Masterpiece Pu Songling’s Strange Stories
The prompt is pretty open-ended. I want you to write about something that interests you about any one or more of the stories we’ve read thus far in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, and I want you to use Jonathan Spence’s Death of the Woman Wang as a point of comparison and context. (I personally think that the last chapter and epilogue might be interesting to look into). You can do outside research if you’d like, but you don’t have to. You can limit your quotations and citations to the assigned texts, but be sure to quote directly and read closely. Don’t dwell at the level of generality. Go deep. Get specific. You can also make reference to King Hu’s film “Painted Skin” if you’d like. You can even make reference to a strange event that happened to you or that you heard about or read about, if it really helps illuminate one of Pu Songling’s stories. Basically, you can write about whatever interests you so long it’s in the course of interpreting very closely a particular story (or more) from our assigned text(s).
MASTERPIECE
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Masterpiece
Throughout generations, different individuals have told stories for various purposes. In most cases, these stories are aimed at addressing issues of concern in the society and how to go about solving them. Moreover, the tales discourage any practices of immorality. In Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, there are a number of interesting facts that have been addressed through the short stories “Painted Skin”, and “Yingning or the Laughing Girl.” The two touch on the subjects of ghosts, the position of women in society and immorality. The present work examines the Strange Stories by Pu Songling from the eyes of Jonathan Spence’s “Death of the Woman Wang.” In the works of the two authors, there is an extensive use of the supernatural as a means of helping make sense of life and society as a whole. There are interesting shared themes, styles and messages that make all these works worth looking at.
In order to understand Songling’s stories in light of Spence’s, it is important to compare the plots in the three stories. To begin with, Painted Skin centers on the experiences of a man Wang who lusts for a young girl after meeting her. The girl is beautiful and this attribute makes Wang to readily take her to his house without telling anyone else. Later, it is revealed that Wang was possessed by a demon because of the interaction with the girl who happened to be a “green-faced monster, a ghoul with great jagged teeth like a saw.” His attempt to get rid of it fails and his heart is ripped out instead. In the end it he monster is killed by the Taoist priest once it returns to its original form. The story Yingning or the Laughing Girl is about a young man Wang, a widow’s son who falls in love with the girl Yingning. After the first encounter where Wang picked a flower dropped by the girl, he cannot afford to keep her off his mind. He keeps thinking about her until his health begins to deteriorate. After suffering for a long time, Wang decides to go and look for the girl and finds her living with her aged stepmother. He manages to take the girl to his home where it is revealed that the girl was a fox’s child even though this does not affect the relationship between the two. Lastly, Death of the Woman Wang is a story about young widows in the 17th century China who are left at the mercy of their in-laws and are expected to live according to standards set by the society. The pressure from these expectations makes many to commit suicide.
It is interesting that most of Songling’s works are based on extraordinary, supernatural beings and events. This fact points towards an in-depth characterization that has been known as a common feature in most of Songling’s works. In the story “Painted Skin” for example, there is the mention of ghosts and evil spirits, which are used to expose different characteristics in human beings. In the story, Wang, a Chinese scholar falls in love with a girl he meets who seems nice and beautiful in an innocent manner. A romantic relationship develops between the two before the girl’s real identity is reve...