This feminist essay on Hung lou meng (A Dream of Red Mansions), focuses on the character of Bao Yu as embodying a subversive gender ideology; his own rather bisexual nature and sympathetic attitude toward women in the novel represents a utopian sexual ethics—a recognition of the Other (the female) as different and not merely derivative. Further, like the woman characters who are “fluid” and ambiguous as water, Bao Yu’s gender orientation is “fluid.”  The author employs the theories and terminology of modern French psychoanalytic theorists like Lacan and Luce Irigaray to critique the Confucian gender ideology of Hung lou meng. The author remarks at the end of the essay that in this novel, “Marriage as an institution is powerful enough to strangle femininity.”

Hung lou meng, Utopian sexual ethics, Luce Irigaray, subversive gender ideology, French, fluidity, Freud, phallus, water imagery, Bao Yu