Ghosts Seeking Substitutes: Female Suicide and Repetition

In late imperial Chinese ghost tales, the victims of certain kinds of untimely death, including some methods of suicide, become ghosts who seek out mortals to take their places. If such a ghost can incite another to die by the same means that she died, then she will be freed from suffering as a ghost and can be reborn. They and their replacements are often, but are not exclusively, female. Responsibility for the suicides in which the ghosts are involved varies from story to story, and may be ambiguous: the ghosts may be portrayed as essential causes of suicide, or as taking advantage of deaths that would have happened in any case. The seeking of substitutes may be portrayed as primarily the independent action of the ghost, or as sanctioned by other sources of authority. Commonly there is more than one cause for a particular death, with human despair and ghostly influence compounding one another.

The ghost of a suicide seeking a substitute is terrifying largely because of the expansion of personal vengeance to general malevolence. A wronged ghost who takes revenge on the living person who wronged him or her, the more common and ancient figure, can be a force of terrifying violence, but that violence is contained by equations of moral justice and injustice. One of the central organizing concepts of the Chinese imaginary cosmos is bao, repayment or retribution, which may take the form of either heavenly or personal repayment of past good and evil deeds. Essential to the idea of bao are equivalence of original deed and consequence (whether in the form of "an eye for an eye" or monetary or other exchange) and personal (or familial) responsibility for deeds. The relationship involves a specific and finite number of individuals, and once a debt has been repaid in full, bao comes to an end. The ghost seeking a substitute, however, wreaks destruction on unconnected strangers. The new death is repetition, but not repayment, and thus the story has no ending. An initial act of violence reproduces itself indefinitely, apparently beyond the control of moral authority.

Rather than moral justice, the seeking of substitutes is closer to ideas of death pollution or contagion, which contaminates others based on proximity rather than whether they deserve its ill effects. Pollution, too, can reproduce itself.¹ In some ways substitute-seeking is even more frightening, because it is not restricted to the places near the corpse or the moments after death, and thus is a form of pollution without clear limits in space and time.

The idea of ghosts seeking substitutes both creates and controls horror. Unjust or unclean deaths not only leave traces, but reproduce themselves indefinitely. The terror of all ghosts is often based on the fear that they will pull us over the same border parting the living from the dead that they violate themselves, and these ghosts do exactly that. Death, especially suicide, can come to prey on an individual from an external source. At the same time, even a horrifying explanation may be less frightening than inexplicable death. Placing the cause of suicide outside the individual, the family, and even the human world averts attention from possible internal causes: the flaw rests not in this individual or household, but in another one, beyond the narrative horizon of the story.

The means of death believed to produce this kind of ghost are hanging (as suicide), drowning (sometimes a suicide), and death in childbirth. These ghosts are an acknowledgment that certain kinds of death do not simply destroy the body, but malform the soul as well.² Within this category of unclean deaths, I will focus on the suicides (thus mainly the hanged ghosts), with the other kinds of substitute-seeking ghosts as comparison, because suicide is the most psychologically and culturally complex case. Motive is as crucial as manner of death: the woman who dies to protect her chastity almost never becomes such a ghost,³ but the one who dies for the sake of her personal grievances against her husband or parents-in-law does. It is not obvious that these...