麝月

Her Story

She is the maid at Green Delights 怡红院 whom nothing happens to, which in this novel is a form of survival. The book introduces her properly in Chapter 20. The others have all gone off to find amusement; Baoyu comes in and finds Sheyue alone at the lamp, playing dominoes by herself. Why is she not with them? She has no money — and besides, if everyone goes, who is left to mind the room? Baoyu recognises the answer at once: 公然又是一个袭人, plainly another Xiren. He offers to comb her hair, and combs it, and Qingwen comes in to mock them both. That is the whole scene, and the whole character.

She is in the snow in Chapter 51 when Qingwen runs out in a thin jacket to frighten her and catches the chill that kills her, and she is at the bedside in Chapter 52 while Qingwen darns the peacock-gold cape through the night. She is the one who is always there and never the subject.

In Chapter 63, at the night-long birthday party in Baoyu’s rooms, the maids draw flower lots. Sheyue’s lot bears the 荼蘼, the last flower of spring, with the motto 韶华胜极 — glory at its height — and the old line 开到荼蘼花事了: when the 荼蘼 blooms, the flowering is finished. Baoyu pulls a face and hides the slip and tells everyone to drink. When the household falls, Sheyue is still in the room. She is among the very last of the Green Delights maids the novel names, still at Baoyu’s side in Chapter 118, after Qingwen is dead and Xiren has been married out.

In Xiang Li's Hands

She kneels, skirts spread across the paper in wide wet brown folds, head bowed, eyes down. Her right hand is at the back of her own hair — the Chapter 20 combing, given to her to perform on herself. In her left, at her lap, a sprig of small red berries. The moon of her name is there, top right, but drawn as an unfilled ring of pale grey line, with a few blue smoke-strokes behind her. Every other sheet here gives its subject a scene. This one gives her an outline of a moon and lets the paper alone.

The Calligraphy

麝月, upper right, the two characters of the given name and nothing else — the musk and the moon, a name assigned to her by the household like the flower-names of all Baoyu’s maids. It is the second character that the painting answers, and the inscription sits directly beside the drawn moon it names, at the same height, so the two read across the top of the sheet as a pair.

Connections

• Jia Baoyu 贾宝玉 — her master at Green Delights, who combed her hair in Chapter 20 and whom she outlasted everyone else in serving.
• Qingwen 晴雯 — fellow maid, at whose side she stood in the snow of Chapter 51 and the darning of Chapter 52.
• Xiren 袭人 — the maid Baoyu called her a second version of; Sheyue took over her ground when she was married out.
• Xue Baochai 薛宝钗 — Baoyu’s wife in the closing chapters, in whose household Sheyue is still serving.

Others of the same kind · maid – Baoyu (Green Delights / 怡紅院) Qingwen 晴雯 · Xiren 袭人 · Xiaohong 小红 · Qiuwen 秋纹 · Bihen 碧痕 · Tanyun 檀云 · Qixian 绮霰 · Qianxue 茜雪 · Huixiang 蕙香 · Jiahui 佳蕙 · Zhui'er 坠儿 · Liang'er 良儿 · Chunyan 春燕 · Liu Wu'er 柳五儿 and 1 more

Named on these pages Qingwen 晴雯 · Tanyun 檀云 · Qixian 绮霰

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