35 Supernatural Femme Fatales: The Women of Zhiguai Stories as Confucianist Archetypes and Subversions, Analyzed Through Feminist Theory

The Chinese zhiguai xiaoshuo 志怪小說, or “stories of the strange,” have long been a part of the Chinese cultural narrative. Dating back at least to the 4th century, with the Soushen ji 搜神記 anthology, they’ve served as a window into the religious beliefs, societal concerns, and everyday experiences of Chinese citizens over time. Although rudimentary at first (some of the Soushen ji stories were only a couple of sentences long), the zhiguai genre expanded over the years into a rich and well developed narrative. Starting in the late seventeenth century, the Qing dynasty author Pu Songling 蒲松龄 began amassing a collection of over 500 short form zhiguai stories in what would come to be published as Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異, or Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio for English readers. These stories, written and set in late imperial China, describe interactions between ordinary humans and ghosts, demons, foxes, animated corpses, and other supernatural entities. While each story differs from the others, when read together, certain clear themes begin to emerge between stories. These themes can even be observed in other zhiguai stories, of which there are many.

One of the most notable characters within the zhiguai genre is the alluring yet deadly woman who possesses supernatural abilities, whether she’s a ghost, demon, or fox spirit. This early iteration of the “femme fatale” archetype is usually a young woman of otherworldly beauty, whose appearance is enough to make men fall in love at first sight. While she may be graceful, poised, and elegant, the men she attracts soon find out she’s no ordinary human. Then, depending on the story, the unlucky man might either use his quick wits to escape, or meet his demise at her hands. If he’s lucky, however, she may find redemption through striving to achieve the Confucian ideal by becoming a filial wife to him. The redeemed supernatural woman may even take on more human qualities, like in “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag” from Strange Tales, where the ghost of a young woman who had originally attempted to seduce the protagonist and feed him to a demon eventually married him and bore him three human children.

Pu Songling wrote his works in a time when neo-Confucianism had risen and overtaken Buddhism as the dominant belief set in China, alongside Taoism. While Buddhism was the primary religion in China for a long time, and Confucianism was not always adopted, this essay deals primarily with stories written within the neo-Confucianist time period, and investigates how the women in these stories fit into or pushed back against a Confucianist and neo-Confucianist^[1] framework. Throughout this essay we will explore the ways in which depictions of supernatural women in zhiguai stories both reflect and subvert Confucian ideals, using aspects of feminist theory such as the dehumanization of women, intersectionality, and gender performance.

Confucian ideals were based on the goal of achieving a harmonious society in keeping with the traditions of old, and built upon the fundamental concepts of filial piety, ancestor worship, and loyalty. Under Confucianism, a woman was expected to be subservient to her husband and provide him with male heirs, remain sexually chaste and pure outside of marriage, and submit to men as the ultimate authorities. While not exclusive to Confucianism, a common belief in China was that of the yin and yang dualism. The woman, who was seen as embodying what is viewed as the inferior “Yin” energy, was submissive, yielding, calm, and reserved, and her place was within the home. Confucian ideology maintained that upholding a utopian state was more important than serving an individual’s needs, and when what was best for the state differed from what was best for the individual, the state should come first. In this line of thinking, minority classes were disproportionately affected. Whereas a well-educated, wealthy man could seek an education and land a job as a scholar-official after passing civil service exams, a woman’s only path in life was as the wife of a man, no matter her social standing.

This social framing of the woman as inherently separate from men, unique in disposition and role, adheres to the description of the alienation of women as a social class by men, laid out by Simone de Beauvior in her 1949 book The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe).^[2] Beauvoir describes how men create a mythos around women, framing them as essentially mysterious and unknowable, in order to ignore the issues women face and reinforce their place below men in the social hierarchy. Her work examines the idea that women are perceived as “other” and that they are “defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her.”^[3] Confucius himself often neglected to mention women at all in his writings, as Juliana Batista points out in her article “The Confucianism-Feminism Conflict: Why a New Understanding is Necessary.” While some scholars (like Batista) argue that this allows for an open modern interpretation of Confucianism which isn’t rooted in sexism, it remains true that sexism was a building block of Confucian and neo-Confucian imperial China. Confucius described in his texts an ideal man, the junzi 君子 (literally meaning nobleman or gentleman, but referring to one who upholds Confucian beliefs and practices). The Chinese characters forming the word are specifically gendered male. Confucius did not provide a female equivalent. In this way, he conforms to de Beauvoir’s concept of the “othering” of women, placing them into a category outside the default state of being (male), from which they can be more effectively ignored and subjugated by men.

The women of Pu Songling’s stories and other zhiguai are “othered” not only by their status as women, but also by their non-humanity. Chinese supernatural entities were often characterized by their ability to go between forms. Gods, demons, ghosts, foxes, snakes, and dragons could all appear as ordinary humans if they chose. Foxes, in particular, were treated as lustful and devious creatures, associated primarily with the feminine and capable of taking on human female form. The Chinese word for fox spirit, huli jing 狐狸精, has even come to mean “a seductive, loose, and cunning woman.”^[4] Foxes^[5] were treated especially cruelly in earlier stories, where they were often simply killed on sight. Despite observations that foxes were quite intelligent, and possessed a sense of self on par with that of humans, they were not afforded any sympathy. They were pests that needed to be eradicated. In later stories, foxes were still placed firmly below humans in the social hierarchy, but were offered redemption through romance or friendship with humans. In some stories, such as Pu Songling’s “The Golden Goblet,” fox society was depicted as dignified and refined, but mysterious. In “King of the Nine Mountains,” also by Pu Songling, a fox understandably seeks revenge after a human kills his entire family, simply for taking up lodgings in the human’s backyard. Another of Pu Songling’s stories, “Raining Money,” describes an elderly male fox spirit as being a well-studied gentleman, adept at harnessing Taoist magic. Several of Pu Songling’s male fox spirits, including the ones mentioned above, teach moral lessons to poorly behaved humans (the gentleman mentioned above conjures gold coins for his friend when asked, but later the illusory coins vanish and the fox rebukes his friend for being so greedy as to use him for financial gains).

However, it is notably only male foxes depicted in this way. Female foxes, on the other hand, are more lustful and temperamental creatures, driven by passion. Each story depicting a female fox spirit is first and foremost a story about romance. Even Pu Songling’s “Hsiang-Ju’s Misfortunes,” which initially describes a friendship between a young human boy and fox spirit girl, ends with them married many years later, and her as the archetypical dutiful wife. The female fox spirit, it seems, exists only in partnership with a man. She cannot exist on her own, bestow moral lessons or play clever tricks, without ending up as the object of a man’s desire.

While the fox spirit is only a fictional category of person, their depiction in literature is disconcertingly analogous to prejudice against ethnic minorities. Foxes are openly viewed as lesser, often blamed for things going wrong, and assumed to have certain vices (deceit, trickery, lustfulness). While fox women are described as beautiful, they’re still less than human women; a fox woman is ashamed to admit what she really is to her husband. When viewed in this light, fox women experience a kind of intersectional discrimination. First coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality refers to the ways in which someone’s combined social, ethnic, and political identities create different modes of privilege and discrimination. Crenshaw used this primarily to describe the unique experiences Black women face in a racist and sexist society, and it’s also a useful framework for looking at the ways fox women were treated in zhiguai narratives separately from male foxes or human women. While Confucian society was undoubtedly sexist, it afforded certain privileges for human women. Since women were seen as more delicate, fragile, and pure, they were given greater protection, and expected to do less physical labor.

Well-behaved men were to be gentle and chivalrous around them, and they were given fine clothes and luxuries. Of course, these privileges were primarily given to middle class and wealthy women, and the poor could not afford the same treatment. Socioeconomic class is another facet of intersectionality, and there are certainly parallels to be drawn between lower social classes and fox spirits.

A fox woman, of course, did not receive the same delicate treatment that human women did, regardless of her economic class. While she might be just as attractive as a human woman, if not more so, she lacked the innate purity a virgin young human woman did. Simply by virtue of being “other,” she was already contaminated, and there was no sense in treating her so gently. Her lustful nature and cunning deceit were assumed to be inherent traits of hers, and there was no innocence worth preserving. She wasn’t treated quite like a male fox spirit either, as she was by nature inferior to men. While the symmetric Confucian “friend to friend” relationship was possible between a male fox and a male human (as seen in “Raining Money”), relationships between men and women were inherently asymmetric. A fox woman could hardly expect to be educated the same way a fox man might, as schooling wasn’t seen as a woman’s place. In this way, the fox woman was beneath both the fox man and the human woman, insectionally oppressed.

The fox spirit was not the only type of woman imagined by zhiguai authors, although she was quite prominent. Snakes, like foxes, often took on the form of beautiful women, ensnaring men and taking their money or their lives. It was less common for a snake to live happily ever after with a human man; in one early white snake story a man discovered his modest wife of many years was really a snake and was so overcome with anxiety that he died some time after. Although dragons and snakes shared many characteristics in Chinese mythos, the dragon women (from “The Tale of Liu Yi and its Analogues”) were more likely to be polite and filial brides who got their happy endings. Ghosts and demons, living corpses (in early Chinese folklore, it was thought that human souls were two-part: the heavenly hun 魂 and the earthly po 魄, and after death they would part ways. If the po found its way back into the body after death, it would move around stiffly, blindly chasing people down for their energy), and other creatures from beyond might all take the form of a woman at some point or another. Some sought to allure human men with their beauty and charms, whether as a potential partner or simply a means to an end. Some of the dead had unfinished business, like Madame Zheng of Hong Mai’s Yijian zhi 夷堅志; others, like the girl from Pu Songling’s “Living Dead,” were simply corpses animated by impulse. Although similarities run through the various accounts of supernatural women, there’s one very notable difference: the ultimate fate of these women.

In Pu Songling’s “The Painted Skin,” a young girl is discovered to be a demon (or some sort of hideous creature, the story is not explicit about what category of monster she is) wearing an intricately painted skin suit, and merely posing as a girl in need. The story switches from feminine pronouns, when the girl is wearing the painted skin, to neutral (it) pronouns when the girl is out of the skin. The girl, who lies and manipulates a man before eventually ripping out his heart, is not awarded any sympathy  and is ultimately captured and killed by a Taoist priest. Whether the girl’s true identity was closer to that of the neutrally-gendered monster form or the feminine painted form is unclear from the story.^[6]

This next section compares “The Painted Skin” girl to Little Beauty from another of Pu Songling’s works, “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag.” In this story, Little Beauty is the ghost of a young woman who’s captured by a demon and forced to seduce and kill men so the demon can harvest their life energy. When Little Beauty encounters the story’s protagonist, the honest and chivalrous Ning, she’s unable to entice him with sexual favors or gold, and the two escape the demon’s clutches together with the help of an old man with magical abilities. After Ning gives Little Beauty’s remains a proper burial, she remains in ghostly form at his family home, and after several years eventually marries him and bears children for him. The story claims that visitors couldn’t tell there was anything ghostly about her, and she’s even able to eat and drink food like a living person.

These two women have drastically different fates, as well as different narrative treatments. Not all of Pu Songling’s morally upright women are given happy endings (in “Grace and Pine,” the kind fox spirit Grace loses her entire family to a natural disaster), but what separates them from their less friendly counterparts is their ability to marry men and fulfill a housewife’s duties, achieving the Confucian standard for a woman and securing themselves favor with the heavens.

Judith Butler’s theory of gender as something that is performed, rather than something innate or biological, fits neatly with this treatment of well-behaved and ill-behaved women within zhiguai stories. The women of these stories are awarded or denied their womanhood not through any immutable characteristics they possess, but through their performance in accordance with or against a Confucian understanding of feminine virtue. Through the lens of performance theory, there are no fox-spirit women, no ghost women, no snake women or dragon women, until they make themselves palatable and subservient to human men. It is only then that they become women, in the eyes of society. When the filial and righteous young women break free of the otherness of being supernatural entities through this performance, they find themselves othered instead by their newfound womanhood. Their performance, according to Butler’s framework, is not automatic or mechanical, but rather driven by the societal expectations they must strive to meet to be seen as women at all. For the unlucky young woman who exists in the transitory space between beasts and men (as fox spirits in particular are thought to occupy, but one could view any “lower” supernatural being (i.e. not a deity or an immortal) as occupying), she can either accept her fate as less than human, or cultivate herself into a perfect wife and instead be less than men.

What motivates her to voluntarily submit herself to a man, as so many of these women do, especially when it means giving up great power? A fox spirit, possessed of uncanny intelligence and a harness of magical energy, is surely better off on her own than forced to give up her abilities, staying in a human form forever, and bearing human children at home while her husband goes out and works? Butler’s theory of gender performance theory explains that our desires often originate not from some innate place but from social norms, and that culturally imposed ideas about what’s proper supersede individual desires, and even prevent one from living a “viable life” in accordance with personal needs and wants. While the good Confucian housewife role might be a downgrade from free-roaming, seductive fox or enchanting otherworldly ghost, we all have a desire for social approval, and in such a restrictive society the avenue towards that approval was extremely narrow for a woman. The uniform, collective Confucian utopia depended on the exploitation of minorities to bear the brunt of the workforce at the lowest rungs of society, and the generational stress and trauma from this oppression made it only easier for the wealthy, male elite to maintain their position of superiority.

Of course, zhiguai stories were overwhelmingly often written by men, and the women they described were subject to the same othering and mystification described by de Beauvoir. It’s easy for a male author, desiring a beautiful and subservient supernatural woman, to tell a story where such a woman wants nothing more than to please a human man. After all, if he’s happy living up to his Confucian ideal, why shouldn’t she? If he can’t imagine being in her shoes, that’s simply because he’s a man, and women are inherently unknowable to him. The supernatural woman, who was a creation of man, is subject to men only because her entire world is. She represents male desires, but also male fears. For every woman who sheds her inhuman form to live happily ever after as a faithful wife, there’s another who vanishes into the night, leaving only dead men in her wake. Such a repressive society as Confucian and neo-Confucian imperial China could only attempt to force down female expression and variety, demanding only obedient and respectful housewives. The woman who dares to challenge her role poses a direct threat to male superiority. The irresistibly beautiful, yet dangerous woman from another world is in direct opposition to the soft and yielding wife, a sharp edge stumbled on unexpectedly. She shakes and rattles the fragile, narrowly constructed Confucianist utopia, asserting her presence instead of staying quiet.

Bibliography

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