In a certain sense, A Flower in a Sinful Sea (Nie Hai Hua) can be regarded as a text reflecting the changes of gender relations in the late Qing Dynasty (1644 AD-1912 AD). It created a group of miscellaneous female images such as Fu Caiyun (傅彩云) and Xia Yali (夏雅丽), and showed two paths for women to seek self-liberation and move towards modernity in the era of great changes, i.e., “mainstream revolution” and “marginal revolution.” Lacan’s view on women provided an effective analytical tool for understanding the logical differences between these two paths. On the basis of describing the two ways, the novel further reveals the male ideological anxiety behind the female narration, and reflects the sexual sociology dilemma encountered by the male elite in the late Qing Dynasty when imagining the modern gender order in China in the process of Chinese modernization.