Psychological structures
In psychotherapy, the structure of what the patient says is often believed to reflect deeper psychological themes than the content, since it is easier for the patient to manipulate the content than the structure. In literature, this is slightly more complex, since the author is likely to pay conscious attention both to content and structure. Still, there is reason to believe that structural features more often evade conscious control and manipulation and thus tend to reflect deeper underlying themes than the more easily accessible elements of content.
It is well known, and not in itself of great psychological interest, that The Red Chamber Dream makes extensive use of what I shall call structural pairs (sometimes referred to as mirror images).[1] Structural pairs are based on a mixture of similarities and contrasts. The most famous example is the opposition between the two young girls Lín Dàiyù 林黛玉 and Xuē Bǎochāi 薛寶釵, both of whom are female cousins and potential future wives of the main protagonist Jiǎ Bǎoyù, with whose personal name each of them shares one Chinese character (bǎo 寶 and yù 玉, respectively), while each of them clearly typifies two diametrically opposed personalities, Dàiyù being genuine, but hypersensitive and sometimes unreasonable, Bǎochāi more rational and reasonable, but perhaps less open and sincere, more calculating.
Among Bǎoyù's maidservants, a similar contrast exists between the emotional Qíngwén 晴雯 and the more commonsensical Xírén 襲人. Thus Bǎoyù stands at the centre of a structural web involving the following four structural pairs:
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In this case, all the structural pairs involve characters. In other cases, they may involve groups of characters, such as the Róngguó 榮國 and Níngguó 寧國 lines of the family, or events, such as the way Zhēn Shìyǐn's 甄士隱 fall and subsequent spiritual enlightenment in chapter 1 is repeated in the fall of the Jiǎ 賈 family and the monkhood of Bǎoyù in the part of the novel for which the author may only have managed to finish an outline, revealed to us in contemporary commentaries written by his friends or relatives. Structural pairs may even involve different domains of existence, such as the thematically central opposition between dream and reality, concretised in the contrast between the
While these structural pairs are clearly conscious constructs, intentionally created by the author and forming the backbone of large parts of the narrative, other pairs are less obviously so. Some structural pairs rather resemble the unintended structural patterns of psychotherapy, and they may reveal more about underlying and sometimes perhaps also unintended and even unconscious psychological issues.
It is impossible to determine with any degree of certainty to what extent a given structural pair is a deliberate, conscious construct or a spontaneous creation of which the author was unaware; nor, of course, is it possible to ascertain whether or not the underlying psychological themes are unconscious in a Freudian sense. The general pattern seems to be, however, that the less rigorously symmetrical a given structural pair is, the more likely it is to be expressive of underlying psychological or emotional issues, of something that the actual author may have written in spite of himself, and of something that the real reader may vaguely perceive without necessarily being able to formulate. In the present context, our main interest will be in the less rigorously symmetrical pairs that are rooted in underlying psychological themes, rather than the kind of hypersymmetrical pairs that are obviously the product of conscious literary creation, such as the ones involved in the structural web in which Bǎoyù stands at the centre, surrounded by his two female cousins and two main maidservants.
As a literary device, the use of structural pairs has its cultural origin in the dualism of early Chinese yin-yang philosophy. It is closely related to the pervasive use of parallel lines in Chinese poetry and prose-poetry and may be seen as an extension of it into novelistic prose.[2] Parallel lines involve the pairing not just of poetic lines, but also of words and concepts, and they too have their roots in the correlative cosmology of yin-yang thought. The same kind of yin-yang-based contrasts also informs much of the narrative structure of traditional Chinese novels.[3] The writing style of The Red Chamber Dream, as of many other Chinese novels, is clearly indebted to Chinese poetry and philosophy, and this is but one example.
In the following, however, the main focus will not be on the cultural origins of the use of structural pairs, but on the way some of them are rooted in and expressive of deeper psychological themes. This is much more obvious in The Red Chamber Dream than in any other piece of Chinese fiction, poetry or philosophy that I know of. We shall begin by looking at a structural pair which occupies, on the surface, a quite peripheral position in the novel, but which turns out to be part of a larger structural web that cuts across the entire novel and involves psychological conflicts that constitute central parts of its thematic core.
Structural pair: One impulse, two characters
In chapter 77, the good-looking and intelligent maidservant Qíngwén 晴雯 is wrongly accused of trying to seduce her young master. She is driven out of the household while still ill and left to die in the home of her alcoholised cousin. When her former master, the novel's main protagonist Jiǎ Bǎoyù, steals away from home to visit her in secret, she weepingly expresses regret at not having done what she was later accused of:
??
不是我說句後悔的話，早知如此，我當日也另有個道理。
Shortly afterwards, her cousin's famously promiscuous wife, Miss Dēng 燈姑娘, who has been hiding outside the door, bursts into the bedroom roaring with laughter, drags Bǎoyù into the neighbouring room, holds him tight between her legs on the bedside and threatens to let people know he is there unless she has her way with him. She tries to do with violence what Qíngwén could have done peacefully and now regrets she never did. (In the end, however, even Miss Dēng gives up and ends up expressing admiration for the intensely emotional, but platonic relation between Bǎoyù and Qíngwén.)
Qíngwén and Miss Dēng constitute one of this novel's many structural pairs, and like other such pairs, it is based on a mixture of similarities and contrasts. Qíngwén and Miss Dēng are similar in being physically attractive young women with passionate and sometimes willful personalities, strong emotions and intense desires. They differ widely, however, in their degree of refinement and sophistication, Qíngwén being gracious and cultivated, Miss Dēng coarse and crude. One aspect of this polarity is the contrast between Qíngwén's chastity and Miss Dēng's promiscuity.
This little snippet also illustrates how The Red Chamber Dream sometimes lets two different characters represent variations of one single impulse, in this case an unrealised sexual desire directed at Bǎoyù. In a way, the impulse belongs not so much to any one of the characters involved as to the novel itself, to the text. The novel represents a psychological universe that cuts across the individual personalities of its characters.
A study of psychological structures focuses on issues that go beyond each individual character, such as the repressed sexual desire that is given form in both Qíngwén and Miss Dēng. To the extent that such a study is concerned with individual characters, they are seen as elements in larger structural webs.
In contrast to the structural web in which Bǎoyù is surrounded by his two female cousins and two maidservants, the structural pair involving Qíngwén and Miss Dēng is far from symmetrical. Qíngwén is a central character in the novel and appears or is at least mentioned in 34 of the relevant 80 chapters, the subtleties of her personality thus being elaborated in much detail. By comparison, Miss Dēng is a marginal character in the novel, only appearing in chapter 77 and, under the name Miss Duō 多姑娘(兒), in chapter 21. In addition, chapter 64 of the 1760 manuscript (the gēngchén 庚辰 edition) contains a story in direct contradiction to the one under discussion here, relating how Miss Duō after losing her alcoholised husband marries Bāo'èr 鮑二. The family relation between Miss Dēng and Qíngwén is only mentioned in chapter 77. Apart from the fact that she is a highly promiscuous married woman of servant status, nothing seems to be consistent in the two or three descriptions we have of her.
The story of Miss Dēng, then, does not seem to be one on which the author has spent much time, and it clearly contains features that have evaded his conscious control and manipulation. In the following, we shall discuss whether this also means that parts of this story reflects underlying psychological themes of interest to our understanding of the novel.
Structural web: The fear of love
In and of herself, Miss Dēng is such a marginal character that she hardly seems worthy of much analytical attention. As a pair, however, Qíngwén and Miss Dēng tie in with larger structures that dominate substantial parts of the novel. Together, these structures make up a pervasive structural web of no little psychological and thematic significance.
Let us begin with Qíngwén. By being thrown out of the household and left to die because her beauty makes Bǎoyù's mother fears she is seducing her son, Qíngwén joins a large group of characters in the novel who die as a direct or indirect consequence of their illicit feelings of love and infatuation, which leave them defenseless and vulnerable. This group of unfortunate creatures includes the coarse, but helplessly naïve Jiǎ Ruì 賈瑞, who tries to seduce his distant cousin's wife, but is instead cruelly tricked by her and dies after a year of illness, the passionate and sensual Qín Kěqīng 秦可卿, who either dies from an illness with pregnancy-like symptoms or hangs herself after having had a sexual relation to her own father-in-law, her younger brother Qín Zhōng 秦鍾, who catches a cold and dies after falling in love and forcefully having his way with a young nun in the family temple, the maidservant Jīnchuàn 金釧, who is dismissed and drowns herself in a well after having uttered flirtatious words to her mistress's son Bǎoyù, the servant Bāo'èr's wife 鮑二家的, who hangs herself after her affair with one of the masters is discovered by his wife, Yóu Sānjiě 尤三姐, who cuts her throat after her fiancé pulls out of their engagement due to rumours of her unseemly past, and her older sister Yóu Èrjiě 尤二姐, who has an equally unseemly past and is driven to suicide by the wife of the man whose semi-illicit concubine she has become. With her love for Bǎoyù, her sentimental nature, her life-threatening illness, and her sense of defenselessness and vulnerability, Lín Dàiyù also probably belongs in this group of characters; however, although both the first eighty chapters and the early commentaries contain forewarnings of her early death, we know little about how the author envisaged the details surrounding the end of her life, since the campaign against her and for Xuē Bǎochāi, as well as the melodramatic story of her death on the very night when Bǎoyù is being wed to Bǎochāi are products of another author.
Starting from the first preface to The Red Chamber Dream, included in the 1754 manuscript (the jiǎxū 甲戌 edition), critics have tended to see the sections of the novel in which illicit love is punished by death as cautionary tales against the dangers of romance and transgressive sexuality. This ties in well with the fact that even physical love that takes place within established norms carries no danger of death. Even when Bǎoyù's most trusted maidservant Xírén 襲人 introduces him to the art of love at the beginning of chapter 6, nothing bad happens, simply because “Xírén knew that Grandmother Jiǎ had given her to Bǎoyù, so even if they were together like this, it would not be improper” 襲人素知賈母已將自己與了寶玉的，今便如此，亦不為越禮 (my translation). In contrast, all the cases of love leading to death involve illicitness or impropriety. Jiǎ Ruì’s desire for Xīfèng is incestuous as well as an offence against a married woman; Qín Zhōng’s love and lust for a nun is highly proscribed; Qín Kěqīng’s relation to her father-in-law is, of course, also incestuous; Jīnchuàn, being Bǎoyù’s mother’s maid, is technically also his father’s concubine, and so a love relation between her and Bǎoyù would also border on the incestuous (“violating his mother’s maid” 淫辱母婢, as his father says in chapter 33); Bāo Èr’s wife, being married, should not have an affair with Jiǎ Liǎn; and with Yóu Sānjiě and Yóu Èrjiě, their lascivious past catches up with them as they try to mend their ways and enter into more or less proper relationships, though even Yóu Èrjiě’s relation to Jiǎ Liǎn is way beyond propriety, since Èrjiě is actually already betrothed to another, Jiǎ Liǎn is in mourning both for his own kin and for the kin of the emperor, and they both act behind the back of his first wife and other relatives.
From this point of view, The Red Chamber Dream continues a long tradition of moralistic fiction. Death is a punishment for sexual transgression.
If this were the whole story, however, it would be hard to understand why Qíngwén, who may have desired Bǎoyù but never actually realised her desire, had to die, while Miss Dēng, who 滿宅內，便延攬英雄，收納材俊，上上下下竟有一半是她考試過的, comes from her blatant transgressions unscathed. Miss Dēng is joined by a large number of male rakes, whose wild promiscuity also goes unpunished: Jiǎ Shè 賈赦 and his son Jiǎ Liǎn 賈璉, Jiǎ Zhēn 賈珍 and his son Jiǎ Róng 賈蓉, as well as Xuē Pán 薛蟠 and others. If The Red Chamber Dream were a novel about punishment for sexual transgression, these characters ought to be the first victims, but they do not seem to be affected at all.
Thus, there exists a contrast not only between Qíngwén and Miss Dēng, but between a group of characters whose illicit love carries a death sentence and a group whose sexual transgressions go unpunished. Since both groups transgress, the crucial point lies not in the presence of sexual transgression, but, I suggest, in their degree of emotional involvement. Outside the realms of propriety, emotional involvement is dangerous, because it turns the person into a victim of strong, irrepressible and in the end destructive forces beyond his or her control.
The group of characters who die for love share a strong emotional involvement in illicit feelings of love. Jiǎ Ruì may be coarse and crude, but his desire becomes a passion that turns him into a defenseless victim of his longings, unable to see that his love is not requited, and that the object of his love is in fact setting up for him one trap after another. As for Qín Kěqīng, we do not know whether she is emotionally involved in the relation to her father-in-law, but from the paintings and calligraphy in her bedroom, we do know that she is not only a passionate person with a strong sensual nature, but also that she actively surrounds herself with cultural objects associated with love. Her younger brother Qín Zhōng's use of force to have his way with the young nun borders on rape, but in addition to his immediate sexual desire, he is also clearly driven by strong feelings of love, and his sentimental nature is clear from the moment he enters the novel. When it comes to Jīnchuàn, we do not know much about her personality and behaviour, but her teasing and flirtatious words to Bǎoyù in chapters 23 and, most fatally, chapter 30, seem innocent enough. Bāo'èr's wife is a less obvious member of this group, since her only sign of emotional involvement is her suicide by hanging after her affair was discovered, and we do not know if this was motivated by shame (which might be taken as a sign of deeper emotion) or plain fear. As for the Yóu sisters, one of the many ways in which they resemble Qín Kěqīng is their passionate and sensual personalities; interestingly, it is not so much their loose past that kills them as their unsuccessful attempts at rectifying their lives. Finally, we have already mentioned how Qíngwén is on the emotional side compared to the more rational Xírén, and how she is more refined in her sensibilities than Miss Dēng. Like Qín Kěqīng and Qín Zhōng, she is also given a name that puns on the culturally most important word for 'emotion': qíng 情. In a number of different ways, therefore, the group of characters whose illicit love is punished by death is associated with strong and passionate feelings. It is as if these feelings are eating them up from the inside, either making them fatally ill or leading them to commit suicide. Psychologically, their fictional punishment by death reflects a fear of uncontrollable feelings of attachment.
The other group, whose sexual transgressions go unpunished, is much less emotionally involved. Some of them are simply cold and unfeeling, most notably Jiǎ Shè and, to a lesser extent, perhaps also Jiǎ Róng. Others may have strong feelings for their love objects, but these feelings do not linger. Jiǎ Zhēn is obviously deeply bereaved when his daughter-in-law and mistress Qín Kěqīng dies, but after the excessive funeral arrangements are over, neither he nor anybody else as much as mentions her again. Jiǎ Liǎn is also strongly attached to his semi-illicit concubine Yóu Èrjiě, but when the anniversary of her death approaches, he has completely forgotten about her and is only reminded of the anniversary by his wife Xīfèng. Thus, even when the characters in this group do have strong feelings, these feelings do not stick. These characters have many sexual relations, and may at times appear to be quite passionate, but are primarily driven by corporeal desire and have few long-lasting emotional bonds. A person like Xuē Pán can even get away with murder, because he is not killing for love, only for the pleasures of the flesh. When his desire makes him blind to the rage his improper advances induces in the male actor Liǔ Xiānglián 柳湘蓮, he is severely beaten and left in a ditch, but even this has no long-lasting effect on him. Since these characters are not deeply affected by their love-making, they are never in danger of seriously losing control. Psychologically speaking, their sexual transgressions do not evoke the kind of fear that the emotional involvement of the first group does.
The contrast between Qíngwén and Xírén is interesting. To judge from Miss Dēng’s comments in chapter 77, Qíngwén has not had a sexual relation to Bǎoyù. Still, their relation is highly eroticised, and when she realises everybody believes she has had such a relation, she regrets not having had one. In contrast, Xírén has sexual intercourse with Bǎoyù as early as chapter 6, when he must have been very young indeed. To what extent their sexual relation continues is uncertain, but Qíngwén mentions it much later:
I know what goes on between you when you think no one is looking.
便是你們鬼鬼祟祟幹的那事兒，也瞞不過我去
(chapter 31).
Besides the intense and genuine emotional attachment between Bǎoyù and Qíngwén on the one hand, and the much more prosaic relation between Bǎoyù and Xírén, the crucial difference lies in the perceived sanctioning of the relation between Xírén and Bǎoyù, as opposed to the illicitness of any erotic relation between Qíngwén and Bǎoyù. In fact, Qíngwén has been given to Bǎoyù by Grandmother Jiǎ in exactly the same way as Xírén, but in contrast to Xírén, she has never thought that this would legitimise a sexual relation between the two, and she consistently refuses Bǎoyù’s advances. This psychological difference enables Xírén to have sex with her master without any damage to her reputation, not to speak of her health, while Qíngwén pays with a damaged reputation and in the end with her life for simply being good-looking and close to Bǎoyù.
While the group of characters who die for love is dominated by young women, Jiǎ Ruì and Qín Zhōng being its only male members, the group of unpunished sexual transgressors is dominated by men, Miss Dēng being its only female member. However, the structural web involving these two groups of characters is by no means rigidly symmetrical. In the first group, some of the less refined characters, like Jiǎ Ruì and maybe Bāo'èr's wife, have personalities that bring them quite close to the second group. And in the second group, Jiǎ Liǎn is a much more emotional character than his cold father Jiǎ Shè, and the promiscuous and beautiful young woman Miss Dēng almost constitutes a group unto herself. This structural web, therefore, displays a lack of strict order and symmetry, and this is, as we have seen, typical of psychological structures. In spite of its unorderly nature, however, the basic pattern is clear: Illicit love leads to death when it is heartfelt, while sexual transgression without emotional involvement is fairly harmless. This seems to reflect a deepseated fear of the uncontrollable feelings of love and attachment. As an early commentator expressed it: 愛何（河）之深無底，何可泛濫，一溺其中，非死不止 (ch. 35, Royal Household Edition, Youzheng Edition).
Structural frame: The repression of lust
Most of the deaths due to love occur in the chapters immediately preceding the building of the Prospect Garden 大觀園 or in the chapters accompanying the gradual collapse of the garden idyll. Before the building of the garden begins in chapter 16, Jiǎ Ruì, Qín Kěqīng and Qín Zhōng die in rapid succession, and the stories of their deaths fill most of the space from chapter 12 (or 10, if we include Qín Kěqīng's illness) to chapter 16. When the garden idyll is about to crumble, the story of the Yóu sisters takes up much of the space from chapter 63 to chapter 70, and then Qíngwén's illness, dismissal and death come in chapter 77, as does Dàiyù's death in some later chapter to which we have no access, and which may never have been finished from the author's hand. In the following, I will argue that it is no coincidence that the idyllic and often lyrical depictions of life in the
The
I shall argue that the stories in which heartfelt, but illicit love leads to inevitable death are parts of a structural frame surrounding the
First, the birthday party in honour of Jiǎ Jìng 賈敬, head of the Níngguó branch of the family, in chapters 10-11 stands in a near-symmetric relation to Bǎoyù's birthday party in chapters 62-63. Jiǎ Jìng's birthday party may be read as an introduction to the first part of this structural frame. By providing an opportunity for Jiǎ Ruì to meet his sister-in-law (actually his distant cousin's wife) Wáng Xīfèng, Jiǎ Jìng's birthday party initiates the chain of events that leads to Jiǎ Ruì's death. Due to his slightly ridiculous search for Daoist immortality, Jiǎ Jìng himself is absent from the party, and his absence on this and nearly all other occasions is seen as a precondition for the irresponsibility and wild lasciviousness of his son Jiǎ Zhēn, including the latter's sexual relation to his daughter-in-law Qín Kěqīng, who on one reading of the novel commits suicide because of this unseemly relation. Jiǎ Jìng's birthday also coincides with Kěqīng's pregnancy-like illness. Whether she kills herself or dies of illness, therefore, Jiǎ Jìng's birthday provides an immediate precursor to her death. Since Qín Zhōng's fatal relation to a young nun takes place during the funeral arrangements for his older sister, even his death may be seen as following in the wake of Jiǎ Jìng's birthday party. In seemingly sharp contrast to Jiǎ Jìng's disastrous birthday party, Bǎoyù's birthday party may be seen as the culmination of innocent pleasure in the
Second, Jiǎ Jìng's birthday party also stands in a near-symmetric relation to his death and funeral. Just as his birthday party introduces the chains of events that lead to the deaths of Jiǎ Ruì, Qín Kěqīng and Qín Zhōng, so his funeral provides an opportunity for Jiǎ Zhēn and Jiǎ Róng to engage in their sexual relations to Yóu Èrjiě and Yóu Sānjiě (who are Jiǎ Zhēn's sisters-in-law and Jiǎ Róng's aunts) and for Jiǎ Liǎn to meet them and then make Yóu Èrjiě his semi-illicit concubine, all this eventually leading to the suicide of both women. After the long and dramatic story of the fate of the two sisters is over in chapter 70, the joyful state of life in the
Third, there also exists an interesting near-symmetric relation between Qín Kěqīng's and Jiǎ Jìng's death and funeral. Both are grandiose occasions. The emperor bestows upon the deceased Jiǎ Jìng an official title (while acknowledging that he has made no great contribution to the country), mirroring the purchase of an official title for Qín Kěqīng’s husband at her death. The choice of wood for a coffin again is a topic in both cases, though easier to handle in the case of Jiǎ Jìng, since it has been prepared in advance. Tens of thousands of onlookers follow both funeral processions. Family members whom we otherwise never hear of only enter the scene on these two occasions, among them Jiǎ Guāng 賈珖 and Jiǎ Héng 賈珩. And just as Jiǎ Zhēn’s wife's illness creates a problem for the funeral arrangements after Qín Kěqīng’s death, Jiǎ Zhēn’s absence initially also creates a problem for the funeral arrangements after Jiǎ Jìng's death. There are, however, two striking contrasts between the two occasions. First, as has often been observed, the expenses for Jiǎ Jìng's funeral create immediate problems for the cash-flow within the family, while no such effect is visible during the lavish arrangements for Qín Kěqīng. Second, while Qín Kěqīng has been highly cherished by everyone, nobody seems to have cared much for Jiǎ Jìng, and their weeping and wailing for him are clearly hypocritical. By the time of Jiǎ Jìng's death, all that is left is an external display both of wealth and of the emotions that bind a family together.
Fourth, while Jiǎ Jìng’s funeral may be read as a mirror image of the funeral of Qín Kěqīng, the lives and deaths of the Yóu sisters provide a mirror image of Qín Kěqīng’s life and death. The two stories contain remarkably many of the same elements, briefly summarised below:
1. Both Qín Kěqīng and the Yóu sisters are beautiful women described with much sympathy.
2. Both Qín Kěqīng and the Yóu sisters have had a sexual relation to Jiǎ Zhēn and Jiǎ Róng simultaneously.
3. Just as Bǎoyù is erotically drawn to Qín Kěqīng, some of his comments suggest a quite intimate relation to the Yóu sisters as well.
4. Both Qín Kěqīng and the Yóu sisters have a poor background and have been partly brought up by a father who is not their biological parent.
5. Both Qín Kěqīng and the Yóu sisters end up committing suicide.
6. Just as the death of Qín Kěqīng is rapidly followed by the death of her brother Qín Zhōng, so the death of Yóu Sānjiě is rapidly followed by the death of her sister Yóu Èrjiě.
7. Both Qín Kěqīng and Yóu Èrjiě suffer towards the end of their lives from symptoms that doctors have difficulties deciding whether are due to illness or pregnancy, none of them having menstruated for several months.
8. Both Qín Kěqīng and Yóu Èrjiě have an intense and in many ways intimate relationship with Wáng Xīfèng.
9. Both the dying Qín Kěqīng and the dead Yóu Sānjiě bid a last farewell to their dearest ones by entering into their dreams or dream-like states.
10. Even in the details of the text following Yóu Èrjiě’s death there are repercussions of the text following Qín Kěqīng’s death, such as "Soon everyone in the household had heard the news" 當下合宅皆知 mirroring "By this time the entire household had heard the news" 彼時合家皆知.
11. The condensation of Dàiyù and Bǎochāi into the dream figure Kěqīng in chapter 5 is mirrored in the use in chapter 69 of flowers (which are associated with Dàiyù) and snow (which is associated with Bǎochāi) in describing Yóu Èrjiě’s weakly constitution (“stomach made from flowers and skin made of snow” 花為腸肚，雪作肌膚 [4]).
In some respects, it is almost as if the story of the Yóu sisters, especially Yóu Èrjiě, is a retelling of the story of Qín Kěqīng.
In surn, then, these structural pairs, together with the deaths due to illicit love, constitute a structural frame for the garden idyll. The
The apparent innocence of the
The way the Prospect Garden chapters are surrounded by the frame chapters is symbolic of the way the Prospect Garden idyll is surrounded by forces that threaten to destroy it. In fact, however, the destructive forces reside just as much within the
In general, the
Structural drift: Joy engenders sorrow
The death of Qíngwén also exemplifies what we may call a basic structural drift in the novel, a pattern of recurring downward movement. All that is good is lost in the end. Emotional attachment eventually leads to tragedy. This is not only true of the love between human beings, as in the many deaths of love-ridden characters, but also of the disaster awaiting the Jiǎ family's relatively carefree life of glory and riches, and the falling apart of the more or less innocent life of Bǎoyù and the girls in the Prospect Garden. This downward movement is so dominant that the few exceptions, like the apparently harmonic development of the love relation between Jiǎ Yún 賈芸 and Xiǎohóng 小紅 in chapters 25-26, stand out as being quite untypical. It is this structural drift that the dying Kěqīng uses a number of well-known sayings to describe in her dream visit to Xīfèng in chapter 13: 月滿則虧，水滿則溢, 登高必跌重, and 樂極悲生.
The more intense the feelings of attachment, the more painful the downfall. This explains both why love-ridden characters die, while loveless lascivious rakes survive, and why Xīfèng, with her extraordinary greed for power and money, seems poised to meet with an even more tragic end than most of the rest of the family. Returning to the first structural web discussed above, it explains why the intensely emotional Dàiyù and Qíngwén must die, while the more rational and calculating Bǎochāi and Xírén survive.
On a large scale, this downward movement describes the fall of the Jiǎ family. Though its eventuall downfall does not materialise in the course of the 80 extant chapters of the novel, it becomes the focus of attention from the very beginning. Its downfall is foreshadowed by the fall of the generous and lovable Zhēn Shìyǐn in chapter 1 (contrasted with the rise to riches of his talented, but more selfish and calculating protegé Jiǎ Yǔcūn). In chapter 2, we are told that the Jiǎ family is unable to economise and adjust themselves to harsher realities, and that "though outwardly they still manage to keep up appearances, inwardly they are beginning to feel the pinch" 如今外面的架子雖未甚倒，內囊卻也盡上來了. Gradually, the reader is brought into the illusion of unlimited resources and is only occasionally reminded of the family's future fall. One of the reminders comes in chapter 13, when the dying Kěqīng enters into Xīfèng's dream and reminds her that "our house has now enjoyed nearly a century of dazzling success" 如今我們家赫赫揚揚，已將百載, but that "when the tree falls, the monkeys scatter" 樹倒猢猻散. Xīfèng is filled with respect for Kěqīng's foresight and advice, but soon forgets all about it, and is joined by the reader in her forgetfulness. Little by little, however, the economic problems of the family do come to the surface, and even a not too practical person like Dàiyù notices that "our expenditure is vastly in excess of our income" 出的多，進的少, and that "if we go on in this way without economizing, the time will surely come when our credit is exhausted" 如今若不省儉，必致後手不接 (chapter 62). As mentioned above, the relative austerity of Jiǎ Jìng's funeral arrangements in chapters 63-64 provides a clear contrast to the excessive luxury of Kěqīng's funeral arrangements in chapter 13. By now, it is becoming more and more obvious that the family is moving towards its eventual economic ruin without being able to put on the brakes. Both in chapter 13 and later in the novel it is hinted that the final blow comes when imperial emissaries confiscate their remaining property, and this is exactly what happens to the Zhēn family in chapter 75. The image of scattering monkeys in Kěqīng's dream visit to Xīfèng makes it clear that such an event entails not only economic ruin, but also the breaking up of most personal relations within the family.
On only a slightly smaller scale, the fall of the entire family is foreshadowed by the collapse of the garden idyll. Although some of the problems in the garden were present from the very start, their seriousness increases manifold at about the time of Jiǎ Jìng's funeral. Even before Jiǎ Jìng's death, in chapters 61-62, the maidservant Wǔ'ér 五兒 is wrongly accused of theft, and after a minor search threatened with dismissal and placed in housearrest. We later learn that this made her ill, and that she died soon after. During Jiǎ Jìng's funeral arrangements, Yóu Èrjiě was eyed by Jiǎ Liǎn and then, in chapter 68, brought in to live in the garden, where she is driven to suicide in chapter 69. Shortly afterwards, in chapter 71, the maidservant Sīqí 司棋 is discovered making love to her cousin in the garden, whereupon he runs away and she gets ill, before she is eventually purged in chapter 77. In chapter 73, an as yet fairly minor search of the garden results in the punishment of gambling servants. In the same chapter, a purse with a pornographic motif is found and becomes the occasion of a major search of the garden in chapter 74, leading to the dismissal of the maidservant Rùhuà 入畫. In chapter 77, Qíngwén, Sīqí, Sì'ér 四兒, as well as Fāngguān 芳官 and the remaining former actresses are all driven away. Bǎochāi decides to move out of the garden in chapter 78, and Xiānglíng also decides to stay away from the garden. In chapter 79, Yíngchūn 迎春 is married off to a rascal and suffers greatly. Such incidents bring Bǎoyù close to madness as early as chapter 70, and in chapters 78 and 79, he is moved to tears and then to illness by the gradual collapse of what used to be a haven of youthful innocence. Xīfèng, who has been a protector of the garden idyll, is now plagued by illness, and although she is opposed to the search of the garden in chapter 74, she no longer has the strength to oppose it.
The novel sometimes sees its large number of tragedies in a metaphysical perspective, as examples of the transient nature of pleasure as well as pain, based on the cyclical world-view of yīn-yáng complementarity. Most of the sayings to which the dying Kěqīng refers are grounded in this kind of philosophy. One of the sayings even describes an upward rather than a downward movement: pǐ jí tài lái 否極泰來. This cyclical world-view also seems to underlie the famous "Won-done song" 好了歌 and its poetic "commentary" in chapter 1, and the "commentary" even has a few cases of upward movement. However, not only do most of Kěqīng's sayings and the vast majority of lines in the "Won-done song" and its "commentary" describe a downward movement, but the entire novel almost consistently focuses on the downward turn of the cycle. The exceptions are usually marginal characters like the maid Jiǎoxìng 嬌杏, whose very name puns on the word for 'stroke of luck', jiǎoxìng 僥倖, and who ends up climbing up the social ladder and becoming Jiǎ Yǔcūn's 賈雨村 first wife. In general, however, celebrations and festivals are almost always followed by disaster, while the reverse is not the case. While philosophically, this downward drift of the novel is claimed to express a traditional cyclical world-view, therefore, it actually reflects a deeper psychological pessimism, an intense and pervasive sense of loss.
In a metaphysical perspective, the only possible way out of the tragedy is through complete renunciation. In chapter 1, Zhēn Shìyǐn lets go of all attachment and becomes a Daoist recluse. In chapter 66, Liǔ Xiānglián becomes a Daoist recluse after his fiançée's suicide. And in the latter part of the novel, for which the early commentators had seen drafts or outlines, Bǎoyù becomes a monk and eventually "lets go of the hanging cliff" 懸崖撒手, presumably freeing himself of all attachments. However, even the supposedly enlightened lyric of Zhēn Shìyǐn at the end of chapter 1 does not really convey a sense of non-attachment, just a kind of disillusionment with the things to which we are attached: "Each of us with that poor girl may compare / Who sews a wedding-gown for another bride to wear" 到頭來都是為他人作嫁衣裳！ No matter what philosophical meaning may be read into the downward drift of the narrative line, its basic emotional import is rather a sense of helpless and utterly reluctant surrender to a world of shattered hopes. Philosophically, these parts are about renunciation and liberation, while psychologically, they are about disillusionment and hopelessness.
Structural drift: The root of the fall
Even if we do not go into the details of the actual author's life, and especially if we take into account the 作者自云 preface that most editions include as a part of the novel itself, we may read The Red Chamber Dream as a story built around a core of memories of lost youth and lost prosperity and the bewilderment that follows. The 錦衣紈袴之時，飫甘饜肥之日 that once seemed so real and indisputable are now, amidst 今日之茅椽蓬牖，瓦灶繩床, just faint memories, almost like a dream or a fabricated story. At the same time, the memories of a splendid past seem so much more authentic and genuine than the harsh and almost intolerable truth about the present moment, and the sense of alienation linked to it. The novel, in its confusing interplay of real 真 and unreal 假, becomes a way of retrieving the irretrievable, of making the unreal seem real. What is lost for good in real life may still live on in one's imagination. The "hot and bitter tears" 辛酸淚 supposedly underlying the whole narrative (according to a poem in chapter 1) provide a much-desired gateway to this lost world, alleviating the pains of the present by reviving the intense sense of pleasure associated with the past.
But when the idyll eventually crumbles, the result is a fractured and ruptured world in which the original patterns of meaning no longer make sense, a place where bitterness reigns.
How can one explain such a terrible loss? Where, if at all, can one put the blame? Or was the whole thing perhaps unavoidable? Was the blissful state an illusion built on the suppression of destructive forces that were at some point bound to break through? Or on the denial of the basic conditions of life, including the passing of time? (For although the loss of wealth and glory may not have been inevitable, the loss of youth certainly was.) Or are in the end the memories themselves at least partly illusory, products of a mind that is all too willing to exaggerate both the material prosperity and the emotional intensity of the lost world it is desperately longing to retrieve? The Red Chamber Dream may be read as bringing together into a long and complex story a number of fragmentary and contradictory attempts at addressing and exploring such questions.
The novel seems to vacillate between a sense of guilt and a tendency to blame outside forces. The guilt part is obvious in the 作者自云 preface, in which the author is quoted as blaming himself for the sin of ... 一技無成,半生潦倒之罪, and of having ... 背父兄教育之恩,負師友規談之德. However, the novel's main protagonist, Jiǎ Bǎoyù, apparently never feels guilt, and some of the enigmatic song lyrics in chapter 5, one of which is titled "The end of all that is good" 好事終, explicitly place the blame for the fall of the family outside our sphere of identification, on the Níngguó branch of the family, clearly representing "the other":
漫言不肖皆榮出，造釁開端實在寧
家事消亡首罪寧
Denial of guilt, however, amounts to an admittal of, not factual guilt, but a psychological sense of guilt, or at the very least a strong concern with it. Freud writes about the unconscious:
There are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty: all this is only introduced by the work of the censorship between the [Unconscious] and the [Preconscious]. Negation is a substitute, at a higher level, for repression. (Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious", 1915, Standard Edition vol. 14 p. 186. Cf. Sigmund Freud, "Negation", 1923, Standard Edition vol. 19, p. 239: “. . . in analysis we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious”.)
Psychologically, therefore, there is at bottom no difference between the author's initial sense of guilt and Jiǎ Bǎoyù's appalling lack of guilt, or the attempts at projecting the sense of guilt onto the evil forces of the Níngguó branch of the family. The negation of guilt only amounts to a repression of an already existing sense of guilt.
The attempts at placing the blame outside our sphere of identification and outside the novel's main protagonist are also contradicted by other elements in the same song lyrics. First, the sinful element in both song lyrics is conceived to be qíng 情, which is exactly the element with which Bǎoyù is most strongly associated:
情天情海幻情身，情既相逢必主淫。
宿孽總因情。
The first of these song lyrics states squarely that there is no qíng without yín 淫'lasciviousness', and the second states that the karmic root of the downfall of the family is precisely qíng. Of course, Bǎoyù's yín is supposed to be a 'lust of the mind' 意淫, a more refined kind than the yín of others, but psychologically speaking, the strong connection between qíng and karmic guilt cannot but affect him at least as much as the members of the largely loveless Níngguó family.
Furthermore, both song lyrics are associated with paintings of the suicide of Qín Kěqīng, and one of the song lyrics states that 擅風情，秉月貌，便是敗家的根本, clearly hinting at the disastrous effect of her beauty and obsession with love. As we shall see, the associations between Kěqīng and Bǎoyù are strong, so her guilt inevitably also implicates him. Thus, the notion that the denial of guilt is actually connected to the repression of guilt is not just a fanciful Freudian idea, but is based on the text of the novel.
The vacillation between internal guilt and external blame is also evident in the concrete events leading to the falling apart of the garden idyll. The various searches and purges that seem to destroy life in the garden from the outside are actually preceded by similar actions, though on a smaller scale, by Bǎoyù and the seemingly innocent girls around him. For instance, as early as chapter 8, Bǎoyù gets angry and wants to dismiss his own wet nurse for a minor incident, and ends up (according to a comment in chapter 19) dismissing the innocent young maidservant Qiànxuě 茜雪. In chapter 52, Qíngwén, who is one of the main victims of a later purge, becomes herself a perpetrator of violence when she dismisses the young maidservant Zhuì'ér 墜兒 on partly trumped-up charges.
As other scholars have pointed out, however, nobody is actually to blame for the collapse of the garden idyll. It is in fact an unavoidable effect of the growing to age of its inhabitants and their consequent dispersal. Most of those who live in the garden are unmarried girls who will eventually have to be married off. Furthermore, the passage of time brings with it the inevitable maturation both of Bǎoyù and the girls, and their emerging sexuality and the consequent need for sexual segregation is a topic of concern throughout the novel. Even without the searches and purges of the garden, the innocent relations between the garden's inhabitants are sooner or later doomed to come to an end. And the stronger the attachment between these inhabitants is, the more painful their eventual dispersal will be. The contradictory emotions expressed by the novel include an intense longing for this sense of attachment combined with a fearful awareness of the dreadful pain that will be its inevitable result. And this fear focuses on the very same feelings that we have already discussed in connection with the sense of guilt: the fuzzy area between love and lust, between qíng and yín (or yù 慾 'desire'), between attachment (more often than not with an erotic undertone) and physical sexuality.
This common focus brings together two themes (and two explanations for the loss) that seem at the outset very different: the passing of time and the sense of guilt. At bottom, both are rooted in a fear of the disastrous consequences of combining erotic attachment with actual physical sexuality.
The very same focus links the topics discussed in this section to the earlier discussions of the death of love-struck characters and the survival of loveless lechers. Physical sexuality by itself is not conceived as a threat, unless it is combined with the sensuality and sensitivity that is so characteristic of Bǎoyù and the girls on the one hand, and the number of characters who die for love on the other.
Bǎoyù's emerging sexuality is constantly perceived as a sinister threat; it brings both him and others into trouble. It begins with his wet dream during an afternoon nap in the bed of his nephew's wife in chapter 5, which is immediately followed by his first sexual intercourse, with his maidservant Xírén. The real trouble, however, comes much later, and it comes in spite of the fact that Bǎoyù no longer seems to have actual sex with any of the girls. In chapter 30, it is Bǎoyù mother's worries about the corruption of her son that leads her to hit and then purge the maidservant Jīnchuàn, who ends up commiting suicide. In the same chapter, Dàiyù tells Bǎoyù to stop his physically intimate behaviour with her now that they are beginning to grow up. In chapter 34, Xírén reminds Bǎoyù's mother that Bǎoyù and the girls are beginning to grow up and cannot go on living together forever. In chapter 57, Dàiyù's maid Zǐjuān asks Bǎoyù to keep his hands off her now that they are no longer children. The purge of a number of maidservants in chapter 77 is mainly motivated by Madame Wáng's fear that they might seduce her son Bǎoyù. And in chapter 79, Xiānglíng 香菱 decides to keep away from the garden after she misconstrues one of Bǎoyù's wellmeant comments as an improper advance. Thus, the falling apart of life in the garden, and perhaps even the later downfall of the family, is repeatedly linked to Bǎoyù's emerging sexuality.
From the very beginning of the novel, Bǎoyù himself expresses contempt for male sexuality, including his own sexuality, symbolised by his jade, the likes of which "none of the girls has got" 家裡姐姐妹妹都沒有 (chapter 3), and the sexuality of married women, which has been infected by male impurity. Although as late as chapter 78, Grandmother Jiǎ observes that Bǎoyù's intimacy with the maidservants is not sexually motivated, his coming of age means that the strong bonds of attachment between him and the girls sooner or later will be tainted by the same sexual drives that have taken the life of other love-struck characters.
The notion of yìyín 意淫 is probably best understood as a strategy for the avoidance of the ultimate disaster. It is an exact reverse of the attitude of the loveless lechers: strong and lasting feelings of love without their actual realisation through illicit sexual behaviour. For Bǎoyù, this strategy does seem to work, at least in the sense that he physically survives. For sensual and flirtatious, but in fact quite innocent girls like Jīnchuàn and Qíngwén, however, sexual abstention does not save their lives. Unlike Bǎoyù, they simply do not seem to belong to the group of 有緣者 who are able to traverse 渡 the 迷津 without 墮落其中. And even in the case of Bǎoyù, his physical survival does not prevent the falling apart of all that he loves, including the garden idyll and eventually the entire Jiǎ family.
Another strategy for the avoidance of the ultimate disaster lies in the lyrical mode of existence (and of writing) associated with the Prospect Garden. Lyricism borders on the timeless and thus seems on the surface to be the best antidote to the passage of time. In the novel, Bǎoyù is 13 years of age all the way from chapter 18 to chapter 53 (counting from newyear to newyear), the pace of the narrative having slowed down perceptibly with the building of the Prospect Garden from chapters 17-18 onwards. The slow-paced lyricism of the garden chapters may have been the author's only literary weapon against the progression of time and the falling to pieces of the wonderful world of his own childhood.[6] In the novel, the significance of the slow temporal progress after Bǎoyù has turned 13 lies in the way it keeps him in a state in which his sexuality and masculinity are emerging and may be conceived as a threat, without bringing him beyond the point where these forces break through and eventually smash the image of childish innocence completely. It is significant that it is Bǎoyù's 14th birthday (on the 27th day of the 5th month, in chapters 62-63) that marks the end of the garden idyll, and after that, the passing of time actually begins to pick up in speed. Again, however, after entering the 8th month of the following year in chapter 71, the pace slows down again, as if to avert the final disaster, and when the narrative breaks off after chapter 80 (or at least in chapter 79, since we do not have an exact indication of the time after that), we are still in the 8th month. I shall return to the difficulties the author seems to have had finishing his novel below, difficulties that seem to be related to the fear of the impending disaster, which he attempts to avoid by entering into the timelessness of the lyrical mode, or by constantly introducing new narrative plots (such as the introduction of Xià Jīnguì 夏金桂 in chapter 79).
In addition to the purely psychological issues discussed here, emotions like the fear of love also have their own cultural history. Early Chinese novels, such as Water Margin 水滸傳 and Three Kingdoms 三國演義, written in the 14th or 15th century, are known for their negative views of women, whose influence is seen as a threat that any male has to overcome in order to grow into a true hero. In these novels, men sometimes even have to kill women who become too intimate in order to show their real prowess. On the surface, The Red Chamber Dream represents an opposite view, idealising women (or at least young and attractive girls) while expressing a profound skepticism towards men and male ideals. However, The Red Chamber Dream shares with the early novels a deep-seated fear of intimacy and of how the uncontrollable feelings and passions associated with love may destroy a life. The different ways this fear is expressed in early novels and The Red Chamber Dream reflect the difference between a period and novelistic subgenre concerned with grandiose heroism and one that is more interested in private feelings, especially love.
Sympathy and antipathy
So far, our discussion of structural pairs has been based on more or less objective descriptions of the characters involved, and not on the emotional responses they elicit in the reader. Some structural pairs, however, are accompanied by a contrast between feelings of sympathy and antipathy on the part of the reader. For instance, characters whose illicit love leads to death tend to receive the reader's sympathy, while characters whose rampant lovemaking has no apparent consequenses are seen as less sympathetic or even unsympathetic. The opposition between sympathy and antipathy constitutes a large and complex issue, which brings the reader's emotional responses directly into the discussion.
In the present context, sympathy is the feeling of liking somebody, a combination of a positive evaluation and positive emotions towards another person, while antipathy is simply the opposite. Sympathetic characters, then, are ones that the reader tends to like, while unsympathetic characters are ones that the reader tends to dislike. While this is not unrelated to the feelings that the characters themselves are described as having towards each other (as when both the reader and the characters of the novel tend to dislike Jiǎ Huán), the focus here lies on the reader's reactions, not on the reactions of the fictional characters.
The main psychological importance of sympathy (and its opposite) lies in its complex relation to empathy (and the lack of it). Encyclopaedia Britannica defines empathy as "the ability to imagine oneself in another's place and understand the other's feelings, desires, ideas, and actions". Sympathy is clearly possible without empathy, as when you like a person because he or she somehow suits your needs rather than because you empathise with his or her needs, more or less like Bǎoyù's self-confirming sympathy for the actress Língguān 齡官, who turns out to be much less interested in his attention than he imagines. While empathy without sympathy is also possible, however, it is notoriously difficult. It is much easier for characters inspiring sympathy to become objects of the reader's empathy than it is for unsympathetic characters. Imagining yourself in another's place is simply easier if you like the other person. The sympathetic characters in The Red Chamber Dream are not only described with more empathy by the author, but also tend to be met with more empathy by the reader than the less sympathetic ones.
Empathy is recognised as a central element in psychotherapy within several schools of psychodynamic theory (humanistic psychology, self psychology, object relations theory). Just as a parental figure's empathy stimulates the child to see and accept itself as it is, a therapist's empathy does more or less the same to the patient. In both settings, the focus is on the effect of empathy on the receiver. There is, however, also an effect on the provider of empathy. By imagining himself in the other person's place, the provider of empathy is actually exploring how the other person's feelings, desires and ideas resonate in his own mind. He temporarily and partially identifies with the other person and is thereby brought to recognise as his own feelings, desires and ideas of which he may previously have been unaware. As has often been pointed out, therefore, empathy and introspection are two sides of the same coin.
Part of the pleasure of reading a novel like The Red Chamber Dream lies in the emotional resonance created in the reader's mind by the vicarious representation of his impulses. This resonance may take two forms. If the reader is able to identify with the mindset and behaviour of a certain character, his reading may result in the kind of empathy and introspection described above. If, on the other hand, the reader is unable to identify with a character, the resulting lack of empathy typically corresponds to a projective, denying and externalising stance in which feelings, desires and ideas are treated as belonging to the other (the character) rather than the self (the reader). This may be just as intensely pleasurable (as witnessed by the enthusiasm for crime and murder stories in seemingly completely unaggressive persons), since this kind of reading still allows for a vicarious representation of impulses, although it is no longer recognised as such.
In fact, of course, the relation between identification and empathy is more complex than suggested here. While empathy involves an ability to see a person as he really is, identification may at times have the opposite effect, as when many readers, and perhaps even the author, of The Red Chamber Dream identify with an idealised image of Bǎoyù and fail to see his weaknesses. (See further chapter 4.) In the present context, however, we shall be concerned with (temporary and partial) identification as a prerequisite for empathy.
Although The Red Chamber Dream is famous for its lack of black-and-white distinctions between “good” and “bad” characters, there is a conspicuous contrast between the strong sympathy conveyed in descriptions of some characters and the strong antipathy expressed, directly and indirectly, towards others. Typically, sympathetic characters are endowed with unusual amounts of sensitivity, poetic talent, considerate attitude, purity, and external beauty, while less sympathetic characters display more disputable qualities, like wild promiscuity, lack of concern for others, stupidity, violence, greed, and the abuse of power. In general, less sympathetic characters are also depicted much more superficially, with less empathy and psychological insight.
Characters inspiring sympathy most notably include Bǎoyù and all the young girls surrounding him in the Prospect Garden, as well as some sensitive young men, such as Bǎoyù's close friend Qín Zhōng, his actor-friends Jiǎng Yùhàn 蔣玉菡 and Liǔ Xiānglián 柳香蓮, in addition to Shuǐróng, the Prince of Běijìng 北靜郡王水溶. As mentioned, most or all of the characters who die for love are sympathetic, with the possible exception of Bāo èr's wife, whom the novel seems to treat neutrally, with neither sympathy nor antipathy. Even Jiǎ Ruì, who is crude and not too sensitive in his desperate, misguided and eventually fatal pursuit of physical love is treated with some degree of sympathy, mainly because he is so obviously a victim of internal and external forces over which he has no control. The group of characters inspiring sympathy also includes two older women: the head of the family Lady Jiǎ and, more unequivocally, the country-woman and distant relative Grannie Liú 劉姥姥.
The most obviously unsympathetic characters are above all the group of insensitive male lechers, like Jiǎ Shè, who has few if any redeeming traits, Jiǎ Zhēn, Jiǎ Róng, Xuē Pán and, more ambiguously, Jiǎ Liǎn. Bǎoyù's stupid and ugly half-brother Jiǎ Huán 賈環, though hardly a lecher, also belongs within this group. So, to a large extent, do the pedantic Confucians Jiǎ Zhèng 賈政 (Bǎoyù's father) and Jiǎ Dàirú 賈代儒 (Jiǎ Ruì's grandfather), as well as the longevity-seeking alchemist Jiǎ Jìng. The most clearly unsympathetic female character is Xuē Pán's wife Xià Jīnguì 夏金桂, who is wild-tempered, violent, jealous, egotistic, and manipulative. Jiǎ Shè's wife Madame Xíng 邢氏 also receives little sympathy, while Jiǎ Zhèng's wife Madame Wáng 王氏 and Jiǎ Zhēn's wife Madame Yóu 尤氏 are less unequivocal. Jiǎ Zhèng's jealous concubine Auntie Zhào 趙姨娘 is described with little sympathy. Among older servants, female servants and nannies are described with less sympathy than male servants. The promiscuous Miss Dēng may not inspire much respect, but is not in the end an unsympathetic character.
Apart from the old Lady Jiǎ and Grannie Liú, most of the characters inspiring sympathy are described, sometimes in long-winded and semi-poetic language, as being physically attractive, often with erotic or semi-erotic undertones. With the exception of the ugly Jiǎ Huán and the pretty Xià Jīnguì (see below), the less sympathetic characters are neither described as pretty or ugly. The novel simply expresses no interest in their appearance. To some extent, therefore, there seems to be a connection between sympathy and physical attractiveness.
In everyday parlance, sympathy is often associated with the feeling of commiseration with somebody's pain. While suffering is not a necessary prerequisite for sympathy in the sense used here, it is interesting to note how often the two go together. For instance, the rather crude sexual desire driving Jiǎ Ruì to try to get his distant nephew's wife Xīfèng in bed in chapter 12 does not in itself evoke much sympathy, only ridicule and maybe contempt. But when he is in effect driven to death by the traps set up for him by Xīfèng, his very blindness and helplessness turn him into a person it is easier to like, a character for whom the reader feels sympathy. We shall see below that victimhood is one of the features often associated with sympathetic characters in The Red Chamber Dream.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN THE READING OF FICTION
Harding Brit J Aesthetics.1962; 2: 133-147
Blurring the distinction
In a number of ways, The Red Chamber Dream manipulates the balance between sympathy and antipathy so as to break down the boundaries between identification and projection, between empathy and externalisation. The reader is thereby challenged to renegotiate the relation between different areas of his own mind, to acknowledge more or less hidden impulses, and to internalise that which has been placed outside his own realm of identification.
First, most characters are ambiguous with regard to the distinction between sympathy and antipathy, sometimes inspiring warm feelings of compassion and approval, at other times provoking disgust and disapproval. The most strongly ambiguous character in this respect is the novel's female protagonist Wáng Xīfèng 王熙鳳, who is extremely talented, constantly humorous, bewitchingly beautiful and often both warm and tender, but who is also wildly jealous, scaringly deceitful, violently cruel and brutal, and who is constantly driven by her aggressive lust for power and wealth (see chapter 3). But Xīfèng is far from alone. Even the novel's male protagonist Bǎoyù is a much more ambiguous character than usually assumed, sometimes displaying a daunting lack of empathy and responsibility even towards the people he loves the most (see chapter 4). Another type of ambiguity regards the all-out unsympathetic character Xià Jīnguì. For in spite of all her evil, she looks just as bewitchingly beautiful and physically attractive as most of the sympathetic characters, and this seeming contradiction puzzles Bǎoyù and contributes to his sense of gloom towards the end of (the relevant part of) the novel.
Second, regarding the distinction between sympathetic and less sympathetic characters, the narrator is not a reliable source of information. As is sometimes the case in Chinese fiction, the narrator typically represents conventional views at odds with the dominating values underlying the text as a whole.[7] Thus, the narrator is often extremely critical of Bǎoyù, though the novel as a whole tends to idealise his unconventional attitudes, and he is certainly one of the characters for whom many readers throughout the centuries have felt a strong sympathy. The unreliable narrator's critical views are sometimes reflected in comments from other characters in the novel, not only characters with conventional values such as Bǎochāi (calling Bǎoyù 無事忙), but also Lady Jiǎ 賈母, who actually adores him (but calls him a 孽根禍胎), and Dàiyù, who is herself quite unconventional and has, to put it mildly, very warm feelings towards him (but calls him ???).
Most importantly, there is a clear relation between the characters on each side, so that many of the psychological traits found in sympathetic characters are closely related to the behaviour patterns found in less sympathetic characters. This most famously applies to Bǎoyù’s “lust of the mind” (yìyín 意淫) vis-à-vis the lasciviousness of many of the male characters in the novel. In fact, Bǎoyù constitutes one part of a number of structural pairs of increasing significance in this respect:
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Jiǎ Bǎoyù |
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Zhēn Bǎoyù Qín Zhōng Jiǎ Ruì Jiǎ Liǎn Jiǎ Róng Jiǎ Zhēn Jiǎ Shè |
Jiǎ Bǎoyù and his double Zhēn Bǎoyù, whom he only meets in a dream, have the same personal name (and family names punning on the exact opposite meanings: jiǎ 'false' and zhēn 'real'), the same beautiful appearance, and the same unconventional personality. Both worship young girls and express shame at being filthy males, both are being spoiled by their grandmothers, and both belong among the characters inspiring sympathy, though their unorthodox characters are even more the objects of admiration and wonder.
One step away, Bǎoyù's close friend Qín Zhōng is still clearly one of the refined and sensitive characters for whom the novel expresses strong sympathy. Like Bǎoyù, he is physically attractive and effeminate. He also shares with Bǎoyù unconventional values and a sense of being on a higher plane than the mainstream. In the end, however, his highly illicit and impulse-driven sexual relationship to a young nun (a relationship that ends up killing him, because he catches a cold) brings him one step closer to the group of unsympathetic lechers. His new-won conventional values on his deathbed have a similar effect.
A further step away, it may not be immediately obvious how Bǎoyù is associated with Jiǎ Ruì, who is clearly a much cruder character, and whose desperate sexual pursuits are not exactly signs of emotional refinement. Symbolically, however, the two are inextricably linked by being beaten almost to death by their pedantic Confucian father figures (in Jiǎ Ruì's case, actually his grandfather). In both cases, their beatings are partly caused by an illicit and semi-incestuous erotic relation (Bǎoyù's flirting with his mother's maidservant and Jiǎ Ruì's desperate pursuit of his distant cousin's wife Xīfèng). In addition to the beating scenes, the two also share an object of lust, since there are indications that the relation between Bǎoyù and Xīfèng is not quite as innocent as it should be. Xīfèng's too intimate relation to her younger brother-in-law (小叔子, in this case, her husband's cousin rather than brother) is mentioned both in the drunken talk of the old servant Jiāodà 焦大 and in one of Jiǎ Liǎn's quarrels with his wife.
With Jiǎ Liǎn, we have clearly taken the step to the other side of the division line between sympathetic and less sympathetic characters. Still, Bǎoyù and Jiǎ Liǎn are structurally paired in relevant ways. First, both are referred to as "Second Master" 二爺, although this makes bad logical sense, Bǎoyù being number 2 among brothers but number 4 among cousins, while Jiǎ Liǎn is number 1 among brothers and number 2 among cousins. Second, their relation is reinforced by the intimacy between Bǎoyù and Xīfèng, who is Jiǎ Liǎn's wife. Third, the many structural links between Xīfèng and Bǎoyù (see chapter 3) also bring Bǎoyù and Jiǎ Liǎn closer together. Although Jiǎ Liǎn clearly belongs within the group of unsympathetic lechers, he also has many redeeming and even sympathetic traits.
Jiǎ Róng and especially his father Jiǎ Zhēn are more unequivocally unsympathetic. Bǎoyù shares with both a sexual interest in Jiǎ Róng's wife Kěqīng, in whose eroticised bedroom he once takes an afternoon nap and dreams that she introduces him to the art of love. The intimacy of their relation is reinforced during Bǎoyù's visit to her bedroom while she is ill a couple of years later, at which point he looks once more at the suggestive paintings and lines of poetry on the wall and is reminded of his earlier visit. While Kěqīng is Jiǎ Róng's wife, she is at the same time her father-in-law Jiǎ Zhēn's mistress.
Bǎoyù's relations to Jiǎ Liǎn, Jiǎ Róng and Jiǎ Zhēn are further reinforced by their common relation to Yóu Èrjiě and Yóu Sānjiě. Jiǎ Róng and Jiǎ Zhēn both have a sexual relation to these young girls, and Jiǎ Liǎn tries to flirt with both of them and ends up taking Yóu Èrjiě as his illegal concubine. Again, Bǎoyù's relation to them is only suggestive. He says himself that “I spent a month there fooling around with them” 我在那裡和他們混了一個月, [8] and almost in the same breath that “perhaps I’m none too clean myself” 連我也未必乾淨了. On at least two other occasions, there are indications of a possible relation between Yóu Sānjiě and Bǎoyù.
Even the most detestable of the male lechers in the novel, Jiǎ Shè, is symbolically tied to Bǎoyù, again highlighting the close connection between sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. Jiǎ Shè's attempt at forcefully acquiring as a concubine his mother's maidservant Yuānyāng 鴛鴦 is a mirror image of Bǎoyù's earlier flirtatious words to his mother's maidservant Jīnchuàn, indicating that they might one day be a couple. Since his mother's maidservant is technically also his father's concubine, such a relation is considered incestuous.
Thus, through a number of structural pairs, the sympathetic and even idealised Bǎoyù is systematically associated with some of the least sympathetic of the novel's characters. Some early critics drew the negative conclusion that even apparently sympathetic characters like Bǎoyù are at bottom no better than the lascivious rakes they are at pains to distinguish themselves from:
Bǎoyù’s character is refined, but he walks around with women all day, spending all his energy on them, being utterly lascivious, without letting others realise it or restrain him. Jiǎ Róng gives free rein to all his desires among old and young and among the most lowly creatures, and his wicked ways are detestable. The two appear to be as different as night and day, but in the end both are depraved. They are equally obscene, and the difference between them is insubstantial.
寶玉品高性雅，其終日花圍翠繞，用力維持其間，淫蕩之至，而能使旁人不覺，彼人不壓。賈蓉不分長幼微賤，縱意馳騁於中，惡習可恨。二人之形景天淵而終歸於邪，其濫一也，所謂五十步之間耳。
Chén Qìnghào 1986:669, Royal Household edition
However, a more positive conclusion is also possible. The blurred distinction between points of identification and objects of projection or externalisation may help the reader to build down his defenses against the psychologically unacceptable, making possible a reintegration of projected impulses. The reader is invited to take the step from externalisation to internalisation. The Red Chamber Dream invites its readers to self-reflection.
This breaking down of boundaries between sympathy and antipathy is not restricted to the distinction between Bǎoyù's lust of the mind and the lasciviousness of the lechers, but also applies, inter alia, to the usually hidden aggression and unintentional violence of Bǎoyù vis-à-vis the open aggression and deliberate violence of Xīfèng (see chapter 3). This way of looking at psychological elements from different angles is a typical feature of The Red Chamber Dream. It facilitates the exploration and maybe even integration of hidden emotions and forbidden impulses.
Beyond victimhood
The psychoanalytic approach to dreams emphasises the perhaps obvious truth that all elements in a dream stem from the mind of the dreamer. A person dreaming that he is being chased by raging monsters tends to identify, in his waking state, with the anxiety of the victim of aggression, but in fact the rage of the monsters is also his. What appears to be the other is in fact a representation of the self.
The same is true of a novel. In The Red Chamber Dream, there is no reason to privilege the love and painful sadness of Bǎoyù and the large number of young girls circling around him in the Prospect Garden as being somehow more authentic emotional expressions than the shocking greed and lust for power of Xīfèng, or the feelings (if they are worthy of that designation) behind the hideous sexual pursuits of a large number of male characters. True, the author has, to a large extent, safely relegated the most blatant expressions of greed and lustfulness outside (or at least on the outskirts of) the novel’s sphere of sympathy and identification. But this only means that they are displaced – often literally displaced outside the Prospect Garden – and externalised, projected onto "the other". It is all too easy to see the exposure of such desires as channels of vicarious representation of more or less well-hidden impulses in the author – as well as the reader, for in fact, some of the passages in question are among the most intensely enjoyable and readable ones in the whole novel.
One of the reasons why it is easier to identify with Bǎoyù and the girls is that they appear as victims, while Xīfèng and the lecherous males come across as aggressors, as perpetrators of violence. There is little reason to believe, however, that less sympathetic characters do not provide an equally authentic expression of “heartfelt feelings” as the more lovable ones. Greed and lustfulness may inspire less sympathy and more moral indignation than love and tears, but they belong within the same psychological universe.
The same logic may be applied on a meta-level to the writing and the reading of the whole novel. When characters for whom we have built up intense sympathy suffer and eventually die, they are in fact killed by the author, with us, his readers, as knowing and willing accomplices. The same is true when the idyllic life of the Prospect Garden is lovingly and painstakingly built up from scratch, only to be brutally annihilated just a couple of years later, and when the greatness of the Róngguó 榮國 and Níngguó 寧國 mansions is first displayed with no little fervour, before being mercilessly brought to its long anticipated tragic end. In this sense, the author is the novel's greatest perpetrator of violence, and his readers see to it that his acts of violence are repeated over and over again across the centuries. If we see the The Red Chamber Dream as a novel built on the memories of a tragic fall, as indicated in chapter 1, the novel is a recollection of suffered destruction. It is also, however, a reenactment of the very same destruction. It is, among many things, a novel with an aggressive agenda. It is tragic in Lǔ Xùn's ironic sense: "Tragedies destroy whatever has value in life and let people watch while doing so."[9]
There are indications that the actual author had problems carrying through the final act of violence, which would not only imply the eventual destruction of the Róngguó 榮國 and Níngguó 寧國 mansions, but also the completion of his novel. Finishing the novel would mean putting a final stop to the fictional recollection of memories and in a way repeating the traumatic loss and separation that once turned his life upside-down, confirming the irretrievability of the past. At least three years before his early death, when the 1760 manuscript (the gēngchén 庚辰 edition) was put together, chapter 80 was already finished. When he died, he seemed to have got no further. His earliest readers had seen plans for later chapters, but in all probability these chapters were never written. And although by chapter 80 the author had been able to kill off an impressive number of lovable characters (some of whom were done away with quite early in the novel), and even to destroy most of the idyll of the Prospect Garden, he still kept introducing new plots and new characters as if he were at the beginning of his novel. The last 40 chapters skilfully bring the novel to an end, but they had to be written by a different author and do not belong within the material under investigation in the present study.
[1] For a fine study of mirror images in The Red Chamber Dream, see Zhōu Déchéng (20??).
[2] Reference on parallel lines??
[3] Plaks (19??).
[4] Cf. Plaks 1976:68n.
[5] As has been pointed out by Yú Yīngshí, the garden is itself built on the grounds of earlier indecency, as its location was also the location of some of the most salacious episodes in the novel.
[6] It has been common to link the novel's, and especially Bǎoyù's, fear of the passage of time to biographical facts of the author's life. It seems likely that Cáo Xuěqín was himself 13 years of age when his family lost everything they had and were scattered in different directions, probably in 1728.
[7] See Patrick Hanan etc.??
[8] David Hawkes’s translation does not suggest any sexual behaviour on Baoyu’s part: “I saw her practically every day for a month at Ning-guo House …”.
[9] ?悲劇將人生的有價值的東西毀滅給人看? (墳．再論雷峰塔的倒掉，天津人民出版社，香港炎黃國際出版社 no year, p. 203)