The
description of the emotion and desire in ancient Chinese novels, if it is to be examined against the backgroud of evolutionary
chains of social history and cultural ideology, can be found undergoing a transformation of treating the emotion and desire from vulgar to graceful or vice versa, that is, a transformation going through three stages.The first stage is from the Pre-Qin Days to the Tang Dynasty, in which the
description basically reflects man's biophysical instinct and harmony of emotional appetites as a whole, thus a decription from vulgar to graceful; the second stage from the Song and Yuan Dymastoes to the end of the Ming Dynasty, in which the emotion and desire are split up, the appetite hong publicized while the emotion given up, thus the description going from graceful to vulgar; and the third stage from the Qing Dynasty to Modern Times, in which the emotion and desire are split up too, but with the desire being constrained while the reasoning stressed, so the description going from vulgar to graceful.