Western Characters in Eileen Chang's 1940s Novels

Abstract

The 1940s was the early stage of Eileen Chang’s creative career. During this period, she created many Western characters in her novels, especially seven works, namely Shame, Amah!, Cycle of Traps, When I was Young, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, Aloeswood Incense: The Second Brazier,, Red Rose, White Rose, and The Creation of a Century. Adopting the theory of comparative literary figurativism and post-colonialism, this paper is based on these seven fictional texts involving Western characters and analyses them in terms of writing tendency, generative mechanism and double entailment. The study reveals that the Western characters in Eileen Chang’s novels show the characteristics of “de-familiarisation” and “decolonisation” in terms of writing tendency and are generated under the influence of Eileen Chang’s personal experience and collective imagination, of which the personal experience includes the living environment and reading experience. These exotic images have the double connotation of speaking of “self” and “other”, which can reflect the homogeneity of self and other and the dissimilarity with some post-colonial characteristics.