An Analysis Of The Character Configuration Of Stronger Women And Feebler Men In Ailing Zhang’s Novels

Eileen Chang is undoubtedly a legendary figure in the1940s in Shanghai. Chang, a talented woman writer, published her first works Chen Xiang Xie Di Yi Lu Xiang in1943when she was23. Since then she started to set foot on the stage of the history of modern Chinese literature and became the hottest writer with the momentum of high-yield and high-quality. In A History of Modern Chinese Fiction Professor Hsia Chih-tsing praised the works of Eileen Chang as excellent as Lu Xun. Through Hsia’s work, more people began to pay attention to Chang’s works, and as a special cultural icon people made all kinds of researches on her works.When reading the works of Eileen Chang, I find an interesting phenomenon that there is a clear writing attitude of "dominating women and weak men". Different from the traditional submissive and docile images, female figures showed a relatively dominating style; on the contrary, men in her works virtually cleared up male authority and were a group of cowardly and wretched. This paper focuses on this phenomenon in an attempt to carry out a preliminary study from three parts.The first part mainly has a discussion of "dominating women and weak men" and classifies this manifestation into two modes:dominant mode and recessive mode. It explores how the two modes are presented in novels through a select of her specific works. The second part aims to explain the reasons for this phenomenon from three aspects. Firstly, it thorough explicates the reasons on analysis of the versions based on Jung’s Archetype which is the major theoretical support and assisted with Release of Irrational Desire and Identity theories. Secondly, it focus on Eileen Chang’s personal life experiences and mainly on the people and events that she encountered in her childhood life. Also, it inquires into the reasons of "dominating women and weak men" fully expressed in her works which are influenced by her personal life. The third aspect concentrates on A Dream of Red Mansions that had rather large influences on herself and the character structure in her works. Eileen Chang was famous for having an obsession with "A Dream of Red Mansions", and "A Dream of Red Mansions" definitely had a deep effect upon her. Due to the limit of article length, this paper only analyzes such influences from three aspects on female roles who possess pure and noble morals, extraordinary ability and strong personality, in addition to Male outwardly strong but inwardly weak, rich men’s sons in two aspect a representative.The third part has a simple analysis of the feature of "dominating women and weak men", which is not universal and not thorough. Furthermore, it presents a brief explanation of the reasons for the formation of this feature.The conclusion of this paper, the contents of the summer of a be concise and to the point. To women in her work, Eileen Chang often has a attitude of "understand, so compassionate". Even the most severe criticism, also can see her warmth, and for men, she is often spare no effort to in their merciless lashing, even some look more decent, and ultimately could not escape the fate of being ridiculed.