Chinese Folklore for Modern Times: Three Feminist Re-visions of The Legend of the White Snake

ABSTRACT

Folktales function as a form of cultural heritage in contemporary society and offer models for interpreting experience in everyday practices, but the beliefs and values conveyed by many folktales are ingrained in a patriarchal discourse. Thus, the models they offer are challenged by the modern prominence given to women’s perspectives. This article applies an intertextual analysis in a broad cultural context by exploring how the White Snake story has been transformed to cater to modern progressive attitudes on gender and sex. By focussing on the modern adaptations of the White Snake legend by three female authors – Hong Kong author Li Bihua’s novel, Green Snake (1986), American–Chinese writer Yan Geling’s novella, White Snake (1999), and Canadian author Larissa Lai’s novel, Salt Fish Girl (2002) – this study examines how contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese diasporic female authors incorporate and adapt old folktales in their separate narratives. By adapting the well-known folktale through female voices, the three novels challenge the inherited literary and cultural tradition, interrogate and question its gendered discourse defined by the heteronormative patriarchal family structure, and suggest ways in which non-normative sexuality and gender roles can be imagined and practised by female members of the society.

民间故事作为当代社会文化遗产的一种形式, 为人们的日常实践中的经验提供解释模式。然而, 许多民间故事所传达的信仰和价值观都建立在根深蒂固的父权制话语基础上, 因此它们所提供的经验受到了来自女性视点的挑战。本文旨在对白蛇传这一民间故事在当代的改编和演化进行互文分析, 尤其关注这一故事型如何转变自身以迎合当代有关性别政治的进步观点。本文分析了三位女性作家对白蛇传的改编作品, 分别是香港作家李碧华的小说《青蛇》 (1986), 美籍中国作家严歌苓的中篇小说《白蛇》 (1999) 以及加拿大作家拉丽莎・赖的小说《咸鱼女孩》 (2002) 。 重点探讨了当代香港和海外女性作家如何在各自的叙述中融入和改编古老的民间故事。通过在众所周知的民间故事中加入女性的声音, 这三部小说挑战了固有的文学和文化传统, 审问和质疑了由异性恋父权制家庭结构所定义的性别话语, 为女性群体提供了关于性别和性向的另一种想象

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese folklore
• Chinese literature
• literary adaptation
• feminist criticism
• The Legend of the White Snake

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and to John Stephens for his many corrections and comments.

Notes

1. In the following sections, Chinese names are given in Chinese order, with family name first and then given name. Exceptions are authors who adopt the English name order in their publications. Their names follow their own choices of presenting given name first.

2. For research into Western feminist revisions of classical fairy tales, see Bacchilega (1997), Haase (2000) and Zipes (1986). For research into feminist revisions of folk and fairy tales in East Asia, see Lee (2009) and Murai (2015).

3. There is a growing scholarship that applies concepts of scripts and schemas from cognitive narratology to examine the transformation and metamorphosis of folk and fairy tales (e.g. Gutierrez, 2017; Lee, 2011; 2014; Stephens & Geerts, 2014).

4. There may be a gradual change in the images of Chinese heavenly maidens or animal-women. Earlier records of such tales often depict them as wild and even cruel, and their temporal domestication often ends in the return to their natural world. For several bizarre tales of beast/women transformation from the fifth-century Garden of the Strange (Yiyuan) and eighth-century Records of Gathering Anomalies (Jiyi Ji), see Hui Luo (2009, pp. 100–111). One tale ends with the woman not only transforming back into a tiger but also mercilessly devouring both her human husband and their son. In the narratives from later centuries, with the Confucian patriarchal system strengthening, the otherworldly women become tamed and domesticated. The evolution of The Legend of the White Snake fits with this pattern, with the earlier fierce and unruly White Snake turning into a docile and ideal wife and mother in the Ming and Qing versions.

5. For a detailed illustration of the evolution of The Legend of the White Snake, see Idema (2009) and W. Lai (1992).

6. Alan L. Miller argues that this tale type may have a mythological and religious origin: “In Japan the sacred weaver takes on cosmic, even cosmogonic dimensions in the mythic figure of Amaterasu. In the folktales a more humble and even domestic scene is portrayed, but the vision of the mysterious, even magical power of creator still is strongly preserved in these more popular narrative forms” (Miller, 1987, p. 81).

7. As Liang Luo (2017, p. 30) observes, Walker’s translation omits an important part of one sentence from the Chinese original: “She felt as if he had come to rescue her, taking measures that were completely unfathomable to her, similar to Green Snake’s saving the magic‐herb‐stealing White Snake”. Without the latter part of the sentence, the intertextual link to the folklore is obscured.