Haunting the Boundaries: Liminality, Spectral Desire, and the Female Body in David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman and Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Abstract

This paper undertakes a cross-cultural comparative study of David Lindsay’s The Haunted Woman (1922) and three selected tales from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异)— “Nie Xiaoqian,” “Liancheng,” and “A Bao.” It argues that both writers employ the supernatural not as an escapist motif but as a critical discourse that exposes the liminal boundaries between body and spirit, morality and desire, East and West. Through an analysis of liminality and spectral desire, the paper reveals that the female ghost or “haunted woman” operates as a mediator between conflicting systems of ethics and metaphysics. Drawing on theories of hauntology (Derrida), liminality (Turner, Bhabha), psychoanalysis (Freud, Kristeva), and feminist corporeality (Irigaray, Mulvey), this study reinterprets the supernatural as a mode of cultural translation that articulates the suppressed tensions of modernity. By juxtaposing the haunted spaces of British modernism with the ghostly cosmologies of Qing China, the paper demonstrates how the spectral feminine becomes a cross-cultural figure of resistance and transcendence. Ultimately, the study contributes to comparative literature and cultural philosophy by proposing “haunting” as a universal metaphor for the human condition—an ever-returning negotiation between rationality and imagination, repression and renewal.