One of the most startling stories in the history of Chinese fiction is “In Jiangdu, A Filial Daughter-in-Law Offers Her Body To Be Butchered,” written by the late-Ming writer Xi Langxian. This paper compares Langxian’s story of martyrdom with its earlier sources, showing his successful revisions. Langxian endows his characters with complicated desires, intentions, and motivations, highlights the “embodiment” of the heroine, and incorporates into his story the socio-economic, historical, political, and supernatural dimensions. I contend that because it involves a complete denial of human dignity, the sense of the grotesque-enhanced by the underlying structure of money and exchange-is by no means “carnivalesque” and positive, as is the Bakhtinian grotesque. I also argue against the contention that the story contains subversive elements and there is a disjuncture between the heroic and the comic subversions. Placed in its proper historical and hermeneutic contexts, Langxian’s story does not undercut the protagonist's heroism, nor does it fail artistically because of its comic elements. In fact, the complexities of the story are evidence not of artistic failure, but of authorial control of several levels of meaning and patterns which work to reinforce the poignancy of the heroine's tragedy and evoke complex reader responses. The story serves the functions of didacticism, “entertainment,” and expressing admiration for a paragon of virtue as well as the anxieties of the male elite. It surpasses many other moral tales because it brings the issue of gender sharply into focus and enhances the readers’ cognitive understanding of human nature.