Three Submissions and Four Virtues

Three Submissions and Four Virtues is a formula of prescribed feminine conduct that Madame uses to instruct Lana, linking expectations of womanhood to virginity, marriageability, and obedience. The novel does not spell out the rule’s individual requirements. Its significance emerges through the circumstances in which Madame invokes it and through Lana’s repeated refusal to accept the future her parents have chosen for her.

The Rule in Madame’s Lectures

During Lana’s visits home in the summers of 1973 and 1974, Madame sat her down in the salon and lectured her about preserving her virginity and cultivating Three Submissions and Four Virtues. The advice turns an abstract formula into intimate parental supervision: Madame’s concern is not only Lana’s sexual reputation but her conformity to a model of feminine respectability.

The narrator hears the phrase with irreverence, observing that it calls to mind the title of a highbrow erotic novel. That reaction exposes a tension in the rule’s presentation. It is offered as solemn instruction, yet its emphasis on virginity also becomes an object of the narrator’s private sexual imagination. The phrase therefore marks both the authority Madame claims over Lana and the desires the narrator attaches to that authority.

Lana’s Resistance to a Prescribed Future

Lana’s history makes clear that Madame’s lectures belong to a longer struggle over her independence. A tomboy as a girl, Lana excelled academically and won a scholarship to Berkeley. The General and Madame opposed her choice, regarding Berkeley as a communist colony and preferring a girls’ college; Lana had applied to none of the colleges they favored. When they forbade her to go, she threatened suicide and swallowed sleeping pills. After recovering, she jumped into the Saigon River, where two pedestrians rescued her. Madame eventually relented, and Lana left to study art history in the fall of 1972.

Her parents treated art history as a suitably feminine subject, one they hoped would enhance her feminine sensibilities and keep her suitable for marriage. But Lana’s later choices exceeded that plan. She graduated cum laude, did not return to live at home, and chose to live on her own. The General called her unfilial, while Madame’s later lessons about virginity and the prescribed virtues continued to press the expectations Lana had already challenged through her education and departure.

Gender, Respectability, and the Novel’s Contrast

The rule is presented specifically through Madame’s efforts to shape her daughter, but its concerns belong to a wider picture of gender roles in the novel. Among the exiled South Vietnamese men, some complain that their wives have had to find jobs and no longer match the idealized women they remember. The contrast is not a direct explanation of Madame’s formula; it shows, in another setting, how expectations about women’s proper place persist amid the upheaval of exile and changing family roles.

Lana’s refusal to follow the future planned for her gives the phrase its narrative force. The novel supplies no checklist of its duties, so the rule is defined less by doctrine than by its use: it is invoked to regulate a young woman’s sexuality and suitability for marriage, while Lana’s scholarship, independence, and self-fashioning reveal the limits of that authority.