Lady Tan's Circle of Women

Several ironies thread through this brief final section, which also concludes the dominant themes. Yunxian decides to publish a book of her cases not to achieve fame, which is the customary ambition, but to share information that can support women’s health. As Yunxian has seen, women’s health is not traditionally valued in her culture due to The Subordinate Status of Women. Both the Preface and Epilogue of the book—which are drawn from the historical record—hint at how rare it was to pay attention to the health of women, and how much Yunxian’s understanding, as a woman herself, contributed to her care of patients.

The chief irony of the Epilogue is that, after all the pressure on her to produce a son, Lady Tan lived to see her descendants destroyed by imperial decree. Despite her best efforts, she could not claim what her culture taught her was her most important achievement: bearing sons to preserve and further the family fortune and conduct the appropriate ancestor rituals. Instead, Tan Yunxian’s lasting achievement was the service she provided to other women and to the world by recording and then publishing her medical cases, enabling her to ultimately triumph in The Conflict Between Tradition and Ambition. See writes in the author’s note that she drew some characters for the novel—such as the bricklayer, the tiller woman, and Yining, the concubine’s daughter—from cases discussed in Tan Yunxian’s Records.

The other irony is that, while she was taught that her worth and her contributions depended on her relationship to her husband, Yunxian’s richest, most enduring, and more rewarding relationship is with Meiling, reflecting The Power of Women’s Alliances. Meiling provides the companionship and emotional support that Yunxian’s husband, who has concubines and other diversions to amuse him, does not provide her. Meiling, with her own medical knowledge, provides a professional sounding board for Yunxian; as a working woman, she understands the emotional labor involved in tending a family and a profession; and as a friend, she brings out Yunxian’s best qualities and encourages her to have faith in herself. As Grandmother Ru foresaw, Meiling and Yunxian balance once another, a complement of yin and yang that reflects the larger design of the cosmos.

This balance is also Yunxian’s goal as the matriarch of her household. Her decision to let her family members attend the festival—when before only the concubines accompanied the men—again shows Yunxian’s interest in being part of the broader world. While she prides herself on performing her traditional duties—raising daughters who are dutiful wives and mothers and aunts, managing the household with economic savvy, discouraging competition and rivalry among the women—Yunxian’s prevailing motive is to do what she believes is right. After the loneliness and loss of her early life, in her later age Yunxian gets to look upon a large, healthy, growing family to which she is central. The novel ends on this image as a balance to the loss in the opening chapters, in effect illustrating the circle that Yunxian has built.