Family as a Totalitarian Organism
In her book on family values bolstering neoliberalism, Prof. Melissa Cooper wrote, “The history of family is one of perpetual crisis.”
And Cooper’s theory lives out in media. In-laws wage war in Game of Thrones, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary suffer through dull, hopeless marriages, and in Dream of the Red Chamber, the Jia clan descends into a ten-year fit of debauchery and manipulation. We draw from Sophie Lewis’s 2022 polemic to characterize the family in Dream of the Red Chamber as an externally conditioned totalitarian force self-manufacturing perpetual crises. Family becomes a device for the extrusive public sphere to intrude into private life, toting conventional morality and social norms. In justifying an iron grip on individual livelihoods, the family manufactures alternative crises requiring a conformist, collectivist unity.
It’s “totalitarian” because the family becomes an all-consuming priority. Familial expectations increase in weight and potency as individuals age, surpassing personal opinion to lodge into one’s skull as the decision maker. Jia Zheng downplays Bao-yu’s poetic talents and beats him unconscious because the boy’s aversion to studying threatens family prestige. Jia She marries his only daughter to a domestic abuser for political benefits. It’s “Totalitarian” also because the family triumphs over privacy, rendering internal affairs (love, friendship, sexuality) the business of elders. Bao-yu’s principal maid, Aroma, colludes with Lady Wang to trick him into marrying Bao-Chai. After Dai-yu dies, the maids repress Bao-yu from thinking or mentioning her.
Finally, family reminds members they are family to stifle individualist streaks. For several chapters, Xi-Chun cannot become a nun because the Jias forbid losing a marriage pawn. Thirteen-year-old Qiao Jie’s uncles rationalize marrying her into a foreign harem because she’s family. So the fullest-developed family, which the Jia Clan models, successfully instills a fear of punishment or exposure of inner vulnerabilities into every member. It is like Xi-Feng fearing a loss of favour as she coquettishly entertains her elders: no one wants a family intervention about them.
If a totalitarian sense of normalized unease forms the base, the family institutionalizes general emotional sacrifice for its superstructure. Lewis writes in Abolish the Family that we willingly ignore the
repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancing of greater and lesser evils…the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties…
Formulating a ‘happy’ family. She claims, “No one is likelier rob, bully, blackmail, manipulate, rape or murder than family.” Indeed, the Jias revel in mutual abuse: Jia Huan tries blinding Bao-yu with hot candle wax, Jia Zhen starts an incestuous affair with his daughter-in-law, who later hangs herself, and Aunt Zhao attempts to assassinate Bao-yu and Xi-Feng using black magic. There are plenty more incidents throughout the novel, like Xi-Feng’s poisoning of her husband’s concubine—the point being that the Jias direct malignant attention toward each other.
But the family’s sacrificial superstructure requires fear. Their financial makeup rests upon perpetually imminent dissolution. Without war or natural disasters, which often compel members to set aside personal ambitions, money and children for the family’s political and social purposes, the Jias must self-manufacture alternative crises—underlying issues or the ‘potential’ of disaster—to promote sacrifice. Take the raid on Prospect Garden: Lady Wang suspects Bao-yu will form sexual connections with his maids, and become ‘impure’ if anywhere within two feet of pretty girls, when in fact he’s incredibly courteous and respectful. She throws out one of his most faithful maids and lets her die from consumption because her beauty heralds potential disaster. She directs Bao-yu to sacrifice his female friendships for the family.
Or consider Ying-Chun’s marriage: the union relies on a feeling of intense relief once the Sun family backs the Jias politically. Jia She expects his daughter to sacrifice her agency and happiness for familial security. Without immediate and pervasive external motivations fueling sacrifice, the family must create its problems to exist.
Why can’t families take it easy?
The Jias promote a sacrificial culture because family is externally conditioned. To ensure broader social stability, it must assert a sense of moral decency derived from societal beliefs to create a tolerably perpetual state of misery. Lewis compares families to “a microcosm of the nation-state” incubating “chauvinism and competition,” while Mieli establishes the Family as the “cell of the social tissue,” because we generally consider families a primary socializing force. Alongside various media preferences (books, movies, music, etc), parents often offload moral and political worldviews onto their children, most of which grow dominant because the child spends most of their existence close to their parents.
Similarly, the Jias’ ancestral views on filial piety and female subordination dominate everyone’s worldviews. The young sob and protest, but ultimately, they assimilate. Xi-Feng accepts Jia Lian’s infidelity, Ying-Chun resigns herself to domestic abuse, and Bao-Chai half-heartedly consents to a painfully lowly wedding. The pervading sense of proper behaviour never once originates from within the family; it permeates from outer influence: other moral philosophers, other people, other families.
Of course, the Jias are beautiful. Their serene poetry games and affectionate dinner parties made me jealous. Yet family transforms into an inescapable and inevitable form of suffering as Bao-yu and the girls enter adulthood, weighed down by burgeoning expectations and reprimands, falling victim, one by one, to heartbreak, disease, corruption, and poverty. Upon death, Cao Xueqin frames their souls entering the floating world as a joyful relinquishing of earthly ties to their familial responsibilities: finally, it’s over.
