The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature by Judith T. Zeitlin (review)

Book Review 205 Journal of Chinese Religions 36 (2008) The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature JUDITH T. ZEITLIN. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. xiii, 296 pages. ISBN 978-0-8248-3091-5. US$57.00 hardcover. In this study of how female ghosts have been represented in Chinese narrative, poetry, and drama, Judith Zeitlin’s skills as researcher and reader of texts are fully on display. The result is a compact study of some 250 pages that distills an astonishingly broad array of sources into readings that are thoroughly grounded and brilliantly framed. The book consists of an introduction, four chapters, and “coda.” Zeitlin begins and concludes by noting that the tradition of representing phantom-heroines continues to reinvent itself in contemporary film and popular culture, but she focuses on the work of elite men of letters in the period 1580-1700. Thus her study of narrative focuses on the classical tale rather than the vernacular short story and novel, and on plays written by literati and performed privately rather than ghost operas and exorcist dramas performed publicly (p. 9). While earlier studies have mined ghost stories for evidence of religious beliefs and political sentiment, Zeitlin chooses instead to focus on issues of representation in a specific historical period, with attention to concerns governing relations between living and dead, broadly defined, and also cultural ideas about representation itself (pp. 10, 195). A discussion of terminology in the introduction focuses on hun 魂 as referring to a disembodied soul, which after death can return (huan 還) to haunt the living (p. 5). Given the marginal status of women in China’s patrilocal kinship system, their disembodied hun were more likely to haunt the living than those of men, one reason why Zeitlin focuses on ghost heroines, who vastly outnumbered their male counterparts in late imperial representations. Interest in literature about ghosts was abetted by publishers who produced compilations of ghost stories, playwrights who wrote southern dramas based on earlier ghost plays, the idealization of qing 情 (of which ghosts were thought to be an emanation), and an interest in figures associated with absence, melancholy, and loss after the fall of the Ming (pp. 6-7). Chapters are organized around representative examples of each genre—narrative, poetry, drama—with reference to cultural practices that clarify the literary representations and to the earlier tradition concerning ghosts. In chapter one (“The Ghost’s Body”), Zeitlin uses medical texts to explain why phantoms typically were imagined as female and depicted in erotic contexts (p. 14). What follows are extended readings of stories from the Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋 志異—“Lianxiang 蓮香” (Lotus Scent, pp. 17-25), “Wu Qiuyue 伍秋月” (Autumn Moon, pp. 25-28), “Qiaoniang 巧娘” (Ingenia, pp. 29-35), “Nie Xiaoqian 聶小倩” (pp. 35-37), and “Zhang Aduan 章阿端” (pp. 44-52)—each a tour-de-force of scholarly detective work and literary exegesis. “Lianxiang,” for example, is about a fox demon who assumes the role of physician and exorcist when her human lover manifests “ghost symptoms” after taking up with a beautiful young woman. The medical texts Zeitlin cites illuminate the fox’s diagnosis in the story, an example of how medical images of women and literary representations of 206 Journal of Chinese Religions female ghosts converged, each influencing the other. The other stories examined focus on “Male Potency and Ghostly Fertility” (“Qiaoniang,” “Nie Xiaoqian”), “Resurrection and Qing” (“Camelia,” “Ainu 愛奴”), and “The Ghost’s Corpse” (“Zhang Aduan”). Chapter two (“The Ghost’s Voice”) focuses on acoustic manifestations in poetry, beginning with the Nineteen Old Poems 古詩十九首 and instancing Tao Qian 陶潛 (365-427) as the first to give an inside view of death in poems written from the grave. Zeitlin also draws on Tang dynasty zhiguai 志怪 that include poems authored by ghosts, an example of her attention to interrelationships between genres (here poetry and classical narrative). The discussion moves from anonymous “auto-dirges” found in these narratives to Li He 李賀 (790-816/817), who created a ghostly lyrical style much imitated by later poets. A discussion of how poems by ghosts were codified by anthologists (Song to Qing) culminates in “Liansuo 連瑣,” a Liaozhai story that shows the influence of Li He’s ghostly style and illustrates how the ghost...