On the Mythological Prototype of Bird in a Dream of Red Mansions

Abstract

At present, there are abundant researches and writings on a Dream of Red Mansions. It is also common to study the mythological structure in it. However, the imagists pay little attention to the “bird”, which is rich in connotation, and there are few works to explain it from the perspective of archetypal criticism. This paper aims to enrich the mythological structure of A Dream of Red Mansions, using archetypal criticism and mythological criticism methods, to study the formation mechanism of the god bird worship in ancient China and its influence on the collective unconsciousness of Cao Xueqin, author of A Dream of Red Mansions, and through analyzing characters such as Hsi-feng, Pao-yu, Tai-yu, and Lady Dowager, this paper confirms the existence of the god-bird worship psychology, which believes that a large number of bird images in A Dream of Red Mansions are rooted in the consciousness of Chinese ancestors, and they have unique connotations at the same time.