The Perturbed Self

Gender and History in the Late Nineteenth-century Ghost Stories in China and Britain

Mengxing Fu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000431315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By comparison of late nineteenth-century ghost stories between China and Britain, this monograph traces the entangled dynamics between ghost story writing, history-making, and the moulding of a gendered self.

Associated with times of anxiety, groups under marginalisation, and tensions with orthodox narratives, ghost stories from two distinguished literary traditions are explored through the writings and lives of four innovative writers of this period, namely Xuan Ding (??) and Wang Tao (??) in China and Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit in Britain. Through this cross-cultural investigation, the book illuminates how a gendered self is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets are brought into this construction. It also ventures to sketch a common poetics underlying a "literature of the anomaly" that can be both destabilising and constructive, subversive, and coercive.

This book will be welcomed by the Gothic studies community, as well as scholars working in the fields of women's writing, nineteenth-century British literature, and Chinese literature.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188223-1

In times of peace, humans and ghosts live apart, but in times of chaos like ours, humans and ghosts live together. 太平之世，人鬼相分，今日之世，人鬼相雜.

—Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574–1646)¹

In the Ming dynasty Chinese writer Feng Menglong’s eerie ghost story “Yang Siwen Meets an Old Acquaintance in Yanshan”, a former Northern Song official, Yang Siwen, is stranded in the now Jurchen capital Yanshan and encounters there amongst other traces of the past the most emblematic of the fallen Southern Song dynasty: a female revenant. The revenant turns out to be Lady Zheng, the wife of Yang’s sworn brother Han Sihou, who had killed herself to preserve the honour of her husband when captured by a Jurchen marshal during the turmoil of the dynastic fall. If the revenant Lady Zheng haunting the ghost-plagued Yanshan serves as an embodiment of violent historical rupture, then her following reunion with her husband Han Sihou in Yanshan stages a reunion between a traumatic past and a guilt-laden present, whose longing for each other seems to be brought to a final fruition.

Yet, Feng’s story offers no such romantic resolution, for the husband, now a Southern Song diplomat, soon breaks his promise to be loyal to the deceased wife when he returns to the south with the woman’s ashes. Dumping the ashes to the Yangtze River, he marries a beautiful widow whose husband had also died in the trans-dynastic turmoil. Here the melancholic tone of the story turns suddenly macabre, when Lady Zheng’s mourning poem for herself is heard sung by a boatman on the Yangtze River:

With whom can I speak of the past?

In silence, I shed tears of blood.

When is the saddest moment of all?

The hour when dusk sets in.

I gaze from the tower and pace around.

Who knows the pain in my heart?

Would that I fly with the wild geese home

While south of the Yangzi spring is in bloom!

往事與誰論？無語暗彈淚血。何處最堪憐？腸斷黃昏時節。倚樓凝望又徘徊，誰解此情切？何計可同歸雁，趁江南春色.²

The poem appeared earlier in the story to affirm to Han and Yang that memories of the past are not utterly gone, and that Lady Zheng has indeed come back as a revenant. But when Han’s promise with the past is broken, the ghost’s poem returns as an omen for the past’s revenge on the forgetful present: acting out his own oath to be loyal to the deceased, Han and his new wife are devoured by the monstrous waves of the Yangtze River.

Thus, Feng’s ghost story may be read on two levels: a romantic love triangle involving a man’s betrayal of and brutality toward a woman, and a subtle critique of narratives of the past. What I want to highlight is how this story is exemplary of traditional Chinese ghost stories as it perfectly mixes a gendered narrative and a narrative of the past in the figure of the ghost woman: the ghost Lady Zheng’s feminine virtue and chastity throw into relief the failed masculinity of her living husband who not only accepts national humiliation but also fails the promise to be loyal to the past. Doubly inscribed with historical trauma and personal suffering, the female ghost embodies the two underlying logics of Chinese ghost stories that I will expound in this book: that stories of ghosts are concerned with problems of narrating the past, and that the ghost’s returning also opens up a space for problematising and reimagining gender identities.

A ghost bearing the symptom of problems with history and gender is also the central place of horror in Rudyard Kipling’s most famous imperial ghost story “The Phantom Rickshaw” (1888). Similar to “Yang Siwen Meets an Old Acquaintance in Yanshan”, Kipling’s story involves a surface plot in which a womaniser who refuses to admit to his past is revenged by the phantom of the woman he has abandoned, but it also contains a subtext concerning the problems with colonial historical narratives in the very figure of the woman’s phantom. Indeed, competing narratives of Britain’s colonial presence in India are pitted against each other at the very beginning of the story. Much as the narrator may insist on the “great knowability” of India compared to England and how men overworked to death by imperial duties is commonplace there,³ Pansay’s own narrative of being haunted by the woman’s rickshaw contradicts the doctor’s rationalistic explanation of his disease. To be haunted by an abandoned lover is no strange story, yet what really robs Pansay of sanity and consequently masculinity is how the dead woman’s rickshaw pulled by four Indian coolies could also come back to haunt, as he exclaims, “One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd”.⁴ What is suggested here is that injustice done on a woman may have its ghostly retributions (a familiar trope of British as well as Chinese ghost stories, as I will discuss in later chapters), but to admit that the Indian servants can also return as phantoms is to admit that the indigenous also have their own history that clashes with Britain’s imperial narrative of India.⁵ As with the ghost of Lady Zheng in Feng’s story, the subalterns—Mrs Wessington and her Indian coolies—return as ghosts to force the present’s dominant narration of history to renegotiate its relationship with the past and the ghosted.

It is now time to draw a few conclusions from these two stories. What Feng’s and Kipling’s ghost stories show are not only a marked similarity in plot (revenge of the ghost lover) and thematisation (relation with the past, men’s injustice on women), but also some general parameters of Chinese and British ghost stories that I will examine in the following pages. First, I argue that ghosts are signs of time out of joint, and narratives of ghosts are often about a troubled, unappeasable past. It is one of my theses in this book that in both China and Britain, ghost stories can be posited as a quasi-history or para-history, indeed, the silenced other of history: their persistent gesturing towards the past reveals a desire to rethink and rebuild the historical construction of the present, yet the illicit status of the ghosts—these stories’ central concern—means that they will remain forever in a struggle for legitimacy vis-à-vis the narratives of the cultural mainstream.

Second, the crystallisation of the problem with the past in the figure of the ghost woman, in both stories (and in many others as well), also suggests the genre’s special function as a gendered discourse. The liaison between women and ghosts is no coincidence; as I will show later, being a narrative of the anomaly, ghost stories are traditionally associated with subaltern groups—women, invisible coolies, politically disenfranchised men, etc.—and can be appropriated by these groups in their contestation for new social roles and more cultural visibility. Ghost stories’ connection with socially marginalised groups also ties with a third dimension of this weird genre that I focalise in this book—narratives of ghosts as a literature of the anomaly. In this book I explore ghost stories as embedded in and speaking to their respective literary traditions—i.e., the zhiguai 志怪 (records of the strange) tradition in China and the Gothic tradition in Britain—but I also conceptualise this body of writing in both countries as a literature of the anomaly,⁶ and it is, I hope, one of the book’s contributions to world literary knowledges to explore how this narration of the anomaly can open up a discursive space where dominant cultural narratives can be either subverted or reinforced and new cultural identities negotiated.

From “Europe and its others” to world literary knowledges

I mentioned the term “world literary knowledges” a moment ago, and it is now time to make clear what I mean by this term and how I situate this cross-cultural study of ghost stories from two vastly different literary traditions in current scholarship on comparative and world literature.

Conceived in Europe in the context of the emerging nationalism of the nineteenth century, the notion and practice of comparative literature for a long time has been Eurocentric,⁷ and even the emergence of postcolonial studies since the late twentieth century and the revival of interest in world literature in the recent two decades to a large extent perpetuate instead of supplant a model of world literature imagined as composing of “Europe and the rest of the world”.⁸ I still remember vividly the sense of estrangement I felt as a graduate student in a seminar of a comparative literature programme at University College London. The class was sufficiently international, with more than half the students coming from outside of the UK: the Netherlands, France, Spain, Greece, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India, and China, to mention just a few. On the day we presented our research projects I was more than a little surprised to hear that the French student was working on some writer in southern Africa, the Dutch student on some writer in Malaysia, and the Spanish student on some writer in Latin America. Just as I was marvelling at my fellow students’ command of languages and cultural traditions so vastly distant and different from their own, it became clear that they were working on writers from their countries’ former colonies who now wrote in the colonisers’ language. Suddenly the classroom looked to me like a conference of colonial powers and I, being from China which had not been a coloniser nor ever totally colonised, found no place of entry in this configuration of comparative literature mapped closely upon European powers’ world expansion in the last few centuries.

Much as the sense of estrangement I felt in that classroom should be attributed to a young woman’s naivety and oversensitivity in a foreign country, it does betray some of the limitations of postcolonial frameworks in comparative literary study. If the former comparative study focusing exclusively on the rapports de fait between a few European languages and literary traditions (the so-called “French school” of comparative literature) is now rightly deemed parochial and ethnocentric,⁹ the inclusion of former colonies in the expanded landscape of world literary study by no means does justice to the “world” in “world literature”. As Revathi Krishnaswamy and others have noted, the “Europe and …” models implied in postcolonialism “perpetuate neocolonial geopolitics in the form of linguistic fields such as Anglophone, Francophone, and so on” and posits Europe forever as the centre of reference.¹⁰ Moreover, this model also leaves blind spots, for although colonialism had forcefully shaped the geopolitical landscapes of the world since Europe’s world expansion in the fifteenth century, the literary world has not always corresponded to political circumstances and there are cultures and literary phenomena that predate or go beyond the conceptual framework of colonialism.

Interestingly, the revival of interest in world literature in the past two decades, with an implied intention to democratise and rejuvenate the often elitist and Eurocentric comparative literary study, sometimes implicitly perpetuates coloniality in the literary sphere. Franco Moretti’s conjectures on world literary systems based on the example of the evolution and reception of the European novel across the world reads like a story of conquest of the European coloniser over the rest of the world (though he did mention local resistances and hybridities made thereof, counter-influence from the indigenous literature does not enter his picture) reincarnated in literary terms,¹¹ and Pascale Casanova’s model of a “world republic of letters” recognises only one capital for world literature: Paris.¹² For Casanova, the rest of the world’s literatures only entered the map of world literature with the emergence of post-coloniality in the late twentieth century, for although literary traditions such as those in China and Japan have been well established long before the seventeenth century, they existed not in fierce competition with other national literatures as European literatures did, hence their “late-comer” status in the world literary space.¹³ If we see world literature as an economy of exchange, interaction, and assimilation, then the maps of world literature would invariably bear resemblance to Marx and Engels’s conception of the term modelled on the conquering power of capital across the world,¹⁴ placing Europe at the prestigious centre of everything that matters (as Casanova’s and Moretti’s models suggest). But such a sweeping map, as Graham Huggan notes, “privileges literary history over literary analysis”, obliterating national literatures preceding capitalism and homogenising specific regional literary knowledges thereof to fit a set of “pre-determined ‘facts’”.¹⁵

An alternative way to veer away from the Western hegemony in comparative and world literature studies is to turn to comparative poetics, in which non-Western poetic traditions are drawn into the map of world literature to challenge the stereotype that only the West produces literary theories whereas other parts of the world provide literary raw materials for analysis. Many scholars from Asia, South America, Africa, and elsewhere have contributed to this cause and the valuable work they do broadens our understanding of literature and literary theory. Yet as Krishnaswamy notes, even this intentionally cosmopolitan approach may have its limitations. For one thing, studies that focus on the influence of non-Western literary traditions (Arabic, Indian, Chinese, for instance) on Europe may retain the “Europe and …” model, while parallel studies that focus on historically unrelated literary traditions often risk taking an orientalist model that homogenises a non-Western or Eastern world opposed to the West.¹⁶ Moreover, Krishnaswamy warns that such East–West comparative poetics tend to focus exclusively on non-Western literary traditions that are more systematic (for instance Sanskrit, Chinese) and can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Explanatory notes on romanisation and Chinese sources
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Among dark woods and black fortresses”: Xuan Ding’s mythologisation of national history
• 3 “These are what Westerners refuse to believe”: Wang Tao’s uncanny history
• 4 Two ways to conjure up a ghost: Vernon Lee’s history versus fiction
• 5 The dead woman returning: E. Nesbit’s Female Gothic myth
• Conclusion
• References
• Index