Jia Rui Zhi Mu
贾瑞之母
“A Mother the Book Does Not Give Him”
Her Story
The novel does not contain this person, and I could not identify her.
Jia Rui is the grandson of Jia Dairu, the clan schoolmaster. He mishandles the schoolroom brawl in Chapter 9, conceives a passion for Wang Xifeng in Chapter 11, and dies of it in Chapter 12 — frozen in a passage, drenched in filth, ruined by IOUs, and finally killed by the Mirror of Romance. Chapter 12 states his household plainly: 贾瑞父母早亡，只有他祖父代儒教养 — his father and mother died early, and only his grandfather Dairu raised him.
So there is no mother. The one woman of his house who appears is his grandmother, Dairu’s wife, who is never named and does nothing on the page except weep over his body at the end of Chapter 12 and demand the mirror be burnt. Whether the inscription means her, or means the mother the novel says is already dead, cannot be settled from the text, and I will not guess.
In Xiang Li's Hands
A matron under a wisteria arbour, eyes lowered, smiling, one hand at her breast. Grey robes with black fur borders and four large embroidered roundels; a phoenix pin in her hair; hanging racemes of pale violet all down the left of the sheet. This is the only painting in this group given a flowering setting, and the only one that looks entirely at ease — no trace of the household it is captioned to.
The Calligraphy
贾瑞之母, four characters brushed down the right through the wisteria — a possessive designation rather than a name, defining a woman wholly by a man the novel says she did not live to raise.
Connections
- Jia Rui 贾瑞 — the man the inscription attaches her to.
- Jia Dairu 贾代儒 — his grandfather, the schoolmaster who actually brought
- him up.
- Wang Xifeng 王熙凤 — who sets the trap that kills him.
Dream of the Red Chamber
Xiang Li painted all 413 characters of the novel between 1975 and 1985, the first person to complete the entire cast. See the whole collection · Chinese Empresses
