The Rewriting of Eileen Chang’s Female Characters and Its Significance in the Film Love After Love
Abstract
In November 2021, the film Love After Love, based on Eileen Chang’s short story Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, was released, sparking widespread attention and controversy. Using the basic method of textual close reading, this paper compares and analyses the source text produced by Eileen Chang with the film text collectively interpreted by the film’s screenwriter and director to discover the rewritings and changes in the image of her female characters from the short story to the film, and to interpret such rewritings in the theoretical field of feminist literary criticism, in order to answer the question of how Eileen Chang’s portrayal of women can be adapted to and inspires the contemporary cultural context of China in the adaptation of contemporary creators. The film liberates the female characters in Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier from the anxiety and pain of lack of desire and self-suppression and also gives them the possibility of reclaiming their dignity and selves, which, on the one hand, is adapted to the cultural context of the increasing call for women’s emancipation in contemporary China, but on the other hand, it has not yet escaped from the phenomenon of masculine writing that has been prevalent in the Chinese cultural context since the beginning of the twentieth century.
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