Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 21, 07 December 2023
Open
Access | Article
The Rewriting of Eileen Chang’s Female Characters and Its Significance in the Film Love After Love
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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.
Keywords
Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier, Love After Love, film adaptation, image of female characters
References
1. Shi Fengli. (2023) Fine But Offset: A Film Adaptation of Eileen Chang’s Novel The First Incense. Journal of Hubei Industrial Polytechnic, 36(1), 62-66.
2. Xing Shaoxuan, Liu Chuan’e. (2022) The First Incense Burnt: From a Novel to a Film. Southern Cultural Forum, 4, 163-168.
3. Zhang Xiaoling. (2022) The Resolution of Bleakness: The First Incense from Novel to Film Adaptation. Movie Review, 2, 75-78.
4. Lin Xingqian. (1996) Eileen Chang: Texts of Repressed Situations and Hysterical Discourse. Modern Chinese Literature Studies, 1,90-103.
5. Dai Jinhua. (1994) Invisible Women: Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Women’s Film. Contemporary Cinema, 6, 37-45.
6. Lin Xingqian. (2019) Reverse Writing of Eileen Chang and the May 4th Female Literature. Journal of Lucheng, 5, 1-10.
7. Eileen Chang. (2006). Love in a Fallen City. Trans. by Kingsbury, K.S. New York: New York Review Books Classics.
8. Xu Zidong. (1995) Rereading Sunrise, A Tale of Laughter and Tears and Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 6, 29-39.
9. Yu Yaqin. (2021) Interview with Wang Anyi: “Filling the Gaps” for Eileen Chang, Challenging Due to the Abundance of Hidden Elements. Retrieved from https://weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?display=0&id=2309404695495284228429&retcode=6102&sudaref=www.baidu.com.
10. Noth J. (2021) Militiawomen, Red Guards, and Images of Female Militancy in Maoist China. Twentieth-Century China, 46, 153-180.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-185-8
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-186-5
- Published Date
- 07 December 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/21/20231392
- Copyright
- 07 December 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited