Confucian Ethics and the Literary Humanization of Fox Spirits in Liaozhai Zhiyi.
Open Access DepositedFrom Animality to Humanity
In the pre-Qin period, foxes mainly existed as mythical animals and omens, retaining significant animalistic and symbolic qualities. During the Wei and Jin dynasties, Confucianism became the mainstream, the fox spirits began to take on human form and attempted to enter human society, but their humanization was still in an unstable stage. In Tang Dynasty works, fox spirits were further secularized and humanized, but they were not fully incorporated into Confucian ethical norms. By the Qing Dynasty’s Liaozhai Zhiyi, fox spirits not only possessed a stable human form, but also demonstrated clear Confucian values in marriage, family, and social relationships, becoming an “understandable” and “evaluable” subject at the ethical level. On this basis, this thesis further examines the rewriting of the image of the fox spirit in the modern context by comparing it with Wang Zengqi’s Liaozhai Xinyi. Research has found that with the weakening influence of Confucianism in modern society, fox spirits no longer strictly follow traditional ethical structures. Their emotional expression and behavioral choices exhibit stronger subjectivity and individual consciousness, reflecting a readjustment of existing gender and moral norms. Therefore, this thesis believes that the evolution of the fox spirit image in Chinese literature is not only a transformation from animal to human form, but also a continuous process of reshaping the understanding of “human nature” by different historical ideologies.
This Thesis takes Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi from the Qing Dynasty as the core text and combines relevant literary works from pre-Qin dynasty to modern times to systematically examine the evolution of the image of fox spirits in Chinese literature. Previous studies have mostly understood the changes in the image of fox spirits from the perspective of “humanization”, suggesting that foxes have gradually transformed from animals and anomalies to humanoid beings with emotional and social relationships. However, this thesis argues that this “humanization” process is not a neutral literary development, but gradually formed under the influence of a specific ideological system, in which the definition of “how to become a qualified human” by Confucian ethics played a key role. Through comparative analysis of relevant texts in the Classic of Mountain and Sea, Soushen Ji, Guangyi Ji, and Liaozhai Xinyi with Pu’s Liaozhai Zhiyi, this article points out that
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