The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature Maram Epstein The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature BY Judith T. Zeitlin. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 296. $57.00. The seventeenth-century Chinese literati imagination swarmed with ghosts. These beings and their phantom sisters-souls, fox spirits, dreams, painted images, and mirror reflections-are the ultimate border crossers; they regularly dissolve the boundaries that delineate time, place, reason, body, consciousness, and life itself. As cultural constructs, since their only function is to represent absence and yearning, they are free from the burden of the mimetic. Ghosts are intimately related to changing beliefs about the connections between body, mind, and identity. They are also linked to the rich culture of death and mourning in traditional China. Indeed, Judith Zeitlin's ambitious exploration in The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature demonstrates that ghosts are neither marginal nor liminal; they are seen and heard everywhere in Chinese culture. The passionate interest of the Chinese in ghosts continues into the twenty-first century, as seen by the phantom images that haunt contemporary East Asian media productions. In The Phantom Heroine, Zeitlin argues that, during the seventeenth century, ghosts, even as projections of a living person's imagination, took on a life of their own as agents in the production of new identities and cultural meanings; deeply coded as yin, they became an idealized expression of the feminine. They became the ultimate embodiment of qing 情 (a term that carried such a broad range of meanings during the late imperial period that it is notoriously difficult to translate; its most common meanings include emotion, passion, sentiment, and a fascination with the subjective), as both the expression of emotion and a means to induce corresponding feelings in others. As revenants of the past, they enabled a dramatization of the themes of memory, nostalgia, and the work of mourning. During this golden age of Chinese theater, the presence of ghosts on stage posed a metatheatrical commentary on questions of performativity. In addition, as disembodied forces that exist to voice the unresolved emotions of a life that ended in grief, [End Page 214] ghosts had long held a recognized place in the development of lyric poetry. In short, the figure of the ghost is so deeply interwoven with so many facets of Chinese cultural production that a study of the spectral could take us in any number of significant directions. Zeitlin's goal in this monograph is to move beyond the traditional academic cataloguing of ghosts and the basic questions about Chinese belief in the supernatural. Although characters in fictional texts frequently question the existence of ghosts and other supernatural beings, their skeptical gestures are themselves formulaic and playful, since they inevitably launch an encounter with the same supernatural whose existence had just been called into question. It is not really the existence of the spectral per se that was of interest to the writers and audiences of this period, but how spectral figures were deployed. After all, the existence of ghosts and other disembodied beings is fully consistent with a cosmology that was composed of yinyang energies and recognized the persistence of powerful emotions in the form of energy that could live on even after the death of the corporeal heart/mind (xin) which had once breathed life into them. In order to analyze the representation and meaning of the spectral in literary texts, The Phantom Heroine provides a richly textured and interdisciplinary description of the polyvalent meanings of ghosts in the seventeenth century. It builds a context for understanding the literary representations of ghosts by drawing connections to the history of medicine, burial practices, psychology (especially the fields of memory, mourning, and trauma), visual culture, and performance theory. The Phantom Heroine is historically nuanced in its mapping of the evolution of understandings and representations of ghosts that culminated in the seventeenth century. As Zeitlin argues, the "long" seventeenth century (ca. 1580-1700) spans a number of key cultural and historical events that fueled an expanded interest in ghosts. Among them was the rapid growth of the publishing industry during...