Fulfillment and Ruin: A Comparison of the Marriage Narratives of Jane Austen and Eileen Chang — Taking Pride and Prejudice and Half a Lifelong Romance as Examples
Abstract
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance both take marriage and love as their subject, yet lead to two entirely different endings — fulfillment and ruin. This paper explores this difference from the two dimensions of marital ending and the writing of violence, examines the causes in historical context and personal experience behind it, and summarizes it as a difference in the two writers' postures toward patriarchy. Austen domesticates violence, and by shaping rational female characters and reformable male images, fights for women's dignity and space of choice within the marriage system, attempting to improve the system in a mild way; Chang, by contrast, exposes patriarchy's objectification of women through extreme deprivation and betrayal, and reveals the collapse of the system with a calm narrative, carrying out a thorough deconstruction. The two together constitute the two basic paths of women's writing when facing patriarchal oppression, and also provide a reference for understanding the response strategies of women's literature under different historical and cultural conditions.
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