A Study of the Meaning of Qian Zhongshu’s Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

• Main Authors: Yu-Hsien Lin, 林祐賢
• Other Authors: Tung-Yang Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17856546464207155090

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 漢學資料整理研究所碩士班 === 101 === Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts is the only short story by Qian Zhongshu that collects four tales, “The Dream of God,”, “The Cat”, “Inspiration” and “Memorial”. The stories were written during a time of great upheaval in China. The Chinese intellectuals of this period had a complicated tangle of feelings and emotions for the Western imperialism as well as the literary works from the Western world. Qian, delicately integrated his Chinese learning with his education at Oxford, sharply and mostly satirically, illustrated and displayed what he saw and observed about the types of Chinese intellectuals and the social relationship between men and women in his fabled works. Therefore, the study aims at analyzing the unstated meanings of humans, beasts, and ghosts. In the short story, Qian satirized the intellectuals in his times who accepted Western values wholeheartedly without fully understanding the essences of Western culture. Qian also criticized the men of letters who fawned on foreign powers and discarded the idea that literature was the conveyer for moral instruction. Qian perceived that the emergence of the female intellectuals had a tremendous impact on the traditional relationships between husband and wife and that the female intellectuals’ vanity reflected the human nature existing in both men and women. Qian implied his ideas and sarcasm about the intellectuals in his times as well as the relationships between men and women. In addition, Qian divided folks into humans, beasts and ghosts on the basis of desires; those who obeyed the social regulations were humans; those who lived by cravings, beasts and those who were paranoiac were ghosts.