Wang Furen

Her Story

Lady Wang is Jia Zheng’s principal wife and Jia Baoyu’s mother. She was born into the Wang family of Jinling — sister to Wang Ziteng, who rises high in the imperial service, and to Aunt Xue, who brings Baochai and Xue Pan into the Jia compound. Wang Xifeng is her niece, installed as household manager under her authority. Through these three relationships Lady Wang sits at the centre of a family network that runs parallel to the Jia line and, for much of the novel, holds it up.

She had three children. Jia Zhu 贾珠 died young, leaving his widow Li Wan and their son Jia Lan. Her daughter Jia Yuanchun entered the palace and was raised to Imperial Concubine, an elevation that produces the Grand View Garden itself. Her surviving son is Baoyu, born with a jade in his mouth, and everything she does in the second half of the book proceeds from the fear of losing him as she lost the first.

She is presented as devout. She keeps to her own rooms, tells her beads, sponsors nuns and temples, and speaks softly. The novel is careful never to call this a pretence and equally careful to show what it costs other people. In Chapter 30 she is dozing when she wakes to find Baoyu joking with her maid Jinchuan’er; she slaps the girl and dismisses her from the house. In Chapter 32 Jinchuan’er drowns herself in a well. Lady Wang weeps, calls it her own fault, and arranges burial clothes and money for the mother — and the arrangement closes the matter. In Chapter 33, when Jia Zheng beats Baoyu nearly to death, it is Lady Wang who throws herself over the boy and stops it, crying out for her dead elder son. She is capable of both scenes and sees no contradiction between them.

Her real instrument is quiet. In Chapter 36 she raises Xiren’s allowance out of her own share, without announcement and without giving Xiren a formal title — buying a permanent informant and guardian inside Baoyu’s rooms. It is the most characteristic thing she does: no confrontation, no record, complete control.

The turn comes in Chapter 74, 惑奸谗抄检大观园. An embroidered pouch with an erotic design has been found in the Garden. Lady Wang, primed by the servant Wang Shanbao’s wife, authorises a night search of every girl’s quarters. The raid is a catastrophe. Tanchun slaps the searcher and says plainly that a great house is never destroyed from outside, only from within. Siqi is caught and expelled. And in Chapter 77 Lady Wang comes for Qingwen — beautiful, sharp-tongued, sick in bed — has her carried out of the house on the accusation that her looks alone corrupt Baoyu, and Qingwen dies days later. The young actresses in the Garden are dispersed at the same time. Lady Wang reports the deaths upward as illness. She believes throughout that she is protecting her son’s virtue, and it is the most destructive act any character in the novel commits against the Garden. The Garden never recovers; the girls scatter from that night onward.

She favours Xue Baochai for Baoyu — steady, sensible, her own sister’s daughter — over Lin Daiyu, whose health and temperament frighten her. In the hundred-and-twenty-chapter version she is party to the substitution in Chapters 96 and 97: Baoyu is married believing his bride is Daiyu, and the bride is Baochai. Daiyu dies the same night. When the confiscation comes and the family collapses, Lady Wang endures it in the way she has endured everything — with prayer, retrenchment and silence. Her son takes the examinations, passes, and walks away from the world; she is left with Baochai, a grandson on the way, and the piety she never abandoned.

She has no verse in Chapter 5. She is not one of the Twelve Beauties. She is the woman who decides which of them stay in the Garden.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She is turned three-quarters away, head bowed, eyes lowered, and she is counting a string of dark beads held up at her chest. That string is the whole subject. Xiang Li gives her no altar, no incense, no son, no maid — the background is unmarked paper, and the name occupies the empty left half of the sheet like a wall.

The palette is deliberately joyless: greys, mushroom brown, black, a white fur collar laid in with dry brush. The one colour is a run of blue-white blooms across the outer robe, cold as porcelain. The robe itself is covered in mock-writing, loops of ink that read as script without being legible — a garment that looks like a sutra and says nothing.

The hands are the only fully finished flesh in the picture, fingers closed precisely on the beads. The face is small, pale and set, the mouth turned down. This is not a serene devotion. The painting declines to make her peaceful, and it declines to make her a villain; it simply shows a woman fully occupied with an act of piety and gives her nobody to be pious toward.

The Calligraphy

王夫人 — her natal surname plus 夫人, “Madam”. Not her husband’s surname, and not a personal name, which she is never given. The novel and the painting alike identify her by the family she came from rather than the one she married into, and in her case that is exact: her power in the Jia house runs through the Wangs. The three characters are brushed large down the left margin, where they take up as much of the sheet as the figure does.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her surviving son, the axis of every decision she makes.
• Jia Zheng 贾政 — her husband, whose beating of Baoyu in Chapter 33 she physically stops.
• Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 — her daughter, the Imperial Concubine whose elevation raises the whole house.
• Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — her niece, who manages the household under her authority.
• Qingwen 晴雯 — Baoyu’s maid, expelled on her order in Chapter 77 and dead within days.

Others of the same kind · Jia household – wives, concubines, in-laws Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · Qin Keqing 秦可卿 · You Erjie 尤二姐 · You Sanjie 尤三姐 · Xue Baoqin 薛宝琴 · Xing Xiuyan 邢岫烟 · Li Wen 李纹 · Li Qi 李绮 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · You Shi 尤氏 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Zhao Yiniang 赵姨娘 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 and 11 more

Named on these pages Jia Yuanchun 贾元春 · Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 · Li Wan 李纨 · Qingwen 晴雯 · Xiren 袭人 · Jia Zheng 贾政 · Jia Zhu 贾珠 · Xing Furen 邢夫人 · Xue Yima 薛姨妈 · Zhou Yiniang 周姨娘 · Wang Ziteng 王子腾 · Wenguan 文官 and 16 more

Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses