Ghosts Seeking Substitutes: Female Suicide and Repetition

Abstract

��� 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 infl uence 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 fi gure, 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 specifi c and fi nite 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 indefi nitely, 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