Research Of The Garden Narrative Of A Dream In Red Mansions

Early in the Former Qin Dynasty,garden literature in embryo appeared in Chinese classical literature.With the continuous development and evolution of literature genre,cultural infiltration in successive dynasties,the image of garden has played an increasingly important role in narration.Until the period of Ming and Qing Dynasty,the thriving development of garden art has greatly influenced scholars' literature creation.Almost all family or romance novels describing the world and human relations involve the depiction of garden,the daily life space.Particularly in A Dream in Red Mansions with aristocratic family as the narrative object,garden scene in great length appeared.Cao Xueqin has promoted garden narration art to a new development height on the basis of inheriting the garden literature of previous dynasties.Since from the publication of the masterpiece A Dream in Red Mansions,numerous scholars scrambled to exploit this abundant literature treasury due to its outstanding artistic merits in narration,and left a lot of profound and valuable research achievements to us.In current diversified and open cultural context,many new theories and research methods emerged at the right time which can help us to understand these literature works from different aspects so as to endow works with lush art connotation.In recent years,with the introduction of space concept into narratology field,it has provided new driving force for the development of narratology.Analyzing the text of A Dream in Red Mansions from this theoretical perspective,we can find that the imperial discourse space,human ethics and rite space,maid's boudoir space and the dreamlike psychological space can be reflected through the construction of garden space.In the novel A Dream in Red Mansions which mainly describes the noble family life,most plot scenes occurred inside the mansion.So it can be regarded as a garden novel in this sense.The garden buildings constructed in the text as specific scenes where stories happened and the physical media connecting storylines make the narrative technique in the whole novel ingeniously combined with the garden layout in the text to establish the narrative composition in a garden structural type.While carrying out specific plots,the multi-scene narrative mode was used by using daily leisure scenes,festival and birthday scenes,and the scenes of poem get-together in boudoir to manifest the colorful pictures of life.Compared with the unrest and volatile social life,Jia Mansion,the space containing interior complicated human relationship in the family,has constituted a relatively stable living environment.The cultural connotation contained in garden narration is the reflection of the internal characters'living state in the family.It is the exhibition hall for noble family's daily life,as well as the vanity fair filled with storm of jealousy,intrigue,and contending for power and profit,and even the Utopia for the innocent young boys and girls' sustenance of their true love.To construct the narrative building in A Dream in Red Mansions,the author has designed a garden model,Grand View Garden,which endowed the literature work with profound aesthetic implication.The vivid depiction of garden landscape has displayed the flowing and meandering landscape beauty of Chinese classical garden.The natural disposition and intelligence,innocent instincts of the dwellers in the garden also show real beauty of human nature.Besides,the creation of poetic scenes and the chanting of the compound tragic theme by the author have further manifested strong poetic beauty in a profound level.