On Eileen Chang's Death Consciousness And Aesthetic Incarnation

Death consciousness is a fear to death and the resultant anxiety to life sourcing from the life instinct. Essentially, it is the awakening of man's self-consciousness and also it shows the state of attention, willingness and esteem to life. In accordance with S. Freud's theory, death instinct lies on the ground of everyone's heart, i.e., his sub-consciousness, and it incarnates differently in the consciousness. A writer, who is usually sensitive, has a more intensive death-consciousness than the normal one has. So his appreciation to death, at some extent, affects the living attitude and the writing inclination of them. This paper, by means of Fuller's prototype criticism approach, discusses the content and incentives concerning Eileen Chang's death consciousness, and their specific reflections in her works, which based on the psychoanalysis in S. Freud and G. Jung's theory with reference to the currents of culture and literature at that time. It then explores systematically a series reflection of imagination and prototype, such as; ancient tombs, corpses, shadows of ghost, mirrors, glass and the moon, etc. appeared in Eileen Chang's works. Among of them, the paper focuses on the aesthetic incarnation of death consciousness in her novels, i.e., the death imagination that is a literature conception consists of those phenomena.