Summary of Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of Red Mansions takes the tragedy of love and marriage between Jia Baoyu, Lin Daiyu, and Xue Baochai as its main line, depicts the rise and fall of the four great families represented by the Jia family, and reveals a variety of intricate contradictions of the feudal extended family.

It shows the decay and degradation of feudal marriage, morality, culture and education, and portrays a series of tragic images of aristocrats, commoners and slaves, showing the typical living environment of the extremely vast feudal society, and reflecting in a twisted way the historical tendency of that society's inevitable collapse and decline.

Meng of Red Mansions, an ancient Chinese chapter-length novel, also known as The Book of Stones, etc., is listed as the first of the Four Great Classical Novels of China, and is generally considered to be written by Cao Xueqin, a writer of the Qing Dynasty. Dream of Red Mansions is a humanistic novel with world-wide influence, recognized as the pinnacle of Chinese classical fiction, the encyclopedia of Chinese feudal society, and a masterpiece of traditional culture.

Expanded Information:

Background

During the Kangxi and Yongzheng dynasties, the Cao family's grandparents and grandchildren totaled four generations **** did 58 years of Jiangning Weavers. When the Cao family was in full bloom, it had done four times to receive the broad difference. Cao Xueqin grew up in Nanjing, his youth experienced a period of wealth and prosperity of the aristocratic life. But then the family declined, Yongzheng six years (1728) because of the shortfall in the crime was confiscated, Cao Xueqin family moved back to Beijing.

After returning to Beijing, he worked as an errand boy in charge of literature and ink in a royal school, the Right Wing Zongxue, and was in dire straits, leading a difficult life. In his later years moved to the western suburbs of Beijing, life is even poorer, "full of artemisia", "the family gruel wine often on credit. The book Dream of the Red Chamber was created by Cao Xueqin in the midst of poverty after he went bankrupt and lost his family.

Themes of the work

Dream of the Red Chamber is a work of rich connotation, with the "Song of Well-Being" and the twelve "Songs of the Dream of the Red Chamber" hinting at the triple tragedy experienced by Jia Baoyu. The author places Jia Baoyu and a group of young girls of different status and position in the fictional world of the Grand View Garden, which is both poetic and real, to show the tragedy of the destruction of their youthful lives and beauty.

What is extremely profound in this work is that it does not attribute this tragedy entirely to the brutality of the villains. Part of the tragedy is the direct destruction of the feudal forces, such as the tragic fate of the characters of Yuanyang, Qingwen, and Siqi, but more tragedies are caused by the "usual morals, usual human feelings, and usual situations" in the feudal ethical relations. But more tragedies were caused by the "usual morals, usual human feelings, usual situations" of feudal ethical relationships, and the tragedies of life caused by the deep structure of orthodox culture that had been solidified over thousands of years.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Dream of Red Mansions