beiyu feeds Su Xiangwan water while she is too weak to sit up or drink unaided, having already been feverish for two days. These scenes contrast care with command: practical assistance responds to bodily need, whereas the marital rule asks for submission as proof of love.

Lu Xun also assumes the right to impose care directly. After Su Qingrou leaves, he grabs her arm and insists on applying ointment given by Hua Shuo, telling her that the decision is not hers to make. The gesture can be read as concern, but its form repeats the central problem of the marital rule: care is delivered through the removal of choice. The narrative places tenderness, possession, and coercion close together, making the boundary between protection and domination deliberately unstable.

Relational Boundaries and Narrative Significance

The obedience rule becomes particularly contentious around women whose relationships with Lu Xun are explained through kinship language. Lu Xun identifies Shen Yiyun as the child adopted by his uncle and therefore his cousin, arranging nearby housing because she has come to Cloud City to perform. Su Xiangwan remains suspicious because the explanation resembles an earlier episode involving Song Yuner. Her distrust shows that obedience cannot substitute for disclosure: a wife asked to accept authority still seeks facts about the people and circumstances affecting the marriage.

At a family confrontation, Su Xiangwan rejects the idea that a non-blood relative should automatically be treated as harmless. She argues that a nominal relative remains a man and a woman, and that such arrangements would otherwise leave no meaningful distinction between kinship and romantic rivalry. Her challenge attacks the social vocabulary used to protect male discretion. The titles of cousin, wife, and relative become competing claims to legitimacy, and obedience would require her to accept the arrangement without contesting its implications.

The rule also illuminates the contrast between Lu Xun’s self-image and the conduct of other powerful men. Chu Fei tells Lu Xun that Su Xiangwan resembles someone who once wore the clothes of a close relative but was not actually related to him, and admits that he likes her. He says he will not force a woman and prefers the prolonged process of pursuit. Lu Xun’s marriage, by contrast, is structured around the expectation that the woman already bound to him should remain obedient. The contrast does not make Chu Fei’s pursuit innocent, but it clarifies the different forms of control surrounding Su Xiangwan: pursuit may preserve the appearance of choice, while marriage converts possession into an obligation.

The rule is finally given an ironic emotional counterpoint when Su Xiangwan, apparently intoxicated or disoriented, identifies Lu Xun as her husband while teasing him. Lu Xun is uncertain whether she truly knows who he is, because many men around them could be called handsome or addressed as husband. Her declaration temporarily reassures him, but it also reveals how precarious his authority is: the title he wants to secure through obedience matters to him precisely because recognition cannot be forced into emotional certainty. In this marriage, obedience is presented as a condition of order, yet the recurring evidence shows that affection, trust, and care cannot be made authentic by command alone.