Stories from a Chinese Studio episode two: more fox stories

Stories from a Chinese studio

So last time we discussed how in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi there are foxes that change into human form, and there are foxes that just stay in their animal form. In fact, the startling “humanness” of a fox appearance is consistent also across many Tang Chuanqi stories too, which are short fictional stories first formed in the Tang dynasty. The Tang dynasty was a long time before the Qing dynasty. In these Tang tales the human traits are indicative of ideas intimately connected to the social exchange of the stories among elite men of the era. However, quite different from the Liaozhai stories where you see a lot of times the fox fairies falls in love with humans and often marries into the household, the fox is either eventually killed off or runs away, with none able to successfully stay close to the human community forever or even during their lifespan. The fox or the “animal demon” generally are without names, and when they are killed, none are still in their human form, when they die they face their end converted back into their fox forms and then leave the human community and/or the temporal world.

This is interesting because the last episode we got to see some foxes who stay in their human form almost throughout the whole story. They embody the characterizations of human desires by being foxes. The stories documented in Taiping Guangji on the other hand, present us with foxes that reach an ontological limit to their being that does not allow them to transform completely from a fox spirit into a human being. They can exhibit human behaviors, yet deep inside the stories suggest they do not have nor do they immutably share the morality and sentiment that belong to humans. In several stories, fox acts as a messenger of death, or quite the opposite, life, but fundamentally they are still animals. I still wonder now what that tells us about how human nature is perceived back then.