Shijie Knows Best: Recuperating Feminine Knowledge in The Untamed

[I have just finished the Yi City arc and am now on episode 39, so spoiler warning for episodes up to this point!]

I have been conflicted for a while about how The Untamed depicts women. This came to a head when I finished the Yi City arc and yet another named female character—A-Jing[1]—is killed. Madame Yu, Wen Qing, Shijie, and A-Jing…They make up the majority of the named women in the show, and they also make up the pivotal deaths. A part of me wonders: Are their deaths simply for the sake of feeding into Wei Ying’s character formation and growth? If so, does this do justice to these women? I’m sure the latter question will be answered during Wei Ying’s redemption arc in the present timeline, but for now I say: this is a suspicious number of female deaths. It does help that the author is a woman, and it does, I think, make it more miraculous and wonderful that Wei Ying and Lan Zhan are able to survive and be together.[2] It makes it better, too, that Wei Ying has no lack of gratitude and love for these women, no matter how complicated those relationships might be. The jury is still out on the question of women’s representation in The Untamed as a whole.

This post is an attempt to think productively through one of these deaths—and lives: Jiang Yanli’s. Hers, of course, is a death that cuts deeply. Her depiction in The Untamed, especially compared to that of the donghua, gives her a lot of screen time: she attends the Gusu Lan lectures with the boys (and why not? She is a sister of the clan!), for instance. She is always there to quell the bickering between her brothers. She is there to provide a piece of home in the form of lotus and rib soup (which, by the way, is an absolutely delicious dish I highly recommend), even when the family is adrift and homeless. In many ways, she is very stereotypically feminine: she is quiet, she blanches at the sight of blood, she is usually off the battle fields. Her death could be read as a very maternal sacrifice. However, what if we recuperated her way of being in the world? What if we read her on her own terms? This may be one small way to do her justice.

My methodology here draws from feminist surface reading practices as opposed to symptomatic reading. Surface here is what Stephen Best has described as “what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). My method has also been called reparative reading, which Eve Sedgwick explains: “The desire of a reparative impulse…is additive and accretive” (146) and instead of asking “Is this knowledge true?”, it asks, “What does this knowledge do?” (124). I find this particularly helpful for thinking about Yanli. It is less useful to ask: “Is she a Strong Woman Figure?” Our question, rather, is: “What does her way of being in the world do? What effects does it have on the narrative and on us?”

Yanli is not stupid or weak. Her drive, rather, comes from a steadfast love for her family—a non-traditional, non-nuclear one. Already, this is progressive. Her first loyalty is not to her clan but to her brothers, biological and adoptive. To equate her domestic skills with a lack of Strong Woman features is to overlook the strength of what this kind of femininity can offer. Two moments stand out to me in particular. The first is during Jiang Cheng and Wei Ying’s battle at Lotus Pier. At this point, their Shijie is waiting alone in the woods. When her father and mother are felled, the camera cuts to Yanli, off the battlefield, her jade pendant dropping to the ground and splitting into two. She looks worried, on the verge of tears. Could this mean something?

The audience knows what this means: Somehow, the bonds of family are so strong that she can sense their passing from afar. There are similarities here with a Victorian storytelling technique and ideology—that the bond of blood is such that faraway cousins will find their way to each other by chance, that sentiment between blood relatives and heterosexual pairings is so powerful as to cause the supernatural (an example, Jane Eyre). Yet Yanli’s premonition here is complicated by a later moment of premonition, when Wei Ying defects from the Jiang clan and becomes the Yiling Patriarch. Yanli has no way of empirically knowing this is happening in the Burial Mounds between her brothers. Yet, she knows.

Women in this fantastical world, as in most patriarchal societies past and present, Chinese and non-Chinese, are limited in their geographical mobility. Yanli cannot wander the roads of the world like her brothers. Because of her class and gender, she is limited to domestic spaces. How can she gain knowledge if no one is informing her, if she is not afforded the worldly experience of her male counterparts? That is where her premonitions come in. Although this is a highly gendered epistemology—that is, a highly gendered form of knowledge acquisition—it remains powerful. Gut feelings, dreams, and supernatural premonition are how Yanli experiences battles alongside her brothers, even if she is not physically there, because she cannot be physically there. It is also how she feels emotionally connected to them even after several months of not seeing them.

Yanli’s feminine ways of knowing—gendered because they have to be, because she and we live in a world in which she cannot know otherwise and she must use the tools available to her—enable her to cross the boundaries of physical space and even time. Compared to, say, Wei Ying who cannot know his sister is getting married without someone telling him in person, Yanli’s is a different way of being in the world, but it is one that bears its own kind of power.

Works Cited

Best, Stephen. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1.

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin 2006.

Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke 2002.

[1] I’ve been told that it’s A-Qing in the novel and her name has been subtitled this on Viki. However, the Chinese character and the sound of the name in The Untamed is A-Jing, which I’ll stick to for this post.

[2] Andrea has aptly pointed out to me that this runs in contrast to the stereotypical depiction of gay couples in the media: Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan’s survival and happiness is a refreshing anomaly.