When another debtor, Doctor Lu, attempts to strangle Cai instead of repaying what he owes, Old Zhang and his son Donkey, who seek to marry the women, rescue her. Dou E refuses Donkey’s proposal out of loyalty to her dead husband and the spurned suitor attempts to poison Cai, believing that the older woman’s death will force Dou E to accept him. When instead Old Zhang drinks the poisoned soup and dies, Donkey accuses Dou E of murder and presents her with the choice of marrying him or going to court. Taken before the Prefect and beaten, Dou E maintains her innocence; but to spare her mother-in-law a beating, she falsely confesses to the crime and is sentenced to death.
Through Dou E’s hardships, Hanqing makes a statement that mortality is onerous. Dou E laments, “My heart is full of grief, I have suffered for so many years! Unending sorrow which I cannot banish, unceasing reasons for fresh misery” (lines 105-106, 110-111). Our mortal lives are a heavy load to carry – we often carry more pain than we would …show more content…
Dou E revisits her father as a ghost; her spirit lives on in her ghostly form as well as her father’s promise to take revenger for her death. What happens to human beings after they die is less important to Confucian thinkers than how the living fulfill their obligations to the dead. Dou E’s mortality was not the final say in her life – her spirit, and life, and carried on with the promise of her father to avenge her soul. While morality is burdensome, it is also not final. Death offers a welcome release from the encumbrances of this worldly life, but the spirit we carried as mortals pursues the living after our death. Our mortality causes grief for the living, the ones left behind when a loved one has passed on. The weight of mortality is never-ending – we are hampered by our own mortality and fraught even more by the mortality of those who have passed before
Through Dou E’s hardships, Hanqing makes a statement that mortality is onerous. Dou E laments, “My heart is full of grief, I have suffered for so many years! Unending sorrow which I cannot banish, unceasing reasons for fresh misery” (lines 105-106, 110-111). Our mortal lives are a heavy load to carry – we often carry more pain than we would …show more content…
Dou E revisits her father as a ghost; her spirit lives on in her ghostly form as well as her father’s promise to take revenger for her death. What happens to human beings after they die is less important to Confucian thinkers than how the living fulfill their obligations to the dead. Dou E’s mortality was not the final say in her life – her spirit, and life, and carried on with the promise of her father to avenge her soul. While morality is burdensome, it is also not final. Death offers a welcome release from the encumbrances of this worldly life, but the spirit we carried as mortals pursues the living after our death. Our mortality causes grief for the living, the ones left behind when a loved one has passed on. The weight of mortality is never-ending – we are hampered by our own mortality and fraught even more by the mortality of those who have passed before