| Summary: | 碩士 === 東吳大學 === 中國文學系 === 101 === Character Study of Eileen Chang’s “The Golden Cangue” and “The Rouge of the North”
Abstract
Eileen Chang is an important figure in the history of modern Chinese fiction. By her legendary growing-up experiences that filled with misfortune and dull, Chang always explores the warm and cold in the world with the extraordinary insight and perceptiveness and narrates the real humanity with neat and unique text. Although the wordings are magnificent and gorgeous, the world construct by the text is so desolate and sad. The thesis is aim to explore the character of Cao Qiqiao in Eileen Chang’s true story which drawing on her own family and was written into a short story in 1943, “The Golden Cangue” and compare with Chai Yindi's image in the novel “The Rouge of the North”, another version re-written by the author again with Cao Qiqiao two decades after. The thesis also explores the way how the director in the 80s to explain Eileen Chang's text world with the lens and has an analysis of the discussion made.
In “The Golden Cangue”, Eileen Chang successfully shaped the heroine Cao Qiqiao’s madness and mutation in people’s mind. In reality, such a typical image reflected the author’s feeling of the resentment and dissatisfaction from the autocratic forces in China for over thousands of years. Therefore Chang wrote , distinctive dynamic soul startling deep-seated write about how Cao Qiqiao survive and self-defend in the environment full of injustice, how to struggle and select in lust and money, and how step by step walk to madness and variability with the gold cangue finally without emotional attachment, mercy and reservation. From “The Golden Cangue” and “The Rouge of the North”, Eileen Chang's writing focus remains on the heroine. She delicately depicts Yindi’s mentality before and after marriage ─ ─ Although both Cao Qiqiao in “The Golden Cangue” and Chai Yindi in “The Rouge of the North” worshiped money at the expense of the real inner emotion and decided to marry into the aristocratic family, causing their lifetime grievances to survive in a strong autocratic oppression and bullying with the bitterness of blood and tears out of the tragic desolation female theme of life. The complete to dull descriptions of the core figures as well as desolate and gorgeous to dull and far tone ... expresses the creation of “The Rouge of the North” truly is more in line with the concept of Eileen Chang’s writing. Eileen Chang still made the unique value of “The Rouge of the North” between the two to isolate the differences of the two.
The different forms and different interpretation perspective represent every editor’s different sort of understanding to the works and the willingness to recreate with a transformation through different forms of media. The director, Dan Han-Chang started from a male director perspective with the inevitable ambition to interpret a ten-thousand-word long novel by a female writer, Eileen Chang through the lens of a two-hour movie. In movies, there is its own set of deleting and retention. Different space, time, background, authors and editors will have different understanding and interpretation for the original text. Thus, the rewritten adaptations will have different meanings and characteristics, which is the reverberations and re-creation from the original.
Keywords: Eileen Chang, Golden Cangue, The Rouge of the North, abnormal psychology, Dan Han-Chang
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