The Way of Darkness and Light

A mysterious goddess magically generates a swirling wind to conceal the body of a hero. A licentious flower deity seduces a male to experiment with forty-three postures of copulation in a picturesque garden. Such graphic details of late imperial Chinese fiction exhibit two types of power from women: their martial prowess and seductiveness. This dissertation brings these two types of female power together by focusing on the Mysterious Woman (Xuannü 玄女) and the Immaculate Woman (Sunü 素女), two Daoist goddesses who figure prominently in martial arts and erotic stories, respectively. I argue that after being marginalized by institutionalized Daoism, these goddesses played a pivotal role in framing two different, though occasionally interrelated, types of novels. One type of novel concerns war and public affairs, including dynastic crises; the other type concerns domestic life, as exemplified in erotic fiction. The metaphor that equates sex with war relates these two types of stories. I consider these fictional texts to be powerful agents that reused and reinterpreted the goddesses’ stories in late imperial China. I also situate these texts in the cultural network within which they const