Dream of the Red Chamber

¶ … Dream of the Red Chamber

Among the diverse themes of this novel are the meaning of jade, of stone, of love, and the imagery that jade and stone offer, based on the authors' view of Chinese religion (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism), Chinese society and culture. And one of the early and main themes, and certainly a central theme of the Dream of the Red Chamber, is virtue, goodness, and being able to lead people to learn true facts so they can better be prepared for their lives. In fact, in the first five chapters, the authors (there are two authors but only one at any time) create a tone in the story of questions about value and morality, and what is just being presented in literature as merely lovely for the sake of being pretty. That is, he criticizes the writers who write entertaining and lovely stories, the "beauty-and-talented-scholar" kind of writing, and the "breeze-and-moonlight" kind of writing.

Another theme that comes through during the reading of the novel is played out through the feuding through central characters, which is the authors' way of illustrating, through literature, the decline of the feudal society. The sub-theme might be, on a big-picture level, two-fold: the story of power, wealth and, typically Asian, honor and nobility, and society's seeming self-defeating fall from grace; and a big picture theme also is, in the end, the regeneration of a seeming degenerate character in the person of Pao Yu, and yet the tragedy of his misfortunes.

One of the main protagonists - and likeable characters - is Black Jade. Two other main characters are Chen Shih-yin (who is in decline at the beginning) and Chia Yu-tsun, who has been building up a reputation based on currying favor with higher-ups, all in the name of Chia gaining power personally. Chen is a wealthy intellectual / scholar, who is married to Lady Feng, has a happy life, and a three-year-old daughter named Ying-lien (Lotus). They live near the Temple of the gourd in Kusu. They pretty much set the stage for the action to come later.

An important part of this novel, setting up the authors' values as far as Confucianism and Chinese spiritual culture, is when Chen has a dream in which he meets a Buddhist monk and a Daoist priest; they show him a very lovely and expensive piece of jade, called "The Precious Jade of Spiritual Understanding." Later, he sees them again, and they tell him a sad fate awaits his daughter, Lotus. The authors' philosophical views of life are launched through the characters, and continue to come out through several of the characters, as is the case with many novels; but in this instance, since there is much for the reader to learn about China in the 18th Century, it is both instructive and entertaining to learn about Buddhism, Daoism, and the culture of that time period.

And so, to analyze the central themes, main characters, the plots and the morality on exhibit through the plot and the characters is also to analyze the time period in China that the book was written, and the authors.

One of the keys to understanding the novel is being aware that that there are words used and images used that are associated with religious imagery and cosmology. For example, in Chapter 3, in one version of the book, Black Jade (Lin Daiyu) arrives at her new place of residence, where her father has sent her so she'll have the advantage of a woman around her, and an education. But the authors use the situation to make a point about Daoism.

Madame Wang warns Black Jade, upon Black Jade's arrival, that Madam Wang's son Jia Baoyu (Pao Yu) is a very bad influence, and is a womanizer who is extremely charming but dangerous. That is interesting because Pao Yu is Madame Wang's son. And as the story goes along, Madame Wang refers to her son as a "hunshi mowing," which is a "demonic ruler in the realm of chaos," according to an article in T'oung Pao (Zhou, 2001).

The wayward, hustler-womanizer Pao Yu, who represents the bad side of the society that the authors write about, later moves into the Garden of the Total Vision, and rules over it as "a crown of beauties," Zhou writes. The girls in the garden are part of a concept of "pristine ignorance...oblivious innocence" and that is a situation that calls for the author to use the term "hundun shijie" ("hundun" means "chaos" in Daoism). Allowing the huckster Pao Yu to rule over innocent girls, a reader could easily surmise, is tantamount to the "chaos" in society, in the metaphor; insensitive rulers, power brokers in that 18th Century society were likely able to take advantage of innocent, powerless civilians in the same way as Pao Yu feeds on young women. Pao even has a dream that he makes love to his niece.

Another Daoism term used by the authors is "hun" ("the chaotic state prior to the creation of the world," a time when, according to Daoism, "heaven and earth were not yet separated and yin and yang intermingled..."); "Sociologically," Zhou writes (254), it refers to the innocence of the primitive age, before moral values, hierarchical divisions and social conventions were introduced into the human world along with all the strife and conflicts."

And so, to continue the Daoist influence into this book, which is really the moral theme played out through the characters, the authors use "Hundun" (an emperor in Daoism who is faceless) as a personification of "benevolent disorder." The period of the Neo-Daoist movement known as the "Wei-Jin" period (255) was a time of rejection of "corrupted institutions" and hence, a "chaotic" life style was adopted that seemed, Zhou writes, "to hark back to a pre-historical, pre-cultural state of chaos."

The author presents Pao Yu ("Jia Baoyu") as being connected to a hundun state in his "pre-human identity as a stone made by Nuwa in a pre-historical age."

Very strong symbols in the novel are jade, and stones. The imagery of stone "is mainly operative on a metaphysical level," according to a scholarly piece in the Journal of the American Oriental Society (Idema, 1994). But jade ("yu" in Chinese) is more closely linked to characters who have "yu" in their names and who "are distinguished by their obsessive pursuit of purity." (Characters linked to jade, an important spiritual symbol in the 18th Century, include Pao-Yu, Tai, yu, and the nun Miao-yu.)

Jade, Idema writes, jade and "desire" are homophones in the Chinese language, so not only is jade associated with characters seeing purity and the spiritual high ground, jade has the contrasting meaning of "desire" and thus, those characters' lives "can only result in either a life of desire" (which it turns out is the final demise of Miao-yu) or "in death" (as is the reality of what happens with Tai-yu).

The novel, according to the book, the Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in Dream of the Red Chamber, Water Margin, and the Journey to the West (Wang, 205), the Pao-Yu character is contradictory because he is symbolized as both a "wan-shih" ("foolish stone") on the one hand and the "t'ung-ling" ("intelligent stone") on the other hand.