The Story of the Stone (part five)

Apologies for not posting sooner, but here is the final installment of The Story of the Stone. 

At the beginning of the story, Bao-yu still has not recovered his jade, so he has relapsed into a stupor.  Baochai's brother is still in prison despite the family's best efforts to bribe the officials into releasing him.  Bao-yu's father Jia Zheng has been posted to a job in the provinces where his naivety and rigor will get him into trouble...ironically...for corruption.  (His servants are notoriously corrupt, and one man has even convinced his master that servants expect to be able to make money from corruption in their position.  He said that if they are unable to do so, the master will not be able to do his job.)  The narrator also implies that the Jia family is out of favor with the government.  In fact, later in this volume, the family compound will be raided, and two senior members will have to go into exile.  Ironically, by then, Bao-yu's father will be working in the capitol at a job more suited to his strengths.

It goes without saying that at this point the garden (called Prospect Garden) is haunted.  Some of the family then become possessed by the spirits in this garden after You-shi (one of Bao-yu's aunts) takes a short cut through it.


By this time, hardly anyone is living there or even goes there.  Even the older women who were tending fruit and vegetable gardens there have left.

A number of characters also die in this volume.  The first is Xia Jing-Gui, Xue Pan's wife.  She appears to commit suicide, yet as it turns out, she was tricked into drinking the poisoned soup that she was about to give to Caltrop.  All this is revealed in an inquest.  The next is Ying-chun whose husband had been abusing her.  Grandmother Jia dies a while after the government raids the family's compound.  Ironically, she becomes ill at Baochai's birthday party.  Her protege Xi-feng is responsible for Grandmother's funeral, yet the family's finances, the politics within the family, and her own frailty make it impossible to carry out her duty.  She collapses during the funeral and dies but not before asking Grannie Liu, a poor woman from the country, to watch out for her daughter, Qiao-je.  This will be very important as after Xi-feng's death relatives will attempt to sell Qiao-je as a concubine to a Mongol prince.  Grannie Liu will then rescue the girl, hiding her at her own home in the country. 


Robbers also attack the Jia family compound in this volume, carrying off all the treasure that the late Grandmother Jia hid from the government.  Seeing Adamantina, a beautiful nun whose convent is within the compound, one robber kidnaps, rapes, and (probably) murders her. 

The tide begins to turn for the family towards the end of the book.  A mysterious monk returns Bao-yu's jade.  (As Adamantina predicted, the stone went into hiding at Greensickness Mountain for a time.)  Jia Zheng as head of the family continues to flourish in the capitol.  After all of her tribulations, Caltrop becomes Xue Pan's wife, not merely a "chamber wife."  Xi-feng's husband similarly "promotes" Patience after his wife's death.  Bao-yu and his precocious nephew Jia Lan take the civil service exam, enabling them to carry their weight in the family.  However, shortly after excelling on this exam, Bao-yu disappears.  As it turns out, he has become a monk, having completed what he was destined to do.

Story of the Stone (part two)

In this volume of The Story of the Stone, the cousins are a little more grown up (14 or 15), and they are mad for poetry.  The Crab Flower Club is the name of their club, and many of "their" poems are included in this volume.  Our anthology includes only a few scenes from this section of The Story of the Stone, but I think that it is still well worth reading not only to see what happens to Bao-yu and his family but also to understand a little more about Chinese literature and literary studies as well as their attitudes towards gender.

The picture below is China-Guide's illustration of Dai-yu composing one of her poems.



However, this volume is not as wonky as it seems.    In fact, here, the clouds begin to gather over Bao-yu and his family.  Early on, Jia Zheng, Bao-yu's father, attacks his son, giving him an extremely severe beating because of what he perceives as his dissoluteness.  Keep in mind that Bao-yu hates to study and that he shows especially contempt for what is considered masculine knowledge.  His father, on the other hand, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant.  Almost at the beginning of the book, Golden, a servant to Bao-yu's mother, is dismissed for flirting with the young man.  Later she kills herself.  When Jia Zheng inquires into this young woman's suicide, Jia Huan (his other son by a concubine) informs him that Golden killed herself after Bao-yu had raped her.  (Right now I'm reading Vol. 3, and this lie has not yet been exposed although it is clear to the family that Jia Huan and his mother are troublemakers.)  Jia Zheng leaves the family compound shortly thereafter when the Emperor promotes him to high office.  However, Bao-yu's days in the garden may be limited.  His maid and now "chamber wife," Aroma, advises Bao-yu's mother to be stricter with him, move him into lodgings outside of the garden, and encourage him to be more like his father.  In other words, it is time for Bao-yu to learn to be a man.  (Below is a picture of Confucian scholars from www.cultural-china.com.) 



Dai-yu, Bao-yu's beloved cousin, also faces certain gender strictures.  At one of the meetings of the Crab Flower Club, she quotes lines from Dream of the Western Chamber, a risque novel that Bao-yu has encouraged her to read.  How explicit it is you may see here:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7134.html
Afterwards, Bao-chai takes her aside to warn her about her reading and even her absorption in literature.  She reminds her that for both girls and boys literature is just a pastime. 

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of Baochai at work, so here is An Ho's portrait of Wang Xifeng, the relative who runs the household...or shall I say family complex.  Wang Xifeng is perhaps Dai-yu's polar opposite.  She is energetic, practical, manipulative, and illiterate.  She puts a great deal of energy into humoring Grandmother Jia and managing the servants as well as making money for herself.  Let's imagine that Wang Xifeng is sitting listening to reports from the various servants.



However, all is not well for Wang Xifeng either.  Her husband Jia Lian is a philanderer, and in the Crab Flower Club, we will see her attack him and her servant Patience after she overhears his complaining about her to a mistress.

As you might imagine, at this point, the poetry club, though, is a useful diversion, uniting the younger members of the family, a group that becomes even more numerous near the end of this volume.  Even Wang Xifeng is involved as the enforcer of penalties.


Perhaps I will end this entry with another picture of the Grandview Garden in Beijing:

Reading Heart of Darkness Continued

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Above is a picture of the Thames River at dusk.  Because Heart of Darkness begins and ends on the Thames, I thought that this image would work quite nicely.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism is actually almost twenty years old, but it's a useful introduction to the book and to ways of reading it. 

Twenty years ago (the late 1980s) literary studies was undergoing a great change as ways of reading and writing about literature became more systematic and self-conscious.  This resulted from the (relative) popularization of literary theory.  Literary theory predates the 1980s, of course, but during this decade theory became more and more important to literary studies. 

Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I am reviewing this book because Heart of Darkness is complicated.  There is no one way to read it.  Moreover, Conrad's style can be difficult because he is evoking the atmosphere of the Congo and its psychological impact on Marlow (the original narrator).  Also, Conrad wrote at the end of the 19th century, a time before film and the internet.  His work truly is "betwixt and between"...between older, more elaborate novels by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens & others like Thomas Hardy *and* later, more direct novels by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald or impressionistic novels by Virginia Woolf.  When I first read Heart of Darkness (in a course on the 19th century British novel), I remember being shocked at how short this novella was.  It looked very different a few years later when I read it in a course on Conrad and then again when I read it at the beginning of a course on the modern British novel. 

Heart of Darkness: A Case Study focuses on five different theories that were popular at the time (1989).  These theories are psychoanalytic (focusing on psychology), reader-response (focusing on the reader's response to literature), feminist, deconstructionist (attempting to take apart the text and discover its structure & contradictions), and new historicist (placing the text in its historical and cultural context).   If this book were to be revised today, I suspect that deconstructionism and reader-response theory might be replaced with queer studies and post-colonial studies.  Here is a link to an essay that takes a more post-colonial approach:  http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/conrad/pva52.html  This situation reminds me that there is no one way to read a piece of literature.

The book actually begins with a short biography of Joseph Conrad and an introduction to his work.  I'm going to save time here by linking to a general biography:

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jconrad.htm

What's most important to know about Conrad is this.  He was Polish at a time when Poland did not officially exist because it was ruled by Russia and Germany.  (He grew up in the Russian Empire.)  English was his third or fourth language, and he traveled the world as a sailor before becoming a writer.  At first, his writings were not popular, but they became popular and even influential.  Many later writers admired his work and the view of the world expressed in it.

By the way, like many 19th century novels, Heart of Darkness was first published in a magazine over three issues.  Here's a link to a college's web site that has this version:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/darkmenu.htm

To finish, I'd like to mention what each section focused on in Heart of Darkness. 

The psychoanalytic reading interprets the novel as Kurtz and Marlow's inner journey.  Kurtz falls victim to his desire for power, but Marlow comes away with greater self-knowledge.  This section was written by Frederick R. Karl who also wrote a biography of Conrad, but he does *not* talk about the connections between Marlow and Conrad.  Yes, there are connections!

Adena Rosmarin's section on reader response in turn faces the reasons why Heart of Darkness is difficult for many readers.  Specifically, there are gaps in the narrative and therefore places where the reader has to decide for him/herself what is going on and why it is important.  Conrad's refusal to tell the reader what to think appealed to readers who lived through World Wars One and Two.  WWI, in particular, disillusioned many who fought in it and lived through it.

For more information about WWI, see this site from the BBC:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/

The presence of a feminist reading of Heart of Darkness may surprise you.  Or does it?  In this section, Johanna M. Smith (one of my husband's professors at Indiana University) uses feminist theory to examine Marlow's narrative and his self-justifications about the Company, the Congo, and the women he encounters along the way.  These women include his aunt (who convinces the Company to hire him), Kurtz' African lover, and his European fiancee (his Intended whom Marlow visits at the end of the story).  Interestingly, in the 19th century, a popular type of book was the collected biographies of women.  A number of these women went to Africa, India, and elsewhere in the British Empire as missionaries, and the collected biographies encouraged young female readers to see missionary work as an ideal career.  In practice, most young women could not become missionaries, but these biographies ultimately encouraged them to go on to other careers in the US and the UK.  For more information on these collective biographies and their impact on women, see my review of Prof. Alison Booth's How to Make It As A Woman:
http://ncgsjournal.com/szlyk.htm

Now you know the other side of the story...as Paul Harvey says!

In a deconstructionist reading, J.Hillis Miller argues that Heart of Darkness is something of a parable, a story that appears to be about realistic, everyday events but reveals a hidden, cosmic truth.  He also examines the ways in which Conrad's novel is apocalyptic, that is, about the end of time.  (Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now had come out about ten years earlier.  I know that I first thought of Heart of Darkness as the novel that Apocalypse Now was based on.)

Brook Thomas' New Historicist reading places Heart of Darkness in its historical and cultural context.  Thomas also notes Conrad's thoughts on history and the extent to which a novelist is also a historian.  Conrad, the literary scholar argues, "felt that 'the reality of forms and observation of social phenomenon' in his fiction [produced] more truthful histories than those of most historians" (Thomas 239). 

In your opinion, what are the most important elements of Heart of Darkness?  Why?  Which of the five perspectives outlined above seem most useful to you?