Seeking a dream of red mansions thesis.

Xu Yongyuan: Personality Analysis of learned helplessness and Jia Baoyu

Based on learned helplessness's psychological principle, this paper analyzes Jia Baoyu's mental journey, including his constant derogatory evaluation of gods, ghosts and human relations, which leads him to develop from psychological anxiety to mental helplessness, thus generating disillusionment and despair, and concludes that he and his family will inevitably decline or die in "meaningless self-failure", and finally form Jia Baoyu's special personality.

Keywords: "A Dream of Red Mansions" Jia Baoyu learned the classic analysis of helpless personality literature

Jia Baoyu is a classic literary image since ancient times, and its rich and profound meaning is self-evident, but ordinary readers first see a real person. This living man has lived in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions for only 19 years from birth to becoming a monk, and his personality is constantly forming and changing. It is precisely because he doesn't set his own personality from the beginning like the characters in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin and Jin Ping Mei that he provides us with a more multifaceted perspective to interpret this image. When we use the psychological principle of "learned helplessness" to examine this typical image, we find that Jia Baoyu can neither be simply described as a rebel or an awakened person, nor can he be said to have only the spirit of "world-weariness and liberation" (Wang Guowei's language). The formation of his character is the result of the interaction of his internal and external environment. This paper attempts to have a dynamic understanding of his personality formation from the aspects of innate endowment, enlightenment education, social evaluation and self-evaluation.

I. On the "learned helplessness" Principle (1)

The so-called "learned helplessness" was proposed by American psychologist Seyrig Mann in 1967. It means that when people or animals are frustrated one after another, they will feel powerless, lose confidence and fall into a helpless psychological state. This psychological result is obtained by animals or people in research. They realize that no matter how hard they try, they can't alleviate the pain or the end of failure, so they stop struggling and let nature take its course.

Using the principle of "learned helplessness", psychologists have found that most people are interested in the future world and a better life at first, and have a strong curiosity to explore the source, sum up the law and explore the way forward. But after a period of time, when they find that they can't achieve their goals smoothly through various efforts, they will run counter to their own goals in life. In addition, they will often be negatively evaluated by their parents, peers, relatives and society, resulting in anxiety, which leads to doubts and even fears about their own direction of struggle. They began to believe that they really lacked the ability to succeed and were unwilling to work hard to complete the task. Over time, they will suffer from "learned helplessness".

By analyzing Jia Baoyu's mental journey, we will find that Jia Baoyu experienced a series of setbacks and failures in the stage of juvenile enlightenment education and adult education, and finally became disillusioned and went to "decadence" to some extent. The so-called "decadence" here means that life and even the whole civilization are doomed to irretrievably decline or end in meaningless self-exhaustion. It is in the process of realizing his cultural ideal that Jia Baoyu was criticized, ridiculed and even denied by gods, ghosts and human relations, which made him have self-doubt, from psychological anxiety to spiritual helplessness, disillusionment and despair, and thought that he and his family were bound to sink or die in "meaningless self-exhaustion", and finally formed a special personality.

Second, the influence of innate endowment and enlightenment education on the formation of Jia Baoyu's special personality.

Jia Baoyu's life story is legendary. Cao Xueqin wrote that he didn't start from the birth of a baby as usual, but from the myth that the goddess filled the sky. Regarding the connection between Si Tong, Shen Ying Waite and Jia Baoyu, the two versions of the system have different ways to deal with it, and the critics have analyzed it in detail. For example, from the perspective of narratology, stones have the meaning and function of cameras. This paper does not understand the image of stone in this meaning space, but focuses on Jia Baoyu's innate experience, which is referred to as the abandoned stone made by Nu Wa. This myth clearly tells us a psychological fact, that is, Jia Baoyu suffered the first serious psychological setback in his life at the stage of "prenatal education". In the upper world, this psychic Baoyu's "no material to fill the sky" is the starting point or "fundamental reason" for the author to reveal Jia Baoyu's special character.

As a writer with profound thoughts, Cao Xueqin not only discussed the ultimate value of human beings from the physiological point of view, but also from the philosophical point of view-who am I? Where is the land I come from? What will my future be like? It's just that these two angles all use the same bizarre story-Jia Baoyu's dreamland.

The fifth implication in the novel is that although Jia Baoyu is a waiter in front of him, he is just a "muddy thing" after he was born, which is a fatal setting for him and the key factor that causes Jia Baoyu's "learned helplessness" character. First of all, the positioning of Jia Baoyu by the police phantom fairy-"I am a mortal, but I am a prophet", which makes Jia Baoyu have a lingering fear; Then there is the unscrupulous and blatant negative judgment of the little fairies-"Why do you want to lead this turbid thing to pollute the territory of the pure daughter?" God made Baoyu "feel filthy" and Jia Baoyu suffered a heavy psychological blow; Later, Jia Baoyu learned from the fairy tale that Rong Ning, who had never met before, was eager to inherit the family business, and accused him of being "perverse and emotional" because of high expectations. These words made his mind fall into crisis again, making him more repentant and less confident.

These critical words of the divine world have left Jia Baoyu in a state of frustration one after another, and the negative judgment of the divine world is one of the key reasons for Jia Baoyu's value imbalance. From that moment on, his character has a tendency.

Third, the influence of social evaluation and self-evaluation on the formation of Jia Baoyu's special personality.

When Cao Xueqin created Jia Baoyu's artistic image, he also put him in the value system of parents, relatives and companions in the real society, measured his personality value with their value standards, or suppressed Jia Baoyu's values with everyone's incomprehension, disapproval and even misunderstanding.

Cao Xueqin created two opposing worlds, the utopian "Grand View Garden" world and the real world outside the Grand View Garden. The world of Grand View Garden is Jia Baoyu's world, and it is his ideal realm to contend with the secular. There, Jia Baoyu and his daughters enjoyed a pure life isolated from secular passions. Life here is romantic, warm, poetic and spiritual, but it is incompatible with reality and lacks down-to-earth truth. The world outside the Grand View Garden is a kitsch world, where there is a strict concept of male chauvinism and ethical standards representing mainstream culture. According to this standard, Jia Baoyu was denied by the word "Xijiang Yue" in the text as soon as he appeared, and then he showed his specific behavior of "inaction". The parents of Jia Zheng, an orthodox representative, scolded and beat his son Baoyu, which has always been an indelible psychological shadow of Jia Baoyu, and eventually accumulated into a psychological obstacle of Baoyu's "learned helplessness", which made him refuse and alienate his father and gradually alienated Jia Zheng from the right path of joining the WTO. It can be said that both Jia Zheng's ardent expectations of Baoyu and Jia Zheng's abuse and beating of Baoyu are important reasons for Jia Baoyu's weariness and his escape from the world. Besides. It is an important external reason that relatives and friends around Baoyu don't understand, value and support. In the eyes of these relatives and companions, Jia Baoyu is nothing more than an idle devil who specializes in obscene words and poems, wandering among skirts and women. Jia Baoyu is "stupid in talent". He is interested in what girls do, probably because of his sense of gender equality, but the bigger motivation is his psychological disapproval of mainstream ideology.

It can be seen that Jia Baoyu's psychological process of growing up was basically brought up under Jia Zheng's stern eyes and the sound of "stupid things" and "evil obstacles", and he was under the psychological pressure of being afraid of strict father for a long time. With the growth of age, Jia Baoyu is under increasing psychological pressure. This kind of psychological pressure comes not only from Jia Zheng's strict discipline, but also from his relatives (such as Baochai and Xiangyun), his companions (such as xiren), and even more from the imperial concubine's earnest warning. Yuan Chunming did tell Baoyu to discipline him, saying that "being strict will not work, but it will be dangerous." Even Jia, who dotes on Baoyu in many ways, doesn't want him to really "grow up" and "be an official" in the future; Even Lin Daiyu, his lover who promised her life and death, never told him such nonsense as "career economy". When he recovered from being beaten, he also "sobbed" and advised him to "change everything from now on!" For Jia Baoyu, the high hopes of the old lady's doting and Daiyu's affectionate plea for comfort are all invisible pressures. In short, in the social value system, Jia Baoyu's "heresy" behavior was criticized, blamed, exhorted, persuaded and earnestly persuaded from all directions. Jia Baoyu is in an extremely lonely state mentally and is under great psychological pressure. More social forces have extended their tentacles to the Grand View Garden, pushing young people to a dead end by copying and driving them away. All these stimulated Baoyu again and again, making him afraid, resentful, but helpless. ③

Learned helplessness's theory points out that when negative knowledge and behavior reach a certain critical point through long-term accumulation, it will lead to spiritual alienation of people or animals. In the critical period of life growth, what Jia Baoyu felt was mostly depression and imprisonment, and his life value was denied in an all-round and three-dimensional way, which caused him to have a lasting sense of frustration, prompted his thinking to split, made him show a negative and special psychological state in emotion, cognition and behavior, and entered the ranks of decadence, which was the key reason for his "learned helplessness".

When Cao Xueqin created the image of Jia Baoyu, he not only evaluated his words and deeds from the perspective of social group value system, but also gave a certain self-evaluation to this figure. The so-called self-evaluation is the judgment and evaluation of the behavior subject on his own thoughts, wishes, behaviors and personality characteristics. Jia Baoyu has been educated, disciplined and even beaten by strict father for many times, which easily leads to a strong negative self-evaluation and a unique sense of repentance and inferiority complex.

As a value judgment, psychic Baoyu's "mending the sky without materials" is not so much an evaluation of Nu Wa (others) as an evaluation of others' psychological self-identity, that is, self-evaluation. Only in this way will Jia Baoyu care so much about this derogatory and negative evaluation, and will, in comparison with his peers, "because many stones can fill the sky, we can't choose him alone", resulting in a deep sense of loss, inferiority and shame. "I feel sorry for myself and feel ashamed of myself day and night." This low self-evaluation is undoubtedly a metaphor for Jia Baoyu's image ontology. The integrity of his confession consciousness and inferiority complex leads to his fear of failure far greater than his hope for success, so he no longer expects his own success.

On Jia Baoyu's remorse consciousness and inferiority complex, including his so-called daughter worship complex and his idea that women are superior to men. It can be directly attributed to the long-term accumulation and long-term influence of his self-awareness and self-psychology. And this complex also formed Jia Baoyu's low sense of self-efficacy.

The so-called low sense of self-efficacy refers to the belief, judgment or self-feeling of "learned helplessness" individuals about their ability to complete a certain behavior before performing it. Jia Baoyu has a low sense of self-efficacy, and he is hesitant and uncertain about his ability to achieve his life goals. For example, Jia Baoyu hopes to have an ideal world to compete with the secular world, and the Grand View Garden provides the space and opportunity to realize the ideal. He hopes that the ideal that cannot be realized in the real world can be realized in the Grand View Garden. In the Grand View Garden, there are only some girls who are not wet behind the ears, and Jia Baoyu who is sentimental. The daughters are not only beautiful, but also talented. They abandoned the traditional women's value orientation and raised the inner spiritual beauty of women to an unprecedented height. Jia Baoyu is always hesitant about whether he can realize his ideal or not. When he practiced his ideal, he paid more attention to the failure of his ideal, so he experienced intense anxiety. Fearing the pollution of the kitsch world outside the Grand View Garden, the Grand View Garden kept the "daughter" relatively isolated from the outside world, and no other men were allowed to enter except Jia Baoyu. For fear that his daughters would be contaminated with men's nasty smell, Jia Baoyu fantasized that the best daughter could never be married. All this shows that the illusion of the Grand View Garden and Jia Baoyu's psychological fragility and helplessness make him feel more inefficient. Once attacked by external forces, such as copying the Grand View Garden, Jia Baoyu's performance is not as strong and resolute as Tan Chun's, which doomed the tragic ending of the destruction of the Grand View Garden and the loss of Baodai's love, but she had no choice but to face failure. Baoyu's love suffered a devastating blow, and few women in the garden died well; All these will deepen his doubts about utopian ideals.

The destruction of the Grand View Garden is not so much the failure of Baoyu as the absurdity and helplessness of life. From the tragic ending of the Grand View Garden, we can see the real Jia Baoyu: although he has talent, he feels the loss of talent. Although he was born in a famous family, he was deeply tortured by "poisoning" and the inferiority of wealth. After experiencing the atrophy of humanistic spirit and the frustration of free love, he has a sense of helplessness and inferiority. When the imaginary world he dreamed of building collapsed, Jia Baoyu went to the vast Yuan Ye in extreme loneliness and despair.

Four. conclusion

It should be pointed out that discussing Jia Baoyu's personality with "learned helplessness" theory is only a part of this character, so this theory can only be regarded as a polarizer reflecting his whole personality system. A Dream of Red Mansions is an immortal literary classic, and the so-called literary classics undoubtedly refer to those creative texts that have stood the test of history and won the recognition of readers, and are highly literary and artistic. As some researchers have pointed out, A Dream of Red Mansions, unlike many classic texts of Chinese studies, is in a position of "respecting without kissing"; However, it is widely read by readers of all ages and becomes spiritual nourishment for respect and love. In this way, its "classic" degree is worth pondering and tasting. The image of Jia Baoyu created by Cao Xueqin in A Dream of Red Mansions is naturally a real character, and this character is growing dynamically, and his personality is not stereotyped from the beginning. This paper only uses learned helplessness's principles to interpret some personality characteristics in his growing process. The fullness of his image is always accompanied by the poverty of criticism. In this sense, the image of Jia Baoyu is incomprehensible.

To annotate ...

(1) by Martin Seyrig Mann, translated by Hong Lan, Learning Optimism-the Third Element of a Successful Life, Xinhua Publishing House, 2002; See Lima Ming's Analysis and Prevention of learned helplessness Phenomenon, Education and Management,No. 12, 2006.

(2) Yu Yingshi's Two Worlds of a Dream of Red Mansions, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 2002, p. 36.

(3) See "Zhang Yun's Growth and Death-From the Perspective of Jia Baoyu's Emotional Course", Journal of Dream of Red Mansions, No.4, 2008.

(4) Hu Kejian and Ji Jiansheng's "Looking at the Classicality of a Dream of Red Mansions from the Image of Jia Baoyu", the third series of Dream of Red Mansions Journal in 2008.

(Author: Tianjin Wuqing Tiens College, zip code: 30002 1)