ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the novel and the greatness of Cao Xueqin's artistry in terms of modern notions of sexual ideology. It contributes yet another understanding of the novel to the vast body of hongxue. The chapter briefly presents the current scholarly perceptions of the novel's sexual ideology, which largely praise it as antipatriarchal, and then proceeds to reveal how these existing analyses are inadequate. Its principal focus is on the notions of purity and profanity that are created in Honglou meng. Both the complexity of the novel and the ambiguous nature of sexual ideology reject a single, definitive statement of the novel's antipatriarchal sentiment. The chapter points out the interplay between prescriptions of purity and pollution within the novel. Unraveling the textual conflation of the pure and the polluted, the whore and the goddess, provides an alternative way of understanding China's greatest fictional work.
