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Encountering Ghost Princesses in Sou shen ji

Imagining the Other: Women, Ghosts, and Ghost Wives

In Western folktales Rapunzel lives imprisoned in a tower, Cinderella near the cinders, and Snow White in a deathlike sleep. In the end, each is rescued by a Prince Charming who comes forward to ask for her hand. By comparison, heroines in Chinese zhiguai are much less fortunate. They die prematurely before marriage, wait in their tomb for years, and sometimes leave their burial place for a working-class or peasant man’s room at midnight before they can find a man to marry and have sex with. The corpse bride makes the hero extremely rich, bears him a child, and then, only then, vanishes from the human world and rests in peace underground. Tale 395 in Sou shen ji, “The Ghostly Wedding Nights,” relates a story of this kind:

The first point at issue is whether the ghost’s female gender is arbitrary or has deeper cultural connotations. Sou shen ji does not lack tales about ghosts, but only female ghosts are associated with unions with living beings. Male ghosts materialize as baleful spirits specializing in frightening children and pestering human communities (e.g., tale 376); engaging in discussion with living males and convincing the latter of the existence of ghosts (tale 378); as a guard who warns a human about the limit of his life (tale 379); or requesting a human to take better care of his coffin (tale 383). No male ghost has sexual and/or marital relations with a living female. Only one option organizes the personae in a romance between a ghost and a living human in Sou shen ji: a female ghost and a living male. The prototype of female ghosts with erotic connotations in Sou shen ji later transforms into what Anthony C. Yu calls tales of “the amorous ghost.” The term is Yu’s translation of qinggui, the title of a chapter in Qingshi (History of Love), an anthology of tales by Feng Menglong (1574–1645), another master of the ghost narrative. As Yu has noted, none of the thirty-eight ghost romance tales included in that chapter concerns a male ghost; instead, there is this persistent pattern of a “normal” human protagonist and “the incredibly beautiful, sensual and sometimes virtuous figure of another realm” (1987, 429).

This distinct feminization of the ghost in zhiguai and the consequent creation of the sexual ghost-encountering tradition wherein the female sex predominates should be understood as a male Chinese literary and cultural artifact. Male characters are humans; female characters are ghosts. This objectification of the female sex as the other points to a male-centered perspective, not only in ghost wife tales but also in a wide range of stories about other kinds of alien wives in zhiguai—serpents, foxes, or other animal-spirit wives. In her study of the fox-wife zhiguai tales, Rania Huntington arrives at the similar observation that “the supernatural romance in the classical tale remained primarily a pleasure for male readers” in that “the romance is viewed only from the male and human side” (2003, 288). Projected in tale 395 is the duality of man as the self and woman as the other that has cross-culturally stigmatized the perception of gender. This binary also echoes critical concerns that Simone de Beauvoir raises in her canonical feminist work The Second Sex: “why woman has been defined as the other” and “what have been the consequences from man’s point of view” (1989, xxv).

The association of women with the other, in the alien form of a ghost, originates from the application of the binary concepts of yin and yang to gender characteristics in customary Chinese thought. Traditionally, the yin element is associated with the dark, death, the earth, cold, femininity, and wives. In contrast, the yang represents light, life, heaven, warmth, masculinity, and husbands. Within this oppositional pair, the yin-female and yang-male pattern is conveniently adapted to conceptualize the relation between ghost and human: the ghost is to the living as female is to male, as wife is to husband, and as yin is to yang. A ghost identity attaches to members of the female sex due to their common yin element, while the human identity is reserved for males based on their association with yang.

Viewed further in the light of the analogy between the yin-yang hierarchy and the gender hierarchy in family and social realities in the Six Dynasties, the mechanism behind the creation of a ghost wife in the male imagination can be revealed. According to the influential philosophical text Chunqiu fanlu, attributed to the Han Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu, yang is venerable and yin base. The hierarchy of yang and yin is thought to determine the gender hierarchy: “Yang qi³ is warm while yin qi is cold; yang qi gives while yin qi takes away; yang qi is benevolent while yin qi is criminal; yang qi is lenient while yin qi is severe; yang qi is caring while yin qi is hateful; yang qi gives life while yin qi kills . . . The husband is yang and the wife is yin . . . The Way of yin is devoid of anything that acts on its own” (2003, 166, 168).

From the Han period on, the hierarchical yin-yang/feminine-masculine analogy and yang-venerable/yin-base associations have permeated intellectual discourses, especially those concerning the wife’s role in gender relations. The relationship between husband and wife portrayed in later texts almost exclusively assumes this decidedly gendered form, as illustrated in “The Ghostly Wedding Nights.” The female ghost zhiguai romance tale also participates in perpetuating the subordination of yin and elevation of yang in that the ghost, as the female virgin, because of her untimely premarital death, has to rely on a living male to fulfill her social role—to be a wife. For the dead female soul to be able to rest underground, it must be married off.

Chinese people have long believed in the existence of ghosts, and the concept of marrying the ghost in zhiguai has deep cultural origins (see Campany 1991). Arranging marriages for the dead has been a custom in China since the eleventh century BCE, and is still practiced in some regions. The custom of arranging marriages between a dead soul and a living person is not so strictly gendered that the dead must be female and the living male. The ritual of Minghun or Youhun, for marrying the dead, first became popular in the West Zhou Dynasty (1097–771 BCE). For instance, Jiashang (marrying the dead) was recorded in a chapter, “Meishi (The Matchmaking),” in a supposedly third-century BCE ritual text, Zhouli (The Rites of the Zhou Dynasty), with the annotation by Zheng Kangcheng (127–200 CE)⁴ that it was “for those who died under nineteen years old” (Ruan 2009, 1581). Another detailed description of the possible ritual reference for these tales can be found in a less known Jin or Yuan Dynasty (1153–1368 CE) ritual manual called The Secret Burial Classic of the Great Han Dynasty (Dahan yuanling mizang jing). Its section “Minghun yili pian (Rite of Marrying the Dead),” translated by the zhiguai scholar Judith Zeitlin, offers the following rationale for the practice:

Drawing also on the yin-yang thought, this manual nevertheless justifies the marriage between two pure souls by the complementary, rather than hierarchical, nature of the yin and yang. Zeitlin regards marrying a female soul and marrying a male soul as not distinguished in their priority but equally prominent in ritual practices. In contrast, in zhiguai tales, references to marrying a female soul far outnumber those to marrying a male soul and, as discussed above, they are the only ghost marriage tales recorded in Sou shen ji. In fact, in Sou shen ji, those tales⁶ where the ritual framework is referred to exclusively belong to the ghost wife tale type, revealing a male-centered structuring perspective. In later collections of tales of ghost romances, ritual frameworks are usually less evident. Rather, later author-compliers often foreground either the great love between humans and ghosts that transcends life and death, the humanization of the female ghosts through reacquisition of human status, or the sexual parasitism and prey that a ghost temptress might inflict on the human male.

In Sou shen ji’s male-biased habit of conceptualizing the world, the ghost identity becomes eternally attached to the female other, the yin gender, while the self, the yang gender, can be dissociated from a ghostly connotation. As a result, in the zhiguai ghost romance tales, the male sex—representing and represented by the identity of the narrator—is invariably maintained as the absolute yang while the female sex is at the mercy of male imagination. The ghost marriage theme becomes gendered in male production, to the extent that it is culturally unimaginable to think of a male counterpart for the ghost Princess Ch’in-nü. This character remains nameless in that Ch’in-nü, meaning a girl/daughter of the State Ch’in, is only an indicator of her origin and gender. No named male would wait in the lonely underground world for twenty-three years before detaining a living passerby to set his soul at peace through sex. The reversal of a male ghost prince marrying a humble human female simply has never been employed.

What complicates the gender constructions in the example tale is that the concept of the yin and yang here does not necessarily or exclusively correspond to the paradigms of the feminine and the masculine. Despite his yang identity, the human male protagonist demonstrates characteristics and features that are usually attributed to the feminine personality and to women, such as passivity, inferiority, and disenfranchisement in power relations. In contrast, the female, despite being a kind of super-yin wherein her yin gender is compounded with her yin ghost identity, displays strong masculine attributes: she is active, superior, and enfranchised in terms of power. In “The Ghostly Wedding Nights,” Princess Ch’in-nü initiates in proposing sex, which—in the Chinese culture that forbids premarital sex—is often referred to using the euphemism of “becom[ing] husband and wife.” She retains the active part in sending Tao-tu away in a timely fashion and giving him the golden pillow. She comes from a royal origin and would have married into the same royal clan had she not died young. She thus defies her feminine categorization while simultaneously occupying it. In contrast, her husband Tao-tu remains passive, invited to the communion, offered sex, given the token, questioned by the queen, and ultimately recognized as the royal son-in-law. A poor man who has to beg for meals along his journey, he has little power before being assimilated into the royal family through his sex with the ghost princess. Yet he ultimately triumphs.

Returning to Holbek’s division of “masculine” and “feminine” tales, it becomes problematic to apply the two criteria he proposes when attempting to assign a tale gender to “The Ghostly Wedding Nights.” If we consider who plays the active role and enacts the central moves, the tale is feminine. If we judge by the combination of the main characters, it becomes a masculine tale, linking the lowborn young male (Hsin Tao-tu) to the highborn young female (Princess Ch’in-nü). The discrepancy occurs because the worldview Holbek posits assumes a fixed dichotomy of female and male that corresponds to the feminine and masculine. Such a mapping of a fixed relationship between sex and gender has been extensively contested by contemporary feminists. For example, as Judith Butler argues:

In our tales, the male protagonists’ gender appears more feminine than masculine; they are passive, powerless, inferior, marginalized, silent, and obedient. In contrast, the princesses are independent, active, superior, awe-inspiring, driven by unabashed sexuality, and manipulative, thus subverting conventional gender attributes ascribed to women in ancient patriarchal China. This seeming reversal of traditional stereotypes—female with masculine attributes and male with feminine attributes—further complicates the gender associations of the tale.

However, I would like to argue that it is precisely within this ambiguity that the implied male perspective can be detected. One of the reasons the gender of the tale is difficult to pin down is because male-centered aspirations are obscured in the conceptualization of a subversive supernatural princess, possessing ghostly subjectivity and agency. The problem is that her power is imagined by male narrators and exists only in an imaginary realm. Her desires are merely projections of those of human men. Her action comes from male fantasy, her speech prescribed by the male author, and her supernatural identity constructed in the interest of men. Thus, within the male-dominated zhiguai tradition, encounters with ghost princesses mainly project male desires. The gendered body of the ghost functions not only as a space for male literary imagination of the other but also as the location where patriarchal and heterosexual institutions perpetuate the fixation of the gender hierarchy.

Marrying the Ghost Princess: Whose Happy-Ever-After?

Tale 396, “The Princess of Sui-yang and Scholar T’an,” in Sou shen ji offers another example of the ghost princess/wife tale type. This story resembles the previous one in terms of narrative, persona, and theme. Yet many notable differences emerge. A further examination of the elements manifested in this tale highlights other crucial aspects of the male-centeredness in constructing the ghost princess zhiguai tale type. The tale recounts:

Unlike tale 395, in this narrative, the ghost princess of Sui-yang (who, like Princess Ch’in-nü, is known only by a place association, not a proper name) approaches the scholar T’an at midnight, instead of inviting him to her tomb-palace. The scene of their ghostly encounter is not the underground world but the human world. Rather than detaining the living male for their wedding nights, the princess of Sui-yang transgresses into the human world in her pursuit of marriage, seeking reattainment of a human body. She chooses to conceal her ghost identity and cohabits with scholar T’an with the only condition that she should not be looked at by lamplight. However, T’an breaks the taboo, so the princess leaves him. Yet, quite unexpectedly, what T’an receives for his breach is not punishment but excessive reward. Though he loses his ghost wife, he is left with a human male heir and a pearl robe, which brings him greater fortune and power.

T’an’s loss of a wife is compensated by the miraculous acquisition of a new social status as the royal son-in-law. In contrast, the princess recedes quickly from the tale; her fate is no longer significant, as long as her royal identity is recognized and safely transferred to the male human. In this light, the ghost princess functions as no more than a medium for her human husband to access the power embodied in her royal identity. At a deeper level, at the core of the traffic between the human man and the ghost woman lies the triangular relation among them and her patriarchal clan. The ghost princess’s role is to mediate between her husband and her family so as to facilitate a patrilineal transfer of power and “male homosocial desire,” to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term (1985, 21). The female sex of the ghost body becomes the signifier of social power. What matters fundamentally is not the sex, gender, or human/ghost aspects of her identity but the possibility of power and status acquisition for the male human that her social status ensures. For the male producer and consumer of zhiguai tales, the encounter with a ghost princess projects the coalition of the desires for sex and for power, thus exhibiting a concern for male well-being only.

Desires projected in tales often stem from a sense of lack. As Holbek observes of fairy-tale wish fulfillment, “The loss of the sources of satisfaction in actual life forces the desires into acceptance of compensation in imaginative tales” (1987, 268). Steven Swann Jones writes that fairy tales “help us to recognize and cope with typical problems and anxieties that we encounter in life. All of these issues may be regarded as of paramount interest to audience members who are trying to . . . answer life’s enduring and perplexing questions” (2002, 20). However, in Chinese ghost princess/wife tales, the compensation is imagined and the dreams and worldviews they project all stem from men’s perspectives. Echoing this view, Chinese scholar Yu Rujie argues that the (male) desires often transmitted into zhiguai narratives manifest because of what he designates as the “creation-compensated repression” symptomatic of Chinese literati. According to Yu Rujie, zhiguai, as a genre less censored than other high orthodox forms, is less constrained by conventions and morals. It is possible for heroes in zhiguai to transgress and transcend the social reality; hence, the genre provides “the best form for Chinese literati to write about sex and sexuality” (1991, 52). As the iconic Chinese cultural critic Lu Xun humorously notes, “The Spanish sing under the windows of young girls to win their love . . . However[,] scholars in our country . . . always say how the girls come to lure [men]” (1963a, 27). Viewed in this light, the ghost princess becomes an imaginary agent for Chinese literati to actualize real-life desires in a miraculous and effortless way.

In the Six Dynasties, arranged marriages, mostly within the same social class, dominated. Particularly in this era, society was stratified into two classes: the upper shi and the lower shu. The former were foremost in all aspects of life—politics, economy and culture—and their dominance in society formed a special political system of menfa zhengzhi (politics of prominent clans) (see Tian 1989, 330–362). In ancient Chinese society, marriage was decided based on social and political considerations rather than emotion and sexual drives. It then represented the most important way for one family to connect with another and enlarge its own power and influences. Thus, marriage between the upper shi class and the lower shu class was very rare. Many lower-class men could not marry at all due to social constraints. For some, marrying into a shi clan offered a shortcut to enter the power group. It compared positively to studying for more than ten years with the slim chance of passing the civil exams, as the story of scholar T’an shows. Thus, it is not surprising that all ghost wife zhiguai tales end with the living male getting promoted and his family line being accepted into the upper class. This change of the hero’s identity through marriage is critical to understanding the implied male perspective that shapes “The Princess of Sui-yang and Scholar T’an” as decisively masculine in concern and interest.

Yet this masculine tale departs from Holbek’s LYM-HYF definition in that the hero is no longer young. Scholar T’an is in his forties when the princess pays him the nocturnal visit. What we have here is marriage between a lowborn older male and the HYF. This misalliance, in terms of age difference, social distance, and life-death boundary, indicates a lopsided conceptualization of womanhood and manhood from a male perspective. Princess Sui-yang’s beauty is highlighted from the outset; she is “a young woman of some fifteen or sixteen years, beautiful and elegantly attired—utterly without equal in the empire.” Yet the tale relates nothing regarding what scholar T’an looks like. All we know is that he is forty years old (which is very old for marriage at his time), still unmarried (which can only be explained by his lower socioeconomical status), and reading Book of Odes (a collection of ancient poetry and songs with strong erotic connotations). To sum him up, scholar T’an is a poor old bachelor who badly needs and desires to get married, which renders him less an individual than a type, or a stereotype, of a special community of lower-class males excluded from the marriage institutions and power structures in the hierarchical society.

The ghost princess demonstrates directly oppositional qualities: she is young, beautiful, and rich. She is the one who initiates in the romance. She is also the one who is betrayed by her spouse. She is fertile and bears her old husband a male heir, the lack of which would be not only a shame but a disaster for a male within the patriarchal Chinese family system. She takes it as her responsibility to provide sufficient financial aid to her husband and boy child before she leaves the human world. She expects her living relatives will exhume her tomb to verify her marriage with scholar T’an, so she wisely takes a piece of his clothing as the evidence. She sacrifices herself and brings about the happily-ever-after life for her human husband and son. In other words, she represents the most idealized womanhood man can conceive, especially when opposed to the overshadowed image of her husband.

If, as shown in this tale, the ghost princess owns everything and her husband nothing at all, what then motivates the ghost princess to marry the scholar? What can she gain from the marriage? To what degree can the tale thereby appeal to a female reader? The first question directs us to another detail in this tale, that is, the literary hypothesis that female ghosts can reacquire a human identity through living with a human male. This idea is also developed from the yin-female and yang-male analogy. According to the traditional Chinese yin-yang cosmological thought, two fundamental elements, or energy (qi), are needed for the genesis of the universe and everything living in it: the yang qi and the yin qi. Again, to cite the Han philosopher Dong Zhongshu’s theory: “Yang qi is warm while yin qi is cold; yang qi gives while yin qi takes away; . . . yang qi gives life while yin qi kills” (2003, 166). As mentioned before, the ghost/female is the yin while the human/male the yang, so my conjecture follows that by living with the human male (the super-yang), the female ghost (the super-yin) will regain the yang qi, that is, the energy for generating a new life. However, to be able to assume human shape again, Princess Sui-yang has to take in enough yang qi without her ghost identity being discovered. This is why from the start she insists on a three-year period during which scholar T’an may not look at her by lamplight. The ghost princess, though superior to the scholar in other aspects, has to rely on his male yang qi to obtain her own human identity. This dependence of the ghost on the human projects and reinforces the hierarchical relations between female and male, wife and husband, as viewed from a male perspective. For this reason, the sense of fulfillment for the female ghost, which is imagined by the male zhiguai authors in the first place, is essentially denied through scholar T’an’s breach of the taboo. If the tales could be seen as dreams, they are the dreams of men only; and in these dreams, the happily-ever-after utopia is reserved for the heroes only, while the ghost princess/wife heroines invariably recede back into their dark world underground.

In this zhiguai tale type, it seems that death has freed women from social conventions and empowered them to act upon their own desires. Both Princess Ch’in-nü and Princess Sui-yang appear to be outside patriarchal regulation. They choose their partners, propose marriage, and relinquish their human partner at their own will. They are seen as dominant figures in these tales. However, the female sex never participates in the image-creating process. Women’s desires are merely projections of those of human men and their agency comes from male fantasy. Their speech is prescribed by the male author and their identity constructed in the interest of men. They are the creation-objects, and men are the creator-subjects. Their female subjectivity and agency are devoid of their own intentions; they are shadows reflecting the dreams of others. Within the male-dominated zhiguai tradition, women function primarily as a symbol, a substitute, and an idea. The world these tales depict is mainly for men; it is the world as it should be for them.