Exploration Of White Snake Story

From the origination to the final completion, the story about The Legend of White Snake experienced a long historical development. As the most popular story in China, it covers a wider areas , and the formation of the story also is very complicated. As far as the art forms related to it be concerned, it has variety of art forms, such as: ancient literature, the theatre and folk literature, etc.The content of first part, is about the problems of historical origination and developing stage .And the major analysis texts are focused on the two fields, ancient novel and theatre. Based on the history, I think that the story consists of four developing stages. There are original stage, primitive stage, pre-mature stage and mature stage.The second part concentrates on the analysis to the major characters in story. Compare the different changing in these characters with different developing periods, especially to the female character Bai Suzhen . Of course, in different stages, the themes of the story is different, at the end , the theme even has a huge contradiction compare to the early stage.The origination and developing of The Legend of White Snake is not a simple literary phenomenon. Looking back to the history, there are profound cultural and social backgrounds. In the third part, I try to use some cultural anthropology and psychology theories to look for theanswer of how the snake was related to woman. And if there is a necessary relations between sex and beauty (snake beauty ).All these problems seems to be the key that can help us to get a better understanding to The Legend of White Snake , a cultural and literary legend in China .