Author(s)

Qiyue Hu

Corresponding Author

Qiyue Hu

Abstract

As one of the representative works of the new historicism novels, Raise the red lantern not only retains the shell of Chinese family story and the sad atmosphere but also exposes the tragedy of traditional Chinese family to the readers directly. The writer Su Tong based on an old Chinese story to write this novel and showed the tragedy of female personality and destiny in the traditional Chinese marriage system. This paper will focus on the personality and the destiny of the main character Lotus and base on the tragedy theories of Aristotle and Schelling to analyze the causes of Lotus's tragedy. At the same time, the paper will also analyse the exact ways to express tragedy in Raise the red lantern.

Keywords

Tragic theory, female, well, wooden flute, Xici