A Study Of The "Dull Son-in-law" Image In Folk Tales

This paper begins with the analysis of the image of the dull son-in-law, regarding folk tales and jokes of different regions and times as the main research material, and studies the type of dull son-in-law's story, the function of his image in stories, especially the cultural reasons for the birth of the dull son-in-law image and its aesthetic value.Based on the current domestic and international research situation about this kind of story types, this paper firstly points out that the dull son-in-law classification research cannot be confined to a particular classification, but should be macroscopically classified as its ideological content and the value orientation of the characters. Therefore this type of story is divided into three categories, namely the real fool, the dull son-in-law overcoming the difficulties and "the dull son-in-law's" story who is truly wisdom but seems foolish, in order to carry out specific textual research.From the perspective of researching the function of folk tales and based on Prop's theory of story roles, the second part of this article claims that the dull son-in-law's story not only highlights the digestion and subversion of traditional hierarchy system in Chinese culture, but also reflects the subtle psychology in patriarchal society. When it comes to analyzing the social function of the dull son-in-law's story, it mainly serves as transferring the knowledge of production and life as well as moral education.The third part of this article mainly analyzes the unique aesthetic implication of the dull son-in-law's artistic image. And it points out that the core aesthetic feature is the fun of "dull". This section studies from the reasons of the "dull" fun's formation and claims that it mainly forms from the roles'language, behavior and personality traits. It also mentions that the fun of "dull" has three aspects as fun of matters, emotion and theory and specifically discusses the aesthetic value of the image from irony, fable and game aspects.Finally, the paper analyzes the dull son-in-law image's aesthetic emotion tendency. It emphatically discusses the importance of aesthetic emotion in shaping the dull son-in-law art image, and mentions that the emotion is the life of the dull son-in-law image in the folk stories.It is innovated that this paper not only classifies the dull son-in-law's story into new categories, but also deeply analyzes and researches the image of the dull son-in-law from the perspective of aesthetic value and summes up some aesthetic concepts as the fun of "dull".