The Global White Snake by Liang Luo (review)

Liang Luo's new book, The Global White Snake, examines the migration and transformation of the White Snake legends in Mainland China, Japan, Korea, the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. Luo asks: "How should we understand the seemingly endless regenerative powers of the White Snake legends? What does their pervasive and long-lasting popularity suggest?" (p. 6). Interweaving historical contexts and textual analyses in chronological order, Luo scrutinizes and compares artistic oeuvres of the legends in various forms, such as xiqu, plays, opera, feature-length films, animations, novels, and fashion videos. This book makes a valuable contribution to exploring the global genealogy of the White Snake legends, especially when there is a stark contrast between the wide popularity of the legends in East Asia and the scarcity of relevant scholarly studies in English.

Chapter one introduces the main themes of the White Snake and the earliest versions of the legends in China. Luo deciphers the multi-directional transmigrations and reincarnations of the narrative, mainly through the lenses of gender and species, as well as media and politics. Luo traces the origin of the White Snake legends back to the ninth-century short story "Li Huang," and recognized the 1624 collection, Stories to Caution the World, compiled by Feng Menglong, as a fully established White Snake story. A summary of the White Snake framework is as follows: the male protagonist, Xu Xuan, comes across two beauties at West Lake: one dressed in white (Madame White), and one in green (Little Green). Xu is married to Madame White soon, but then Abbot Fahai discovers that the two women are transformed from a white snake and a green snake. After a series of chaotic incidents, Madame White is incarcerated under the Thunder Peak Pagoda by Fahai, and Xu becomes a monk. Taking the social, political, and cultural factors into account, Luo's book delves into the significant twists and turns this prototype has experienced.

Chapters two and three describe the developments of the White Snake legends in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Chapter two begins with two Anglophone versions adapted by Woodbridge, and Cloud. Though not the primary focus, these two versions transformed the legends into a love story by adding details of the characters' motives and values in each of their translations.

The legends were central to the popular culture in Shanghai. Focusing on "newness," the Shanghai entertainment industry reimagined the legends through technical innovations on stage, the emergence of female performers on the male-dominated stage, and intellectual debates about the legends' superstitious narratives and vulgarizing trends. Chapter three investigates how the 1924 collapse of the Thunder Peak Pagoda, a real-life incident, prompted modern reinterpretations of this iconic landscape and thus popularized a paradigm shift of the legends from a male to a female-oriented perspective. Lu Xun's 1924 essay, viewing the pagoda as a feudal oppressive symbol and thus celebrating the liberation of the White Snake, was especially influential for the PRC government.

Part two, including chapters four and five, probes into the retelling of the legends in an inter-Asian context during the Cold War. Chapter four analyzes three Japanese feature-length films. Ugetsu, a black-and-white film directed by Mizoguchi Kenji in 1953, epitomizes Japanese aesthetic traditions while expressing concerns for women's wartime trauma. Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yoren), directed by Toyoda Shiro in 1956, was a color film adapted from Hayashi Fusao's 1948 novel. The Tale of the White Serpent (Hokujaden) in 1958, recognized as Asia's first full-length color animation, targeted children and families in Japan and other Asian regions, as the production company Toei Animation was deeply influenced by Disney. As Luo points out, these three films "reveal the importance of a mediacentered approach in examining the White Snake legends in postwar Japanese cinema" (p. 20). Chapter five covers the Korean director Shin Sang-ok...