Outlaws of the Marsh, awesome as it may be, is basically a man’s book. The primary relationships it describes are brotherly (its alternate title is All Men Are Brothers), and women, when they’re not relegated to the sidelines, are portrayed as lustful, catty deceivers who betray the men who rescue them. Twice in twenty episodes the same storyline is repeated: good man marries poor beauty, only to have her cheat on him. He forgives her and even offers her a no-strings divorce so she can be with her lover, but she continues to make demands, and, eventually, meets a violent end. Her killer is vindicated as a moral man who was simply pushed to the brink by this conniving she-demon. One starts to suspect the author, Shi Naian, must have been drawing on memories of a nasty breakup when writing Outlaws!
But Shi Naian’s plan to vilify women seems to have backfired with his creation of Pan Jinlian, the “Golden Lotus,” who remains an enigmatic and influential figure in Chinese culture to this day. Pan Jinlian “enjoys” a status like that of Helen of Troy’s in Western culture – her name has become a byword for an untrustworthy seductress.
Wu Da reunites with his brother Wu Song.
Her story: A beautiful woman married to an ugly dwarf named Wu Da (or Wu Dalang), Pan Jinlian attempts to seduce the dwarf’s brother, the warrior Wu Song. Being an upright guy, Wu Song rebuffs her. A crafty neighbor woman, Mrs. Wang, arranges for her to meet a wealthy playboy named Ximen Xing, and the two soon embark on a torrid love affair. Eventually, they’re caught in the act by Wu Da, who generously offers not to tell Wu Song – a Tarantino-esque killing machine who would certainly avenge him – about their treachery on the condition that Pan Jinlian remain faithful to him in the future.
But soon enough Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing are back to their lustful ways, and, fearing that Wu Song will kill them if he finds out, team up with Mrs. Wang to poison Wu Da with cyanide. In the Outlaws of the Marsh version of the tale, when Wu Song discovers the truth about his brother’s murder, he beheads both Pan Jinlian and Ximen Xing, while Mrs. Wang is arrested and executed – by the “death of one thousand cuts” — for her part in the crime.
Wanton hussy: Pan Jinlian cavorts with Ximen Xing in a teahouse while Mrs. Wang stands guard.
In the erotic classic The Golden Lotus, however, Pan Jinlian marries Ximen Xing after Wu Da’s death, becoming just one of his many concubines. This book, so racy it was banned in China for centuries, features Ximen Xing in hundreds of bedroom escapades. And its version of Pan Jinlian as lascivious seductress is the one that’s persisted in the public imagination. Google her name and you’ll find that she pops up as a character in several NSFW videos. These illustrations (not explicit) represent her as a conniving slut with a heavily painted face, utterly ungrateful to her good-natured husband.
In 1986, the playwright Wei Minglun revisited the story in his opera Pan Jinlian. There, he portrayed Pan Jinlian as a victim of her culture who would have simply divorced Wu Da had she been able to. Other characters in this avant-garde opera include Anna Karenina (!), who advises Pan Jinlian to run away, and a modern-day female judge who excoriates Wu Song for his cruelty.
Bound feet of an elderly Chinese woman.
The CCTV adaptation also presents a revisionist version of Pan Jinlian, though it’s not quite as feminist as Wei Minglun’s opera. It portrays her actions as understandable, though never excusable: she’s less a shameless hussy and more of a bored housewife. Mrs. Wang observes that she never leaves the house, and one can see why she might seek out a romance with Wu Song: she has bound feet and Wu Da is almost her only connection with the outside world, and she probably had little choice as to her husband was. In the T.V. version, she’s also initially reluctant to take up with Ximen Xing and is conflicted about whether to get back together with him after Wu Da forgives her. Ximen Xing and Mrs. Wang are portrayed more as the aggressors and Pan Jinlian as the confused, emotional, and somewhat stupid girl who can be easily led astray by those with stronger personalities. She’s not very moral, but she’s not out-and-out evil, either.
Shi Naian seemed to have a problem with women who revealed a strong sexuality or who were independent and meddled in the affairs of men (Mrs. Wang). One of the few “good” women in Outlaws, Lin Chong’s wife, was a model of constancy who refused to divorce her husband when he was sent to prison, and who hung herself out of grief at his absence. She even told her husband not to take revenge on a man who tried to rape her, as the man was the son of a powerful official who could cause trouble for their family if anything happened to his son. So, in this narrative, a woman can either be utterly self-effacing and good, and wind up dead, or crafty and lustful and wicked, and . . . wind up dead. CCTV, to its credit, portrays Mrs. Lin with much the same nuance as it did Pan Jinlian: she’s not held up as a model wife but as a good, albeit hurting, woman, whose suicide appears as the logical extension of her self-effacing nature. It’s a subtle testament to a changed China.
