EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 3 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 47 Fu-Cheng skillfully developed the genre of travel records; he showed elegance of style and the informa- tive presentation. Many writers of the beginning of XX century became successors of the “short prose essays” as travel records. Zanzottera Lucrezia (Research Center on Asian Studies (ASIEs), INALCO) Delegitimizing Authority: The Fox-Spirit Woman and Her Rebellious Discourse in a Late-Qing Novel Key words: fox-woman, gender reversal, comical weapons The fox-woman is one of the most transgressive figures in Chinese literature. Her infringing of the rules, though, is generally analyzed as remaining limited to the sexual sphere. But is this true? As I will show, there is also a profound social and political dimension linked to the fox-woman against authority. In Zou Tao’s 鄒弢 (1850–1931) important but generally overlooked vernacular novel “The Full Story of the Karmic Predestination of the Vixen” (Huliyuan quanzhuan 狐狸緣全傳 , 1888), we find a compel- ling scene: a fox sorceress, chief of a vixen group, unmasks, ridicules and assaults the deceitful Taoist priest called to exorcise her, but whose true motivation is actually money. This memorable scene can be analyzed as a clash between heterodoxy and orthodoxy, the true nature of which is made obvious through this unveiling of the hidden agenda of the representative of authority. This subversive act of questioning and delegitimizing uses comical items as specifically heterodox weapons and produces an uncanny as well as ironic effect, as the female protagonist paradoxically acquires the moral stature of a retributive heroine. Despite her nature of sexual predator, she becomes the true protector of morality. Through her invective, which should not be simply considered a gratuitous, transgressive outbreak, the fox-woman assesses — if only unconsciously — the true nature of power. For a more in-depth analysis, I shall use a theoretical tool that might prove extremely useful to grasp the underlying discursive nature of the scene: Lacan’s sophisticated theory of “hysterical speech” when addressing the “master’s speech”. Through it, one can see the different components at work in this crucial scene: the role played by the instance of a “symbolic father”, and the rebellious attitude, but also the paradoxical “split” nature, of the subjectivity in its relation to the source of authority.