Lady White Bone: The Making of a Monstress
Lady White Bone, a demon from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, has grown into one of the most celebrated femme fatales in popular imagination. This paper explores the formation of this monster as a gendered skeleton and its association with the dead body. Contextualizing this charact...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
MDPI
2023
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| In: |
Religions
Year: 2023, Volume: 14, Issue: 4 |
| Further subjects: | B
Lady White Bone
B Buddhist literature |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | Lady White Bone, a demon from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, has grown into one of the most celebrated femme fatales in popular imagination. This paper explores the formation of this monster as a gendered skeleton and its association with the dead body. Contextualizing this character in a broadly defined genre of skeleton fantasy, I investigate her lineage in a textual network of literature and religion, focusing on zhiguai (accounts of anomalies) short stories and the Buddhist meditation “White Bone Contemplation” (Baigu guan), which in turn, leads to the notion of “beauty is white bone” (meiren baigu), a highly gendered rendering of the Buddhist notion “form is void” (se ji shi kong). To study the creation and development of this dazzling undead is to examine how women are posed as danger in various traditions, and to understand how this character continues to fascinate readers and viewers centuries after its creation. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel14040542 |