While reading, Rabindranath Tagore’s “Punishment”, I saw an obvious connection right away between it and our previous reading by Feng Menglong “Du Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger”. The common theme among these two stories falls upon the wives of the protagonists. Both these stories are about a man and woman, and the betrayal that follows. Ultimately, because of these men’s actions, both Du Tenth and Chandara who are the wives in these stories choose to fall to their own demise because the betrayal of their husbands was too much to bare.
In “Punishment”, Chidam is trying to protect his brother because he had killed his wife. Despite the fact that Chandara is his wife and he has moral obligations to her because of this, he is more concerned with protecting his brother from this incident. In order to ensure his brother isn’t found guilty for the murder, he convinces his wife to take the blame and reassures her that everything will be okay nonetheless. Chandara can’t believe that he would ask her to do such a thing and his response is simply “Don’t worry – if you do what I tell you, you’ll be quite safe”, even though he is clearly subjecting her to danger by having her take the blame for this incident In “De Tenth Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger”, Li Jia sells his wife to another man for money after listening to a stranger’s advice. Despite the fact that these men’s loyalty should have remained with their wives, they both were willing to use them in order for their own personal gain. When Li Jia is giving Dutenth up to another man he says “With that thousand taels I will have a pretext on which to call on my parents, and you, my dear benefactress, will also have someone to rely on, but I cannot bear to give up the affection I feel for you.” Both men manipulated their wives and reassure them they will be okay, even though they are giving them up to worse conditions.
The fact that they both decide to choose death in the end between of what their husbands did made the two stories very comparable to me, even from the very beginning before I knew what their fate would be.
Hailey, I agree with you that there seem to be a lot of parallels between these two texts. One thing that occurred to me while reading your post is that just as you mention that Chidam seems to be choosing his brother over his wife, we could also describe Li Jia as choosing his father over Du Tenth – another example of blood being “thicker than water,” to quote an old saying.