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.
Index Terms—A Dream of Red Mansions, birds’ image,
mythology, archetypal criticism.
Borui Liu is with the Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing,
100000 China (e-mail: 1945260902@qq.com).
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Cite:Borui Liu, "On the Mythological Prototype of Bird in a Dream of Red Mansions," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 174-177, 2022.