Lu Xun’s Restriction against Living Separately from Su Xiangwan

Lu Xun’s Restriction against Living Separately from Su Xiangwan is a defining expression of the couple’s unequal marital arrangement. When Su Xiangwan asks for help finding a job and uses physical affection to soften the request, Lu Xun refuses—not because the employment question itself is impossible, but because he has already understood that she wants the job as part of a plan to live apart from him. The rule therefore reaches beyond housing: it is Lu Xun’s insistence that marriage requires continued co-residence and that Su Xiangwan may not convert practical independence into emotional or marital separation.

Origin and Immediate Conflict

Su Xiangwan’s proposal is connected to her grandfather’s situation and to the possibility of returning home to care for him. She explains that Cloud City is only half an hour from the Beijing high-speed rail line and less than an hour away by car, presenting separate living as a manageable logistical arrangement rather than a rejection of the marriage. Lu Xun listens patiently, but his response exposes the real dispute. In his view, the short distance makes the proposed separation unnecessary; the very convenience Su Xiangwan cites becomes his reason for refusing to treat the arrangement as legitimate.

The exchange begins with Su Xiangwan taking the initiative. She wraps her arms around Lu Xun’s waist, presses her face against his chest, and asks whether he can help her obtain a job. Lu Xun sees through the strategy and tells Mrs. Lu that he will not agree to her request. When Su Xiangwan asks why he has rejected her, he directly reframes the matter by asking whether she expects him to approve her living separately from him. The restriction is thus enforced through recognition as much as command: Lu Xun identifies the hidden purpose of her request before she can present it as an ordinary career decision.

Operation as a Marital Rule

The rule operates through refusal rather than a formal written clause. Lu Xun does not merely express a preference for sharing a home; he treats separation as something over which he has veto power. His question about whether he can agree to it places Su Xiangwan’s proposed movement under the authority of the husband, while his appeal to the brief travel time between Cloud City and Beijing supplies a practical justification for a fundamentally possessive decision.

This makes the restriction part of the broader pattern of Lu Xun’s marriage rules. The relationship is already shaped by contract, money, public status, and competing claims over loyalty. Su Xiangwan has previously offered to convert Lu Xun’s five hundred million in capital into shares and return it with interest as part of a divorce proposal, insisting that she would take neither property nor alimony. Lu Xun’s refusal to let her live separately belongs to the same larger struggle: she tries to define marriage through consent, repayment, and the ability to leave, while he repeatedly defines it through continued possession and compliance.

Attachment, Jealousy, and the Expansion of Control

The restriction is intensified by Lu Xun’s repeated sensitivity to rival forms of intimacy. He uses an East District land negotiation to demand that Lin Yanche stop interfering in his affairs with Su Xiangwan, making the business transaction serve as leverage in a private relationship conflict. He also allows Song Yuner to leave rather than asking her to stay, but the scene leaves her anger focused on Su Xiangwan and on Lu Xun’s evident prioritization of his wife. His management of these women is different in form, yet each episode reinforces the same principle: Lu Xun wants the boundaries of his relationships to remain under his control.

The rule also appears against a background of disputed kinship. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is the child his uncle adopted and therefore his cousin, while Su Xiangwan objects to the ease with which non-blood relatives can be placed inside a supposedly protected family category. She later argues that a relative connected only by name is still a man and a woman, challenging the idea that the label of cousin automatically removes the possibility of romantic suspicion. These conflicts make co-residence significant: the shared marital home is presented as a protected center, while outsiders—whether former lovers, friends, or relatives by adoption—are treated as potential threats to the couple’s exclusive bond.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The restriction turns a seemingly modest request into a confrontation over freedom. Su Xiangwan’s proposed arrangement would allow her to remain near her grandfather while preserving access to Lu Xun, but Lu Xun interprets separate housing as an unacceptable weakening of the marital bond. The consequence is that practical independence becomes difficult to distinguish from disobedience, and a decision about work or family care becomes evidence of whether she accepts his authority.

The rule’s significance is sharpened by the wider violence surrounding the relationship. When Su Xiangwan is found unconscious after being severely mistreated, Mo Beiyu condemns Lu Xun for reducing his wife to such a state and calls him a rapist. Police surveillance confirms that Liu Xi brought Su Xiangwan back to an apartment, after which authorities attempt to return her to her family. In that context, Lu Xun’s refusal to permit separate living cannot be read only as romantic anxiety. It belongs to a system in which private authority, threats, and physical control repeatedly compete with formal institutions such as the police and the hospital.

At the same time, Lu Xun’s language and conduct show that the rule is not presented by the narrative as a detached administrative policy. His attachment is expressed through jealousy, intervention, and the insistence that Su Xiangwan remain his wife in both name and proximity. When she identifies him as her husband, he is still uncertain whether she knows whom she is addressing, suggesting that marital recognition itself has become another contested form of security. The restriction therefore sits at the center of the novel’s tension between love and freedom: it promises closeness while denying the wife equal power to decide what closeness should mean.