Romanticism
If you’ve been paying attention to the 400 or so posts I’ve created so far, you’ve probably come to the same conclusion that I’ve come to. Dream of the Red Chamber really is a “romantic” novel at heart.
But there’s a problem, of course. This novel was originally drafted sometime in the middle of the 18th century, long before the true explosion of the Romantic literary movement in Europe.
And, when you start really digging in, you’ll realize that Dream of the Red Chamber has a different approach to Romanticism entirely. Rather than a reaction to cold rationality in the post-Enlightenment sense, the emphasis on 情 (emotion) in this book seems to be a reaction to the general state of emotional repression in the society Jia Baoyu grew up in.
In other words, there’s a lot of really interesting philosophic stuff going on here. And we really need to pay attention to it.
