A Rethink about the View on Women in Hongloumeng

Abstract

This article aims to further detect the diverse and contradictory view on women embedded in Hongloumeng(Dream of Red Mansions) and to clarify the conscious praise of women and unconscious contempt for women made by the author Cao Xueqin in the text. Although Hongloumeng is generally considered to be an open-ended text due to its all-encompassing content and multi-version issue, I believe the female perspective is the closest perspective to Caos true intentions among others. In a realistic and compassionate style, Cao speaks out in a strong voice of injustice for women by writing about the miserable life of a group of remarkable but ill-fated women who lived around the hero Jia Baoyu. It appears to be a novel of praise and sympathy for women. Whereas when we explore the deeper connotation in Hongloumeng, we might find that even Baoyu, who always holds up the banner of damsel worship, composes a trilogy for the destruction of female values and has not been divorced from masculinity ever. Accordingly, we can glimpse that the embodiment of the view on women in Hongloumeng is not entirely positive, but partly contains a devaluation for women.