Reconfiguring Female Promiscuity in Love and Independence

This chapter examines the issue of female promiscuity, looking at Ouyang Yuqian's Pan Jinlian (1928), which excited the public for its unprecedented creation of a Nora figure based on the notorious traditional shrew Pan Jinlian. Ouyang reframed Pan Jinlian as a Chinese Nora by integrating the love discourse and shedding light on issues of sex and the body. The chapter then considers an incident involving Lan Ping, later known as Jiang Qing or Madame Mao, whose association with the Nora icon adds new twists to the revaluing process on yinfu. The conflict between Lan Ping's stage achievement as a forceful Nora and her failure to receive endorsement for her personal Nora moments off the stage speaks to patriarchal surveillance of women across representational and realistic spheres. Lan Ping had to face slut-shaming, or Pan Jinlian-shaming, when acting in the style of a Nora in her own love life. Female promiscuity, seen from these intertwined strands, served as both the target of, and a weapon against, social forces that categorized and contained women on the basis of their sexual choices.