‘三言’、‘二拍’中商人形象的社會意義

Abstract

As the representative work of the short story in Chinese Ming Dynasty, San Yan and Er Pai reflected a very wide-ranging social life in that period and portrayed a lot of vivid figures of different social levels. Among these various characters, the merchant images in these novels have profound social significance. As we know, the Ming Dynasty is the period when the seeds of the capitalism began to sprout in the Chinese history. It is necessary that the development in the social economy and the changing in the common peoples daily life will give a deep influence on the novel writing and lead to the creation of the merchant imagines in the short stories in this time. The merchant imagines portrayed in San Yan and Er Pai embodied the changing in social life many aspects. This article will focus on four points：the first, the merchant imagines reflected the appearance of the social commercial background；the second, they meant that the merchants had become the positive figures in that time；the third, they also involved with the wake up of the womans consciousness through the woman merchants and the wives of the merchants；the fourth, they incarnated the changing of the social value and the Chinese traditional ideas.