Fated Futures: Females in Eileen Chang's Fictions

Abstract

In her works, Eileen Chang (1920-1995) portrays all human conflicts as occurring not just due to defects in society, but also due to inherent human defects such as malice and the wickedness of the heart, which she saw as not being the monopoly of any class, in contrast to most of her contemporary writers. However, she was not unaware of problems in society, in particular, the problems women faced in traditional male-dominated Chinese society. Most of her stories are stories involve love-courtships, affairs, or flirtations, but they are not sentimental or romantic love stories. In her view, passion is transitory and the human heart always has to contend not only with its own ego, but also with the egos of the other people involved and with the institutionalized ego of society as a whole. The transience and devious irrationality of human passion and the prejudices of society preclude the possibility of permanent romantic love. Her stories deal with many different types of women that vary considerably in age, level of education, and class, but whether traditional or modern, none can escape from the conventional women's tragedy arising from the male-chauvinistic and patriarchal creed that Chinese society maintains concerning women. In this paper, I discuss the role and the notion of the females in Eileen Chang's stories as ＂male-dependent commodities＂.