ABSTRACT
Chapter 1‘reads’ novel and play as having in common their writer’s creative exploration of the deterioration of the cultural ideal and image of the patriarch, no longer able to sustain the demand it makes upon family honour, filial obedience and social order. The analysis places at its centre two scenes of extreme violence: one verbal – ‘speak[ing] daggers’ – the scene from Act Three of Hamlet enacting the hero’s moral chastisement of his mother, Queen Gertrude; and one physical, the scene from the second volume of The Story of the Stone enacting the ‘terrible chastisement’ of Bao-yu by his father. In these scenes, the relentless attempt to impose patriarchal authority builds to a climax and then collapses, having exhausted itself and become reduced to futile self-justification. The two scenes enact the disintegration of moral authority and hidden cyclic generational violence to which, in the wider story of novel and play, sons and daughters – heroes and heroines – are hidden sacrifices in a world they cannot trust to save them.
