38 Sex and Chastity as told by Female Demons in Zhiguai Tales

The 1987 Hong Kong horror romance movie, A Chinese Ghost Story, which gained a cult following and was responsible for being the breakout film for both star actors Leslie Cheung and Joey Wong, was based off a Qing dynasty short story titled “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag.” This story was a part of Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異), the writer’s collection of anecdotes and zhiguai tales, which are stories about strange occurrences and anomalies. In the movie, Joey Wong plays Nip Siu-sin, a ghost at the temple who the main character falls in love with. This film, like other popular Hong Kongese movies of this time such as Mr. Vampire (1985) and Green Snake (1993), all feature seductive female demons. These demons, however, do not only exist in recent media, but also in the strange tales from the hundreds of years before. Yet, the zhiguai tales of the past deviate from the present by centralizing marriage and chastity in their stories, often to offset the sexuality of women which is portrayed as threatening. Through the texts “The Painted Skin,” Madam White Is Kept Forever under Thunder Peak Tower, “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag,” and “The Tale of Miss Ren” this essay will examine late imperial China’s anxieties surrounding sexual women and explore how these stories illustrate marriage and chastity as a solution to these fears.

Confucianism and the rise of neo-confucianism during the latter end of imperial China deeply influenced and almost mandated the ways in which society functioned; as a result, women in imperial China were placed into positions of subordination and were also conceptualized as lesser forms of human, the man being the ideal. Although it may not have been Confucious’s intention to consider women as inferior, “By neglecting to define the role of women, Confucius (Kongzi, 孔子) allows those interpreting the texts to belittle women.”^[1] The ways in which this philosophy was interpreted during this long period of time constructed an environment where women were suppressed. One of Confucious’s most well known philosophies is that of the five relationships, and the only one that mentions a woman is the relationship of a husband and wife. Moreover, this is a relationship of hierarchy which relegates the status of wives below their husbands. In addition, Confucius was a strong believer in the importance of family and placed a lot of emphasis on having as many children as possible. As stated by Thomas William Whyke and Yu Zhongli: “Chinese women were identified primarily as daughters, sisters, and future mothers—categories that imply their gender while emphasizing their obligations within the family-kinship network.”^[2] (Whyke and Yu 2020, 97) The weight of family shaped society in which the roles that women occupied overshadowed their individual self.

Outside of the marital relationship, as in many other cultures in the world, boys were, and still are, preferred to girls. Additionally, the Chinese philosophy of yin and yang, two opposite forces that are meant to be in balance, placed women among yin which encompassed things like darkness, night, cold, and passivity. In contrast, men were in the yang category, which is associated with light, daytime, heat, and strength. Despite the intention for yin and yang to be equal and in balance, women being yin associated them with being weaker. Furthermore, with the introduction and popularization of Buddhism in China came the concept of karma and rebirth, and this ideology fortified the concept that women were worth less than men. The teachings and popular stories that incorporate these concepts enforce the idea that men could be punished for wrongdoings by being reborn into women, or that through successful cultivation, women could be reborn into men in the next life. These attitudes further ingrained the subjugation and suppression of women, and the lack of authority that women had in imperial China is evident.

This essay explores the themes of sex and chastity through female demons in imperial China’s supernatural tales. The disfiguration of women’s bodies and their ability to change form as female demons presents these characters as “dangerously outside the limits of male authority and control.”^[3] Female demons do not fit the standards for what is expected of human women, not only in terms of bodily expectations but also moral. By existing beyond the bounds of male authority, these female demons are able to pursue sex “outside the purposes of heteronormative marriage and reproduction.”^[4] It is their subversive bodies that provide them the ability to be sexual without being married, and it is their choice and their freeness to make these choices that makes them especially threatening and frightening to the systems set by male dominated society. Through female demons, expressions of sexual behavior are displayed, something that human women are not afforded in these tales.

“The Painted Skin” exposes the anxieties that men in late imperial China had about sexual women and how these fears were resolved through devout wives. The “girl” in the story is a beautiful teenage runaway and the same night that she meets Wang, “they slept together, and for several days he kept her hidden in his study without anyone knowing that she was there.”^[5] Merely the description of the fugitive girl as young and beautiful situates her as essentially irresistible, and even though it defies the customs and attitudes around sex, it makes their quick relationship almost logical. Their situation, however, is threatening because it was perfectly acceptable, and arguably encouraged (because Confucianism advocated for having many children) for men who were wealthy enough to have concubines. The fact that the young girl was kept as a secret produces a message about the fears of unlawful adultery. When her true identity is revealed as a demon, it can be assumed that she willingly slept with Wang as a way to cultivate herself. Both women and demons were thought of as having yin energy and female demons were thought to sleep with men as a way to extract their yang energy in order to cultivate themselves into stronger beings. This demonic interpretation of sex “demonstrates that sexuality was heavily dependent on virtue for legitimacy.”^[6] Uncustomary sexual relationships were conceptualized as dangerous and the intent was placed on women. This tale warns against nonconformitive sex and depicts women as dangerous for pursuing sex on their own resolution.

Through the faithfulness of Wang’s wife, “The Painted Skin” conveys a wife’s almost unnatural commitment to her husband as a form of salvation. This story was written in the Qing dynasty and during this period, “The emblematic feature of female sexuality was engraved in two opposite cultural symbols: the chaste and the licentious.”^[7] “The Painted Skin” includes both extremes and portrays the triumph of a loyal wife over a demonic seductress. The wife is sent to beg a mad Daoist to help bring her husband back to life and he questions her, “There’s plenty of fine men in this world for you to marry! Why bother bringing him back to life?”^[8] She abides by the expectations of the time and despite her late husband having committed adultery with a teenage girl, she has no plans to remarry and remains steadfast in her own faith. She goes to unbelievable lengths, withstanding both verbal and physical abuse and in a final display of her devotion, she goes so far as to eat the Daoist’s “great glob of phlegm.”^[9] Her efforts, however, are successful and when she regurgitates the madman’s spit, it transforms into a new heart, saving her husband. The wife’s extraordinary devotion results in the salvation of Wang and serves a representation of the power of her commitment to their marriage. Through Wang’s wife’s exemplary behavior and by saving her husband, “The Painted Skin” presents a devoted wife as the ultimate standard and how she can ward off the dangers of sexual unmarried women.

Feng Menglong’s Madam White Is Kept Forever under Thunder Peak Tower illustrates the fear held towards widows who want to and do remarry through the snake demon’s active seduction of Xu Xuan and the misfortune that he suffers after becoming entangled with her. When the male protagonist first sees Madam White, she is dressed in white, the mourning color, and she explains to Xu Xuan that the reason for her travel was to sweep the grave of her late husband.^[10] During this time in China, it was expected that widows remained unmarried or that they followed their husbands by committing suicide.^[11] Madam White, however, is unlike those ideal widows and her pursuit of Xu Xuan is portrayed as methodical, cunning, and dangerous. This can be attributed to her demon identity as she operates outside the confines of normal human women. Because Madam White is a snake demon, she has the agency to woo those who admires. Conversely, her unconcealed objectives further vilify her and perpetuate an attitude of hostility towards remarried widows.

The author, Feng Menglong, injects his own thoughts about the pair’s early interactions, stating that the lady borrowing Xu Xuan’s umbrella was, “an excuse for continuing the association”^[12] and that his concession was “volunteering to continue the relationship and inviting trouble.”^[13] Madam White’s active charming of Xu Xuan is framed as something to be warned against and foreshadows impending misfortune. This later ensues as Xu Xuan is repeatedly captured for crimes that his wife is behind. Xu Xuan’s fatal attraction to the snake demon and Madam White’s rejection of the standards for widows is depicted as a pathway to doom.

The ending of the story clearly defines Madam White’s actions as wrong and presents her punishment as fair. This tale of the white snake demon by Feng Menglong finishes with a Buddhist monk named Fahai reverting the “evil spirit” back to her true form and trapping her underneath a pagoda. Fahai in this tale is often interpreted as the voice of authority, whether that be state or religious authority. His involvement and the punishment he delivers is conveyed as an intervention from authorities above to enforce correct relations. Even though Madam White is faithful to Xu Xuan throughout their marriage, the fact that she remarried as a widow is a sign of her failure to uphold her chastity. She pleads her case to the abbot saying that she unexpectedly met Xu Xuan and she states that she was “unable to control my desires.”^[14] Her loss of control is not only over her feelings but also her chastity, and this violation of her promise to her late husband and initiation of her new relationship is depicted as unforgivable. Fahai’s capture of Madam White at the end of Madam White Is Kept Forever under Thunder Peak Tower relates to the reader the fears about women and specifically widows, who were not able to regulate their desires and were therefore dangerous.

Pu Songling’s “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag” examines the conception of supernatural female beings as calculating seductresses through Little Beauty. The male protagonist of this tale, Ning Caichen, rests at a temple during his travels and on his first night there a young and beautiful girl comes to his room and says, “I want to make love with you.”^[15] Her directness is shocking to Ning and while she is established as a mysterious seductress, her initiation and vocalization of wanting to be together is framed as off putting. Following her failed attempts, Little Beauty explains her predicament as a ghost forced to seduce men by an evil spirit and explains her methods of bewitching. The first is when “a man agrees to make love to me, in which case I secretly prick him in the foot with an awl so that he falls unconscious and his blood can be drawn off for the evil spirit to drink.”^[16] Little Beauty’s revelation of how she seduces, kills, and presents energy to the evil spirit expresses the fear about female demons using men for their yang. Typically thought of in a Daoist context, while there existed good methods to achieve immortality like meditation and breathing exercises, more sinister methods included sleeping with men to obtain their energy, which would subsequently lead them to their death. Although it is revealed that Little Beauty is not a seductress out of her own desires, the portrayal of sexual women as demons who use sex for their own gain still establishes a negative connection between the two.

Little Beauty exposes her method of seduction as a goal that is devoid of love and even lust; this reveals that “anxiety about sex with the alien shifts from the violation of boundaries by means of illusion and deception to male depletion and female gain.”^[17] This idea of female demons using sex with human men merely as a calculation to gain immortality displays the fear of women manipulating men in sexual contexts for their own benefit, which also ends with the demise of the male. The acquisition of men’s yang for the purposes of cultivation additionally exposes concerns “about women becoming-man, thus subordinating man.”^[18] Because women were viewed as a lower form of human, good karmic retribution could reward them with being reborn as a man, or, as revealed in the Buddhist religious text, The Lotus Sutra, if they had great ability women could cultivate themselves into higher beings, men. “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag” expresses the larger society’s anxieties about women using sex as a loveless tool to cultivate and transform themselves into men, which would thereupon either mean the death or subordination of men.

Through “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag,” Pu Songling demonstrates the influence of locations and how marriage can rescue individuals from deviance. Setting in zhiguai tales is essential, and similar to this story, many of the strange and supernatural events occur in places like inns and temples. These spaces can be defined as transitory and temporary locations where it is somewhat logical that these unusual occurrences could take place. In contrast, the home is conceptualized as safe and secure. The transference of Little Beauty from the temple to Ning’s home unveils a change in her own character as she transforms from a perilous seductress to a talented and archetypal wife who even gives birth to a son. After integrating with Ning’s family, Little Beauty undergoes changes. Ning’s mother begins to allow Little Beauty to stay inside the house instead of sleeping outside, she begins to eat human food over time, and when Ning questions her newfound bravery to the magic bag he received from the Yan to ward off evil spirits, she says, “After all this time, I have absorbed a lot of your life force, so I am not afraid of it anymore.”^[19] Little Beauty’s time in the home and her marriage to Ning produces a change in the young woman and through this she transforms from nonhuman to human. Additionally, her time spent in a domestic setting also changes the way that others view and treat her, as conveyed through the change in the mother’s attitude. The anxieties about sexual women are diminished as Little Beauty becomes a chaste wife and fears about women subordinating men are erased as she becomes an obedient wife. This tale illustrates the existence within the home and a proper marriage as a method of saving women and also soothes men’s dread about women choosing and initiating sex.

Fox spirits in Chinese literature and culture are typically viewed as exceptionally beautiful, seductive, cunning, and lustful women. Yet, in the early stories about foxes, they mainly appeared in the form of men. During the pre-Qin era, fox spirits were mostly understood as similar to animals and they were not difficult to kill. During the Han dynasty, the imagery of the nine-tailed fox arose, and foxes were seen as both demonic and virtuous. In Six Dynasties, the thought around foxes changed, and this is most popularly explained in Guo Pu’s Xuanzhong ji #111:

“Foxes at fifty years of age can transform into women. At one hundred they can become beautiful women or spirit mediums. Some of them become handsome men and have intercourse with women. They can know of affairs a thousand li away, and they are skilled at black magic and [other] demonic arts and can thus delude people and make them lose their senses. At a thousand years of age they attain communication with heaven and become celestial foxes.”^[20]

This reveals the changing attitudes around foxes, and emphasizes femininity, sex, tricks, and association with witchcraft. As the fox tradition progressed it became further entrenched with the conception of vixens who are sexually available women who “embody sex as as a psychological and physical danger in itself.”^[21] Most tales do not tell of the sexual acts that occur, and it is instead the women’s availability and the depletion of the male which happens afterwards that is a threat.

While popular thought imagines fox spirits as lustful women who liaisons with result in death, Shen Jiji’s “The Tale of Miss Ren,” although containing some typical attributes of foxes, ultimately conveys the conservation of chastity as exceptional and humanizing. Miss Ren states that she is “from a line of entertainers. Among my sisters and cousins there are many mistresses and concubines. Thus I know the gay quarters of Chang’an very well.”^[22] The gay quarters of Chang’an here refer to a district in the Tang Dynasty, the period in which this story was written, that was “staffed by high-class and very expensive courtesans.”^[23] This revelation about Miss Ren’s past and her connections to the entertainment realm is similar to typical fox spirits because they share an association with prostitution. Furthermore, Miss Ren appears to have ties to magic, as she makes the girl she procures for Wei Yin sick “which neither acupuncture nor medicine could alleviate”^[24] and she later instructs Zheng to sell a horse for an unreasonably high price, somehow knowing that the buyer would have no choice.^[25] Her use of magic for her personal use signifies a closeness with the common idea of foxes.

Miss Ren, however, deviates from the vixen archetype through her chastity. Zheng, the poor man who fell for the beautiful Miss Ren, discovers she is a fox spirit and still begs to see her again, to which she responds, “But I’m not like that. If you won’t despise me, I’ll wait on you hand and foot forever.”^[26] She insists on her differentiation from other foxes, knowing that others find her kind “repugnant”, and it is her declaration of her obedience that she believes will set her apart from the rest. Later, Zheng’s wealthy cousin named Wei Yin comes to see Miss Ren, whose beauty he finds incredulous, and he attempts to rape her to which she resists so furiously that “she was sweating as if drenched in rain.”^[27] Wei Yin only stops after she reminds him that she is all his poor cousin has and repeats to him all the success his life has seen. This scene portrays Miss Ren’s astound resistance and she also rejects the stereotype of foxes as sexually available and lustful. Additionally, her words of Wei Yin’s achievements and the friendship that they develop hints that perhaps she would rather be with him, yet her steadfast commitment to Zheng will not allow it. The author of the tale even comments at the end, “To be accosted and not lose her chastity, to follow one man into death—even among women of today there are those who could not measure up to her.”^[28] Shen Jiji’s praise of Miss Ren centralizes her devotion and humanizes her to the point that she is elevated above human women.

The author says that Miss Ren followed Zheng into death, and her end is illustrated as devastating and unwarranted like some of the other female ghosts that have been examined. Against her wishes and only because of the urges of Zheng and Wei Yin, Miss Ren follows Zheng on his journey to his new post, where she runs away from a dog in her fox form but is ultimately killed. Unlike other female demons like the one in “The Painted Skin” who gets beheaded or the white snake demon who gets trapped underneath a pagoda, Miss Ren is buried and mourned after, and her death is depicted as a tragedy. The humanizing properties of her chastity and her devotion is what posits her as undeserving of her end despite her fox identity. The tragic light of Miss Ren’s death raises her above the fox spirit status, and this is due to her exceptional devotion and the uplifting of chastity described in this tale.

While this essay’s focus is to inspect zhiguai tale’s warnings against sexual women, the topic of male lust remains largely undiscussed. At the end of Madam White Is Kept Forever under Thunder Peak Tower, Fahai recites a poem to future generations: “Be advised! Do not abandon yourselves to lust;” and states that Xu Xuan was “a victim to his lust.”^[29] It is obvious that the monk had qualms about unrestrained desire and uplifts this as the focal point of his warning. Moreover, in “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag,” the other men in the temple meet their fates because of desire, either for the ghost girl or for gold. It appears then, that these tales’ main lesson is to caution men about desire, however, this is only supplementary. While “sexuality was dangerous to the Confucian order because it was an irresponsible and indulgent form of escapism,”^[30] it is the women that suffer as a result. Take the first example of “The Painted Skin,” in which Wang is undoubtedly a lustful man. Although he does die, it is only temporary. He is brought back to life without remembering what happened while the demon girl was executed without hope to return and his wife is forced to live with the memory of her humiliating actions. As for Xu Xuan, who is called out by Fahai for his overindulgence, he lives the rest of his days as a monk whereas his wife remains trapped underneath the pagoda. It is true that men’s lust is constructed as dangerous and something to control, yet, it is women’s sexuality and caution against marrying morally unsuitable women that is highlighted in these stories.

Imperial China was impacted hugely by Confucian thought, which aided in shaping society to favor men through the centrality of family and pushed women into roles without individual identities. Other philosophy and religion further entrenched the idea of women as secondary through the conception of women being the lesser form of human. Pu Songling’s “The Painted Skin” alerts readers about the dangers of engaging with women unlawfully and through Wang’s wife’s admirable actions, he relates devout wives to saviors. Feng Menglong’s Madam White Is Kept Forever under Thunder Peak Tower cautions against widows who seek remarriage, and portrays Madam White’s punishment as a just response to her loss of sexual control. “The Magic Sword and the Magic Bag” illustrates the common anxieties around female demons using sex as a way to cultivate themselves, revealing fears around women controlling choice around sex and benefiting from it at the downfall of men. Furthermore, this story also conveys the importance of the home and presents marriage as humanizing. Fox spirits are popularly thought of as seductive trickster women, and although the fox in “The Tale of Miss Ren” used to be an entertainer and knows magic, she is different from the rest of her kind because of her chastity. Shen Jiji portrays chastity and devotion as honorable qualities, which is why her death is observed as a tragedy and not as warranted. Even though zhiguai stories also warn men not to give into their desires, they predominantly exhibit the apprehension that imperial China held for sexual women and how marriage and chastity were implemented in these tales to solidify them as honorable and righteous qualities.

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