Chinese folklore has many accounts of female ghosts — the one featured here is the Nü gui, a terrifying vengeful spirit of a woman who committed suicide because of a crime against her, often rape. Such spirits might appear as beautiful ladies who sexually seduce their male prey and drain their “Yang” life-force essence.
This type of ghost has more currency in the modern era, but in the 1700s, a more typical account of female ghosts portrayed them as lovely waiflike spirits representing time gone by. They represent “sentiment” or “qing”, and would be reborn for a while from the land of the dead by the force of love.
Along these lines is a tale called “the Bookworm,” by a writer and scholar called Pu Songling, who wrote around 1740. In it, a scholar named Lang Yuzhu falls in love with an ephemeral spirit called Yan Ruyu. The story has a funny sideline, which is that Lang obsessively reads, ignoring Yan and jeopardizing his relationship with his beloved. Lang is such a bookworm that he doesn’t even know how to have sex until Yan teaches him. Eventually, the happy couple have a son, but Yan has to return to the spirit world.
In these 18th-century tales, rather than depriving men of their masculinity, the frail and sentimental female ghosts give their consorts a chance to express it.
Source(s): Valentina Boretti’s review of _The Phantoms Heroine: Ghosts and Genderin 17th century Chinese Literature by Judith Zeitlin, The Univ of Hawai’i press, 2007, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol 69, Jun 2008, pp 214-221.
