A Son's Obligations: Promoting and Circulating Motherly Exemplariness in Late Imperial China

Abstract:This article investigates how sons in the scholar-literati class in late imperial China promoted their mothers as Confucian exemplars. From the position and perspectives of a son, what were the strategies of promotion, and how might these strategies be related to the different social roles Confucian literati were expected to play? Through an examination of sons' written tributes to their mothers in a variety of biographical and commemorative genres, this article argues that these writings show an increasing enthusiasm to promote mothers as Confucian exemplars during this historical period, and that this phenomenon was related to these writers' endeavors to promote themselves as members of the Confucian cultural elite and to raise their own social profiles. Some of these writings also expose sons' potential conflicting obligations in the context of polygamy, in which the mother's status as wife or concubine of the father could complicate the son's commemoration and raise questions about the proper ways in which the son could show respect to his different mothers (whether formal mother or concubine mother), especially when his own birth mother happened to be his father's concubine.