The Female Images In Eileen Chang’s Screenplays

Eileen Chang is an important and outstanding film screenwriter in the infancy of Chinese female film. In fifty and sixty of the twentieth century, writing screenplays is Eileen Chang’s major creative activities. Her17plays (14for the screenplay), novels and essays, penetrate and affect mutually, and constitute together Eileen Chang’s unique and complete art world. Therefore, the screenplays can not be ignored in the writing career of Eileen Chang. In her screenplays, Eileen Chang re-wrote "weak and ordinary people" who "is more representative of the total amount of times than the hero " in a "humorous" way."Humorous" style shows a new face instead of the "desolate" style in her novel writing. More rich and mature female consciousness constructed a different women world from her novels. This thesis resolves the artistic charm of Eileen Chang screenplays according to the female image. It includes three parts:the type of female images, the Gender Narration and comedy art in her screenplays. Through these analyses, we can more deeply understand the characteristics of Eileen Chang’s Film Literature and her great artistic achievement.The first part of this thesis is a typological expounding of the female images in Eileen Chang’s screenplays. In the screenplays, Eileen Chang shaped four categories of distinctive character image of women: the slick, sophisticated and brainy wives; the open, independent and rebellious women in the city; the wisdom, courageous, vigorous and capable social beauties; the strong and independent "Family Angels." These four types of characters fully demonstrated Eileen Chang’s writing of female strength and beauty. It shows a great different from the "pathological" women in her novels.The second part of this thesis explores the author’s feminist consciousness and gender positions from the perspective of gender narration in her screenplays. Singapore scholar Zhao Xiumin divided the gender factors in Eileen Chang’s literary world into "other-gender" and "self-gender". According to this division, I think, from the "other-gender" in her screenplays, Eileen Chang not only continued the male emasculated simulation writing of novels, but also further converted the metaphorical expression of anti-patriarchal consciousness to a direct rebellious action. From the "self-gender", Eileen Chang obviously expressed the good wishes of "gender identity" in the female. She thought that women must have self-awareness and achieve gender identity, if they want to get equal rights with. What’s more, she insisted that the relationship between women must be friendship and tolerance, rather than mutual repression. This is different from her novels.The third part of the paper is the analysis of Eileen Chang’s remarkable comedy talent according to the skills of characterization in the screenplays. In the creation of screenplays, Eileen Chang used the exaggerated performances, misunderstand and coincidently situational settings and humorous language to show us a art which is humor and laughing in tears. The present of the comic art reflects the excellent talent in comedy of Eileen Chang.