Presentation Title
Late Qing Themes in Eileen Chang: Gender, Modernity, and the Household in Decline
Location
Council Chambers
Start Date
12-10-2013 11:00 AM
End Date
12-10-2013 12:30 PM
Abstract
By analyzing the cover image of Chuanqi (1946, expanded edition) and its late-Qing source, the paper aims to show the persistence of late-Qing themes in Eileen Chang’s work. In the late Qing, the old imperial tradition fell apart while modernity and industrial culture first arrived in treaty ports such as Shanghai. Such combination of old and new elements persisted in Chang’s own era when the city was under the Japanese occupation. Rather than showing heroic characters in revolutionary missions, Chang portrays “incomplete characters” playing the unchanging game of love (or chance) in a setting that is generally traditional but also altered by the intrusion of modernity—this is vividly illustrated by the cover image of Chuanqi.
The paper pays particular attention to the representations of Shanghai women in Chang’s fiction. These women experience modern displacements and anxieties of uncertain future and destiny, which are always tied to relationship and marriage as well as to materialistic and financial concerns. They negotiate with the past as embodied in two distinct social spaces of the late Qing: the old-style elite household and the courtesan house. They are then “incomplete people” as they borrow from the courtesans as well as things modern and Western, in creating a new kind of family or relationship as a rebellion against the traditional household. The combination of emotional and materialistic concerns, of old and new elements, in such relationships seem to be a positive development compared to the traditional marriage that merely served to continue the family lineage and power.
Late Qing Themes in Eileen Chang: Gender, Modernity, and the Household in Decline
Council Chambers
By analyzing the cover image of Chuanqi (1946, expanded edition) and its late-Qing source, the paper aims to show the persistence of late-Qing themes in Eileen Chang’s work. In the late Qing, the old imperial tradition fell apart while modernity and industrial culture first arrived in treaty ports such as Shanghai. Such combination of old and new elements persisted in Chang’s own era when the city was under the Japanese occupation. Rather than showing heroic characters in revolutionary missions, Chang portrays “incomplete characters” playing the unchanging game of love (or chance) in a setting that is generally traditional but also altered by the intrusion of modernity—this is vividly illustrated by the cover image of Chuanqi.
The paper pays particular attention to the representations of Shanghai women in Chang’s fiction. These women experience modern displacements and anxieties of uncertain future and destiny, which are always tied to relationship and marriage as well as to materialistic and financial concerns. They negotiate with the past as embodied in two distinct social spaces of the late Qing: the old-style elite household and the courtesan house. They are then “incomplete people” as they borrow from the courtesans as well as things modern and Western, in creating a new kind of family or relationship as a rebellion against the traditional household. The combination of emotional and materialistic concerns, of old and new elements, in such relationships seem to be a positive development compared to the traditional marriage that merely served to continue the family lineage and power.
Comments
Presentation is included in Panel 14: Border-Crossing and Comparative Literature in Late Imperial China