Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Importance of Friendship

In the culture of the characters of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, female friendship is often the only possible relationship a woman can hope for in which she can be honest and authentically herself. Women in the novel are seen as little more than vessels for bearing sons. To parents, girls are considered a nuisance who must be raised until they can be married off. To their husbands and in-laws, women are viewed as temporary guests until they can prove their worth by becoming pregnant, and are expected to be obedient and demure no matter how cruel their marital families are to them. For this reason, friendship becomes a place of respite for women. Some women become sworn sisters with other women, either before or after marriage. However, Lily and Snow Flower’s laotong relationship is seen as more sacred than even their marriages. Despite the hardships they endure, Lily and Snow Flower are able to lean on each other and share intimacies that they would not be able to confide in anyone else. However, as they grow older and face more conflicts, Lily is shown to not truly understand what it means to be a friend until they are reunited shortly before Snow Flower’s death. After mistakenly holding a long grudge against Snow Flower, Lily realizes too late that Snow Flower never violated their laotong relationship, and Lily spends the rest of her life atoning for the ways she failed the sacredness of their friendship.

The Pain of Coming of Age

In Lily and Snow Flower’s lives, childhood is not meant to last very long, which makes the transition from childhood to adolescence all the more painful. Lily knows from a young age that her worth lies in her ability to marry well and have sons. This knowledge takes away her innocence and makes her desperate for a love she will never receive from her mother. The pain is represented in the footbinding that most girls begin at the age of six, as it begins the process of a girl being deemed ready for marriage. The footbinding not only shows that women can endure excruciating pain, which will be necessary for childbirth, but also that she will obey her elders no matter what. This scenario shows how footbinding, like growing up, prepares women for a life of pain and suffering.

The pain in coming of age is also exemplified in the progression of Lily and Snow Flower’s relationship. As young children, they pledge to be laotong for life, never imagining that anything could come between them. Before her marriage, Lily naively ignores the insinuations she hears Madame Gao make about Snow Flower, making blind assumptions about her laotong. However, on the way to her wedding ceremony, Lily’s innocence begins to break as she reads Snow Flower’s letter. As Lily continues to grow up and have certain expectations, she becomes more and more judgmental of Snow Flower, eventually breaking ties with her over what turns out to be a misunderstanding. Lily’s treatment of her friend shows how hardened she becomes after she comes of age, having been raised in a world with rigid expectations of women.

The Power of Language and Storytelling

One of the most important aspects of Lily and Snow Flower’s education is learning the women’s language of nu shu. Among women, nearly everything is communicated in nu shu, including songs that teach both practical lessons and morals, embroidered stories and autobiographies, and correspondence between family and friends. In a culture where women are largely powerless, nu shu provides women with some power, as being able to share thoughts and ideas with other women is a great source of comfort. It is precisely because men view anything having to do with women as useless that they do not bother to try to understand nu shu, showing how women use the ignorance of men to their own advantage.

However, language also proves its power in how it drives several of the conflicts in the novel. Since many of the characters in nu shu are the same, taking context into account is extremely important. Even once Lily has mastered nu shu, she fails to do this, which is what first makes her blind to Snow Flower’s true circumstances, and then leads her to believe Snow Flower has abandoned their laotong contract. Having finally understood the power of language and storytelling, Lily tries to atone through it. First, she transcribes the stories of village women, whose lives she once would have considered worthless. Then, Lily tells her own story, trying to help others see everything in context to better understand her motivations. All of these instances show how language and storytelling have the vast power to educate, comfort, destroy, and redeem.

The Suffering of Women

In Lily and Snow Flower’s world, women are expected to suffer almost from the moment they enter the world until the moment they leave it. Footbinding is symbolic of the suffering women must endure, as it is a symbol of femininity and a necessary process if a woman is to be considered marriageable. Aside from the pain of footbinding itself, for the rest of their lives, women are expected to serve others while hobbling around on broken feet, giving birth to as many children as possible, and often enduring both physical and emotional abuse from their husbands and in-laws. Even once a woman is married with sons, she is not safe, as shown by Lily’s fear that she will be sold off to another family if her husband dies while traveling to the next county to procure salt. Lily learns from a young age that women are expected to suffer. However, other than her footbinding, Lily ascends to a privileged position and never endures much suffering herself. This privilege makes her unsympathetic to women who do experience suffering, which only continues the cycle of suffering as she takes her anger out first on Snow Flower, and then her daughter.

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