Poetry And Literalism
Jia Baoyu tells us something in the section we read yesterday that I think is actually lost on a lot of scholars of Dream of the Red Chamber.
The key is the identity of the origin of the so-called 女兒棠, which translates into something like “maiden crabapples” or “girl crabapples.”
The scholars who surround Jia Zheng all the time seem convinced that it has something to do with the fictional 女人國 (or 女兒國, as they call it in this book), or “the Kingdom of Women:”
