Talking About The Images Of Shrews And The Culture It Held In The Novels Of Ming And Qing Dynasties

In the history of Chinese literature, there are a series of novels taking shrews as their main characters, quite typical in the novels of Ming and Qing Dynasties. The appearance of the images of"shrews"is not the result of writers'imagination and fabrication. It does exist in the reality. When the philosophy of mind advocated by Wang Yangming was very popular and the democracy ideological trend just came about, the social system in which the status of male and female was extremely unequal would conflict surely with people's desire to liberate their personalities. Under this kind of conflict, problems arose from the world of treating women as inferiors. This article utilizes methods such as synthesis, analysis, comparison and induction to explore the basic reasons why the images of shrews formed and the culture it held in the novels of Ming and Qing Dynasties with the help of historical backgrounds.The paper is divided into five chapters. In the introduction, it summarizes the definition of"shrews", then it connects the women in reality in ancient times with the images of shrews in the novels of Ming and Qing Dynasties. Finally it lists ancient literature books taking shrews as their main characters and points out the books studied in the paper and the reasons of choosing them. The first chapter lists novels taking shrews as their main characters in Ming and Qing Dynasties in this thesis and states briefly the content of the novels, summarizing the behaviors of the shrews. The last section just states the unique phenomenon of"sadomasochism"in Legendary of Waking Marriage. The second chapter analyzes the reasons for forming the images of the shrews from women's request to the rights and their revolt to the unequal system and the decrease of rights for men, analyzed and critiqued the treatment of jealous proposed by novelists. The third chapter just proves the influences upon novels taking shrews as their main characters by the karma, analyzed the convocation for the writers of fiction to preach utilizing the thought of"the karma"and points out the unfairness for the writer to think about the problem from the viewpoint of males. The fourth chapter contrasts the images between novels taking shrews as their main characters and other Chinese ancient Literature books.In brief, the unfair social system is essential to the forming of shrews. However, we should also realize the problems of the shrews themselves. While protesting for women suffered miseries, we should critique the evil conducts which disobey the Chinese traditional virtues, hoping the good, true and beautiful personalities could return under a perfect social system.