31 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan SpenceThe Death of Woman Wang
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary: “The Trial”
Jen and his father went to Huang’s court and accused Kao of having an affair with Wang and killing her. Kao’s wife provided an alibi that helped absolve him from the allegations. Interrogating witnesses and using fear of the City God to his advantage, Huang discerned the truth: Jen had killed Wang.
Jen and his father should have been executed for “falsely accusing an innocent person of a capital crime” (138), but because of Jen’s father’s old age, the fact that Jen was the family’s only son, and the circumstances of Wang’s adultery, Huang lightened the sentence. Jen’s father was absolved, while Jen was beaten and subjected to having to wear a cangue (pillory) in public.
Huang was also concerned about revenge from Wang’s ghost. To appease her spirit, he arranged to have Wang’s body “buried in a good coffin, in a plot of land near her home” (139). Kao had to pay for the burial as punishment for striking Jen in the face.
Epilogue Analysis
Like the details of Wang’s murder, the epilogue combines several themes Spence explores throughout the book. The trial and burial of Wang represents how much fear of the supernatural dominated the region. As a wronged ghost, “[S]he was suffused with power and danger: as a hungry ghost she could roam the village for generations, impossible to placate, impossible to exorcise” (139).
In sum, Wang could only gain the power the law and society denied her in life as a ghost. This implies some level of societal awareness of the impossible position it had placed many women in, and a corresponding fear of their anger. The fact that superstitions operated outside ”official” institutions like Confucianism perhaps underscored their connection to women. Several other figures associated with the supernatural (e.g., local mediums) were women, which suggests that magic, or a belief in magic, constituted an illicit avenue of power for women.
