Finding Out The "Potential Tension" Of A Dream Of Red Mansions Through Xue Baochai’s Image

Xue Baochai is a complex artistic image in A Dream of Red Mansions, and for a long time researchers have made dramatically different evaluations on her. We may attribute this phenomenon to the following aspects:firstly, people’s opinions on A Dream of Red Mansions are influenced by the aesthetic fashion ae well as the social and cultural psychology; secondly, the writer Cao Xueqin himself had a contradictory attitude toward this character; last but not the least, the novel had experienced such a period of version evolution. Since different researchers use different versions as their frame of reference, which leads to the variation and instability of Xue Baochai’s artistic image, their conclusions are dramatically different at last. Considering that the exited evaluations of Xue Baochai can not fully cover this vivid artistic image, we should try to excavate the potential tension of the novel A Dream of Red Mansions.