The Perturbed Self: Gender and History in the Late Nineteenth-century Ghost Literature in China and Britain

Abstract

In both Chinese and Western cultures, the figure of ghost captures an uneasy tension between the past and the present, and between the orthodox history and its other. Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the returning of the repressed — helps to illuminate ghost’s entangled relationship with the past: ghost refuses to stay buried in the past, thus making history — the sanctioned knowledge we produce about the past — a problematic entity that persistently returns and requires re-examination. This entanglement of the ghost with a restless past makes it a perfect metaphor for the other of History — the omissions and distortions of what is orthodoxly sanctioned as knowledge about the past. Stories of ghosts, therefore, can be conceptualized as a quasi-history or para-history: their persistent gesturing towards the past reveals a desire to rethink and rebuild the historical construction of the present, yet their illicit subject matter makes them remain forever in a struggle for legitimacy vis-à-vis history. Ghost at the same time is also a powerful metaphor for a malleable self. Returning as that which has been repressed, it reveals the other of the self: that which has been repressed within the self or rejected without so that against it the self can be established. Conversely, the liminality of ghost also makes it a powerful and empowering agent for subjectivities in transition, therefore are particularly attractive to people who feel an urgency to reaffirm or reconstruct their identity. The two potentials of stories of ghosts—to re-examine or rewrite history and to redefine the self — are inevitably intermingled with each other, and their connection in the late nineteenth-century ghost literature in China and Britain is the focus of my study. My aim is to explore how ghost story writers in China and Britain have negotiated with and reconstructed different models of masculinity and femininity by evoking and appropriating narrative patterns of history and myth through their ghost literature. I believe such a cross-cultural investigation will achieve two goals: first, it helps to illuminate mutually how gender is constructed in each culture and what cultural baggage and assets—as activated by the rich symbolism of ghost — are brought into this construction; second, a deeper and broader understanding of the ghost literature as a destabilizing as well as constructive “in-between” form, a mode of the fantastic.

Date of Award	3 Aug 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Colin Alastair CAVENDISH-JONES (Supervisor) & Hiu Yen Klaudia LEE (Supervisor)