Peony In Love

Peony in Love is a 2007 work of historical fiction by American author Lisa See. See utilizes her Chinese great grandfather’s memories and historical records to explore what a young Chinese woman might have experienced if she had sought to assimilate a Westernized conception of life with the Eastern one inherited from her family and society. In continuously renegotiating her ideal terms of life and marriage with the ones of the people and institutions she respects, the main character, Peony, learns to harmonize her Eastern and Western impulses. The hybrid woman who emerges abandons some old norms and metaphors, which renders her more “real” through a more intimate identification with an increasingly borderless contemporary world. Peony in Love also emphasizes the struggles both seventeenth- and nineteenth-century women in China faced in pursuing a sense of freedom and self in a country that reneged on gender equality, preferring the traditional and repressive norms of the patriarchy.

The novel begins by introducing Peony’s father. A rich and culturally educated man with many political connections, he is busy arranging an operatic performance on the Peony Pavilion, a site on his estate. Many of the people aware of his plans are opposed because they believe that the opera might inspire young women in the audience to emulate the performers. The performers follow the themes of Liniang, a drama in which young women starve themselves to the point of death in order to find love.

Ironically, during the performance at the Peony Pavilion, the young woman who is most deeply moved by the Liniang narrative is Peony. Afterward, she writes extensively about her emotional response to the story. On the same evening of the performance, she meets a beautiful man near her age named Wu Ren. They meet again on three different nights, and Peony eventually falls deeply in love. Her feelings for Ren are matched with an unshakable despair, because her father has already committed her to an arranged marriage to an unknown man. Like the character of Du Liniang, Peony starves herself to the edge of death. Before she dies, she learns that the man her father chose for her marriage is Wu Ren.



The rest of the novel concerns the aftermath of Peony’s death. Since her funeral rites are not executed according to tradition, Peony transforms into a “hungry ghost” and wanders aimlessly outside the narrow band that limited her agency and domain of experience during her life. As she travels, Peony meets a series of female writers who each mourn the arduousness of being heard as a woman in a world dominated by men. Peony meets the spirit of her grandmother, who relates painful memories from their family history, including the violent tragedy when the Qing Dynasty upheaved the Ming Dynasty. Later, Peony meets her mother, who corroborates the story. Peony goes on to discover examples of both suffering and courage that other women have experienced, especially during times of war. This new insight allows Peony to contextualize the behavior of her stern mother, who she realizes merely wanted to shield her from a hostile external world.

Later in her travels, Peony frequently returns to the memory of Ren. Her immense love makes its mark on Ren’s next wife, as Peony haunts her and tries to enrich their relationship only to accidentally distance them. Feeling guilty for her meddling, Peony exiles herself from her loved ones’ lives, deciding to wander the lands of Hangzhou. Eventually, her mother’s spirit tells her to return and correct her influence on the lives of Ren and his new wife.

Peony chooses a young girl who is neglected by her family, and guides her mother to mold the girl into a beautiful and kind young woman. Later in life, Ren, now a widower, meets the girl and falls in love again, marrying her as his third wife. Many years later, the third wife discovers Peony’s writings as well as those of the second wife. She augments them with her own words and asks her husband to help publish them. Soon after, Ren suddenly realizes that Peony never got the correct funeral rites; he completes them for her.



Peony’s acts of kindness and redemption ultimately lead to her spiritual release, rendering her narrative whole as she happily anticipates returning to her husband in the afterlife. Peony in Love therefore blends both Eastern and Western norms, showing that women can secure their spiritual liberation even if the conditions of their mortal lives restrict them.