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　　ON NOT BECOMING A HEROINE:

　　LIND AI-YUA ND CUIY ING-YING

　　ANN WALTNER

　　Published by: The University of Chicago Press

　　Why and how people read fiction is an issue that has increasingly come under the scrutiny of Western literary critics. In her recent Becoming a Heroine, Rachel M. Brownstein suggests ways in which fiction may serve a special role in shaping an adolescent girl's expectations of the future .The fiction Brownstein discusses is chiefly nineteenth-century English novels; the readers she discusses are twentieth-century American adolescents. The novels of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, where the plot centers on finding a husband and the marriage is the happy ending, are read,so Brownstein suggests, as scripts for life by countless adolescent girls who view finding a husband as their central task in a life that will in many crucial ways end with marriage. Expectations about life and marriage are gathered not from observations of the real world but from ruminations within the realm of fiction.

　　Fictional heroines, too, may be readers of romance, and the ways in which the heroine reads the romance reveal a good deal about her, about the romance, and about the fictional world they both inhabit. Lin Dai-yu, a central character in Cao Xue-qin's eighteenth-century Chinese novel

　　Dream of the Red Chamber, is a reader of romances, especially dramas such as Romance of the Western Chamber.Western Chamber is one of the finest exemplars of the "scholar-beauty romance," a genre in which a beauty and a talented youth meet, fall in love, overcome obstacles, and eventually marry. The genre mandates a happy ending.Dai-yu's reading of Western Chamber leads her to see her own future with the image of Cui Ying-ying, the heroine of Western Chamber, firmly in mind.It is an image that both attracts and repels her. While Rachel Brownstein's reader of Jane Austen's novels finds an unambiguous map for the future, Dai-yu sees a warning in the story of Ying-ying.The resonances between Western Chamber and Red Chamber are not limited to the imagination of Dai-yu, but it is there that they find their sharpest resolution.

　　Lin Dai-yu lived in a society where love was not a necessary or even a desirable prelude to marriage. In eighteenth-century China,marriage was a transaction involving the families of the bride and groom. While the interests of the young couple themselves might not be ignored totally, neither were their interests paramount.Furthermore, among the upper classes, female seclusion was such that a woman might not even see her husband until her wedding night. Chastity was celebrated as chief among the female virtues:women who went to extraordinary lengths to defend their chastity(up to and including suicide) were commemorated in local histories.It is no wonder that Lin Dai-yu sought refuge in the reading of

　　romances.

　　Dream of the Red Chamber, first published in 1792, is one of the masterworks of the Chinese novel. In 120 chapters, it juxtaposes an allegorical structure with a day-to-day description of the decline of the house of Jia. The tension between allegory and realistic depiction is mirrored in a couplet that recurs in the novel,inscribed on an arch proclaiming entry into the "Land of Illusion."The couplet reads:

　　Truth becomes fiction when the fiction's true;

　　Real becomes not-real when the unreal's real.

　　As we shall see, Dai-yu uses fiction to interpret her emotional life.The illusion of desire is seen refracted through the mirror of the illusion of fiction.

　　The action of the Red Chamber centers around the character of Jia Bao-yu, the adolescent scion of the house of Jia, and his young female cousins, the most important of whom are Lin Dai-yu and Xue Bao-chai. For much of the novel, Bao-yu, his cousins, sisters,and their maids live in dwellings in a garden at some remove from the supervision of their elders, where they live a life of ease burdened neither by the responsibilities of adulthood nor the restrictions of childhood. Bao-yu and his companions in the garden are adolescents who occupy a twilight world between childhood and adulthood. (At the beginning of the novel Bao-yu is thirteen;Dai-yu is two years younger.)

　　The crucial ritual that will signify the transition to adulthood is marriage, and the essential plot revolves around which of the cousins, Dai-yu or Bao-chai, will marry Bao-yu. The tragedy of the novel is that, according to the allegorical structure of the novel,Dai-yu cannot marry Bao-yu. She is the human incarnation of the Crimson Pearl Flower, and Bao-yu that of the Divine Luminescent Stone. Because the Stone had watered the Flower, saving her life,the human Dai-yu owes Bao-yu a debt of tears. The allegorical structure enters the narrative several times during the novel,perhaps most prominently in chapter 5, in which the immortal Disenchantment reveals to Bao-yu the future fates of the most important female characters in the novel, fates that are inextricably linked with his own. Bao-yu does not understand the meaning of the poems that delineate each character's fate, but the reader does.The prophecy of a marriage between gold and jade . thereby predicting that Bao-yu will marry Bao-chai. The prophecy recurs at several points throughout the novel. This tension between the allegorical mode that places strict demands on plot development and a diurnal realism that seems to leave the question of the marriage open-ended is one of the sources of the power of the novel.

　　Bao-chai and Bao-yu do marry. However, the marriage takes place at almost the precise moment of Dai-yu's death, and Bao-yu,half-mad, has been duped into thinking that it is Dai-yu he is marrying. The marriage is thus a perversion of the youthful dreams of all three of the cousins.

　　Indeed, marriage in the novel almost never implies happiness. One by one, beginning with Xi-chun, the young women of the garden marry and leave. Their marriages decimate the garden and diminish its gaiety. Marriage does not mean a happy ending

　　It is not only the senior generation of the Jia household who perceive the dangerous allure of drama. In chapter 42, in their famous reconciliation scene, Bao-chai chastizes Dai-yu for having used quotations from The Peony Pavilion and Western Chamber in a drinking game. In order to criticize the use of quotations,Bao-chai must of course first recognize them. She confesses that as a child of seven or eight she had been "a real terror" and had read plays. But the more mature Bao-chai realizes the dangerous nature of the plays. She cautions Dai-yu, saying, "Let us confine ourselves to good, improving books; let us avoid like the plague those pernicious works of fiction, which so undermine the character that in the end it is past reclaiming" (chap. 41, Hawkes, 2:333-34). This advice convinces Dai-yu that, contrary to her previous impression,Bao-chai does indeed have her (Dai-yu's) best interest at heart. Dai-yu herself is all too aware of the pernicious influence the tantalizing romance presents.

　　The world of the tantalizing romance is far from the world that Lin Dai-yu occupies, and part of the function of the repeated references to the romance is to serve as a marker of that distance. Dream of the Red