Amanda Bates November 11, 2008 Madame White Snake: East Asian Femme Fatale of Old The Chinese legend of Madame White Snake, the snake demon that takes human form and becomes the wife of a man, has exerted a lasting influence over East Asian folktales and fiction for centuries. Two quintessential novellas, “The Lust of the White Serpant” from Ugetsu Monogatari by the Japanese author Ueda Akinari and “Eternal Prisoner under Thunder Peak Pagoda” a traditional Chinese story, are both relatively complex and demonstrate not only the evolution of the White Snake figure to become a more believable human, but also what aspects may have given her enduring appeal. While both these stories are ostensibly morality tales about the dangerous beauty of this femme fatale, the true source of pleasure from these narratives is the femme fatale’s transgressive behavior, not her eventual punishment for it. Early tales of Madame White Snake appeared in China as early as the Song Dynasty, and initially her portrayal was fairly direct, as a villainous demon who drains the life force out of her human husband. Lai, Whalen. "From Folklore to Literate Theater: Unpacking "Madame White Snake"." Asian Folklore Studies 51, no. 1 (1992): 52. But over time, characterizations of her became more complex, and the persona of Madame White Snake became more sympathetic, and perhaps even a model of the ideal Confucian wife, particularly in “Pagoda”. Whalen Lai notes, “She was a loving wife, a caring mother, rescuer of her family from the first flood, and, at that point, a general benefactor of man. She took on the virtues of a traditional Chinese female, particularly forbearance”. Ibid., 53. But if she were really an ideal wife, why could she not live happily with her human mate? Her dangerous sexuality is the key. Femme fatale might seem an unusual term to apply to a character from pre-modern Chinese and Japanese literature who may exemplify the virtues of an ideal Confucian wife, since it is primarily associated with film characters, particularly those of the film noir genre. But this term, which is relatively speaking, a neologism (The earliest uses were around the beginning of the 20th century Oxford English Dictionary, “Femme, ” Oxford University Press, http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50083541/50083541se3?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=femme+fatale&first=1&max_to_show=10&hilite=50083541se3 ), is an apt description of the depiction of Madame White Snake and all her incarnations. It refers to a woman who is dangerously attractive, and lures men to their downfall with her sexual attractiveness. In both incarnations of Madame White snake, the authors depict her as bewitchingly beautiful. Toyoo, her human lover in “Lust of the White Serpant” cannot shake the image of her beauty from his mind and dreams of her, and finds himself “disturbed and agitated” by her “ethereal beauty”. Ueda, Akinari. Ugetsu Monogatari : Tales of Moonlight and Rain : A Complete English Version of the Eighteenth-Century Japanese Collection of Tales of the Supernatural. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974, 162-164. In “Eternal Prisoner,” Madame White Snake’s bewitching beauty follows her lover Hsü into his dreams, and the next morning “he was so distracted that he could not concentrate on doing business.” “Eternal Prisoner under the Thunder Peak Pagoda.” Trans. Diana Yu, in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau. Traditional Chinese Stories : Themes and Variations. Boston: Zheng & Zui Co, 1986, 358. Both of these stories align negative connotations with her beauty, suggesting that her sexuality is the cause of their distraction. In addition to distracting sexuality, the irregular characterization of Madame White Snake might be another trait her character has in common with the archetypical noir femme fatale. In her essay analyzing the noir film from a feminist perspective, Christine Gledhill writes “Not only is the hero frequently not sure whether the woman is honest or a deceiver, but the heroine’s characterisation is itself fractured so that it is not evident to the audience whether she fills the [femme fatale] stereotype or not”. Christine Gledhill, “Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 81. While both stories each characterize Madame White Snake fairly consistently within their narratives, the uneven characterization in film noir perhaps mirrors the evolution of her character over time: readers may not be sure whether she is a pure villainess or whether she is a good wife who is badly treated by society, because there is evidence of both throughout her legend. She is a loyal wife to her husband as she has promised, but she also causes him to find trouble with the law and deceives him about her supernatural nature. The complications in her character serve to undercut the ostensible didactic intent of these stories. A simple reading of the story might produce the idea that Madame White Snake represents dangerous female aggression and sexuality that traps the man, and she must be defeated and punished by society. This is quite similar to the expected end for the femme fatal character in films - she is punished in some way so that social order and proper gender roles are restored. In both stories, Madame White Snake’s secret is uncovered and a monk comes to exorcise her, and she is eventually rendered powerless and trapped under a pagoda. Her husband becomes a monk, and this further implicates Lady White Snake, this time from a Buddhist perspective. Female beauty is a dangerous thing that ties men to the transitory world and prohibits them from being free from desire and ascending to Nirvana. Furthermore, Lady White Snake’s lover is far from the ideal man. He is weak-willed and not particularly useful. In “Lust,” the priest informs Toyoo “Those creatures took advantage of your fair looks and tempted you. But you, yourself, owing to a lack of courage and spirit, fell victim to their temporary form” Ugetsu Monogatari, 177-178. . The implications of this are that a stronger, more capable man would not fall for the Lady’s trickery. But are the morals of these stories entirely sincere? If they were, Madame White Snake would be unmistakably depicted as an evil character. Instead, both these stories feature many moments where readers have great sympathy for her, despite her depraved sexuality. Certainly, readers admire her patience and loyalty: “I searched everywhere, and now that at last I’ve found you, I’m very happy,” Ibid.,173. she gushes to him in “Lust.” Readers must also acknowledge that her human lover is breaking his promise to her when he leaves her. She pleads with him, “We have a love bond between us, as constant as the T’ai Mountains and the Eastern Sea, and we must live and die together. Please, since we are already married, take me back, and let’s stay together the rest of our lives. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” “Eternal Prisoner,” 369. In another traditional vernacular story, “Tsu Shih-Niang Sinks the Jewel Box in Anger, “Tu Shih-Niang Sinks the Jew Box in Anger,” trans, Richard M. W. Ho, in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau. Traditional Chinese Stories : Themes and Variations. Boston: Zheng & Zui Co, 1986, 358. ” the male protagonist breaks a promise he made to his concubine lover, and suffers for it, suggesting that traditionally, loyalty and keeping ones word was valued on the man’s part as well as a woman’s. So her husband’s failure to follow through on his end of the bargain, completely forgetting the love he once had for her, makes readers more sympathetic to Madame White Snake’s plight. However, no matter how much sympathy Madame White Snake may gather from readers, the story still ends with her trapped under the pagoda. These stories draw from the long tradition of supernatural and ghost stories, which usually end with the demon destroyed or at least subdued. In the initial versions of this story Madame White Snake harmed her human lover, so her entrapment under a pagoda by a Taoist monk or later, a Buddhist monk Lai, 53. would have been a satisfying ending. Readers of early versions of the story might have been cheering for the defeat of this demon disguised as a beauty, and would have enjoyed reading the stories for the lurid horror details and later her crushing defeat. Conversely, the authors of the two stories examined here do not give readers motivation to wish for the death of Madame White Snake, so the pleasure of the narrative - to borrow appropriate phrasing from film theory - comes not from the death of the insubordinate, disruptive force, from watching the transgressions themselves. In an essay on the femme fatale heroines of film noir, Janey Place argues that the strong behavior of the female characters supersedes the moral lessons supposedly imparted by their morals at the end. She writes, “the final ‘lesson’ of the myth often fades into the background and we retain the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed (if destructive) woman.” Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 48. In these two stories, the femme fatale Madame White Snake is going to live on in the minds of readers not as the shrunken snake trapped under a pagoda, but the sexy, aggressive woman who took a weaker human man as her lover. This resistant reading of the text may be too colored by modern viewpoints, since it is impossible to know for certain what readers in the past enjoyed about these stories. However, consciously or unconsciously, these authors created a female character who fits the characteristics of a feisty heroine. In fact, Communists in the PRC in the 1970s reclaimed her as a feminist symbol for women who rebel against the patriarchy. Lai, 52. Just as the dangerous femme fatale of noir films has reemerged as a heroine in her own right, rather than the sexy death trap for the male protagonist, so too Lady White Snake should be reclaimed for her sexual assertiveness and life slightly outside the bounds of conventional social expectations.