Novels As Cures For Trauma

The traumatic experience of Eileen Chang is a result of the pain felt during her childhood, the oppressive living conditions, and the extreme crave for love, which leads to the spontaneous emotion-transferring while she was writing and triggers the unconscious psychological treatment, in the hope of satisfying the inner desire for love and the sense of security. Thus, Chang used the process of rewriting to "cure her trauma", and the details of her life in Hong Kong and Shanghai and daily experiences about her family and marriage were then repetitively mentioned in her narration. She expressed herself and healed her wounds through plot description, rewriting process, memory compensation, and tragic conflicts, among which the overlapped occurrence of memory and reality made parts of the like-autobiography authentic, and the unique expression of the urgency, the absurdity, and the beingness of time revealed Chang’s purposes of presenting and confirming her value of being, and easing her pain during the narrating which was regarded as a therapeutic process of life force transferring through words creating and writing....Therefore, Chang’s "Whispering" and "Free Children", and "Words and Pictures", "Small Reunion", "the fall of the pagoda", and "the book of change", written in her late years, are taken as the important books to support the arguments and the references to her other books during the early stage of her writing. C. T. Hsia is quoted here, "Nowadays, Eileen Chang should be regarded as the most brilliant and most important writer in China. Her short novels are as good as, if not better than, those of the great modern British and American writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. " Although Hsia modified his comment later, what he said still represents the opinions of most people. Chang may exhaust her talents in her early creations and could only focus on details in her late years, but it is undeniable that these books written out of her own experiences enable us to deconstruct Chang, restore what she was really like, and have a better understanding of her uniqueness.