Returning to Tradition: Emotional Morality in Fan Fiction of 'A Dream of Red Mansions'

As one of the four great literary masterpieces in ancient China, Cao Xueqin's masterpiece A Dream of Red Mansions is a model of ancient literature in its literary, artistic and ideological nature. This is a very unique novel, the culmination of Chinese classic family novels and the subversion of many of the conventions of the literary genre. A Dream of Red Mansions tells the story of a group of teenage girls and a young aristocrat named Jia Baoyu who live in a place called the Grand View Garden, a utopia for young people that is far from worldly troubles. It is a paradise for young people, a place full of love and peace where there are no conspiracies or authority and all of the young people treat each other as equals. In the Grand View Garden, the names of the houses are also full of poetry, and each woman has her own unique personality and destiny, leaving room for readers to imagine more—particularly as the novel is incomplete.

No novel has had a greater influence on Chinese society than A Dream of Red Mansions, which has been popular since the end of the 18th century in both copies and engravings, and has become an important subject for popular literature and drama. The novel depicts romantic love in an environment dominated by Confucianism. After the A Dream of Red Mansions came out, a large number of sequels and imitations also came out, which can be described as early "fan fictions." It is worth mentioning that due to the incomplete manuscript, there is endless space for imagination and opportunities for sequels in which countless fans express their views on love. Many fans have also written a large number of sequels to make up for the "defects" of the original work. In the Internet era, online literature websites began to serialize a lot of fan fiction based on A Dream of Red Mansions.

In the online Dream of Red Mansions fan fiction, girls’ love (GL) is striking. Jia Baoyu, the only man who originally lived in the Grand View Garden, is no longer important, and the two women around him - Baochai and Daiyu - have become a couple. In addition, the genre of "time travel" is extremely popular. People from modern society travel to the end of the Qing Dynasty. Since A Dream of Red Mansions is a well-known story in China, the character plot and story arc development are known to almost everyone, so the hero who travels to the end of the Qing Dynasty acts as a representative of countless fans of A Dream of Red Mansions. Through these time-traveling characters, readers can get the full experience of being a "person in the book" and play the "changing the direction of the story" game.

As Lu Hsun said, A Dream of Red Mansions is able to break away from Chinese classic family novel style and become the pinnacle of this genre, precisely because its emotional description breaks the Confucian emotional structure under feudal ethics and creates a modern type of emotional type. Its vitality and innovation also come from this. Jia Baoyu, a unique male character in the history of Chinese fiction, has no interest in career success but genuinely appreciates every woman in his life. "Love" is unique in this traditional Chinese novel. The main concern of A Dream of Red Mansions is "emotion," and it is a masterpiece of Chinese people's emotions. When Haiyan Lee does a literary analysis of Chinese modern emotions, she relies on A Dream of Red Mansions as an important explanation of Chinese people’s emotions. It also contains a lot of potential to break the traditional Chinese Confucian emotional structure.

On Jinjiang Literature City, a popular online novel platform in China, fan fiction about A Dream of Red Mansions often top the bestseller list. The classic novel still has a strong appeal to this day. Among these fan fiction stories, the most mainstream are "Mary Sue" and "childish" styles. The Mary Sue style features a protagonist with the perfect birth, appearance, and fate; the other characters of the novel exist completely as foils for the protagonist. The "childish" style is mainly funny and fantastic. It only borrows characters from A Dream of Red Mansions to write modern love stories that have almost nothing to do with the original work. 

This online fan fiction creation shows the characteristics of "splicing." Fans combine A Dream of Red Mansions with novel ideas of time travel, rebirth, detectives, etc., to present rich and diversified works. What is surprising, however, is these fan fiction stories, despite their variety in genre, are highly consistent in their spiritual core - satisfying love and flourishing families. Fans have re-endowed the original characters with a feminist consciousness, giving them superior talents and resources, and even giving them some magical abilities, such as traveling through time and space. However, these "reborn" characters often take the most worldly path: marrying a prince and building a career. Ironically, this is precisely the kind of Confucian ethics that the original book rejects, and for which the work has become both a pinnacle and anomaly of classical Chinese fiction. Baoyu, the hero who does not conform to the expectations of Confucian ethics in the original work, is abandoned by many fan writers. They separate the original work’s main couple Baoyu and Daiyu and change Daiyu's lover into the originally supporting character of Beijing King, believing that Beijing King has a prominent family and is not as emotional as Baoyu, which is more suitable for Daiyu. This kind of societal value, that women should marry someone more prominent than themselves, is actually not modern but the mainstream view of feudal times. Here we see an interesting phenomenon: today's fan fiction for this subversive classic work continues the traditional view.

Biography

Xiaoxi Zhou earned her PhD in communication at Fudan University. Her research interests include fan studies, celebrity culture, and Asian popular culture. She is deeply attracted by the emotional characteristics of fan culture.Her dissertation, Structures of Feeling of Chinese Idol Fans: A New Emotional Intimacy in the Making, shows a new type of intimacy among Chinese fandom