"Women Metaphors" In Eileen Chang’s Fictions From A Cognitive Perspective

"Women" is a highly abstract and complex concept, with no simple means to be represented. The representation of women has received a great deal of attention. The choice of metaphor as a vehicle to transmit stereotyped images of womanhood proves very effective due to the way metaphor works for talking about one thing in terms of another.This paper is concerned with the study of the concept of women from the perspective of conceptual metaphor by analyzing women metaphors in Eileen Chang’s fictions. In this paper, women metaphors refer to all conceptual metaphors about women portrayal and description in their appearance, figure, age, voice, actions, manners, beliefs, values, emotional attitudes, personalities and fates in Chang’s fictions. Therefore, women metaphorical expressions are the linguistic expressions of women metaphors.The corpus in this thesis is extracted from the Complete Collection of Eileen Chang’s Classic Stories, which is the most complete version published in 2009 by Beijing Shi Yue Literature Press of Beijing Publishing Group Co., Ltd.33 short stories and novels are carefully examined. In accordance with the definition of women metaphors and women metaphorical expressions in this thesis, two major women metaphors are identified:WOMEN AS INANIMATE SUBSTANCES and WOMEN AS ANIMATE SUBSTANCES which include 15 sub-metaphors, realized in 56 women metaphorical expressions.This thesis sets out to answer the following research questions:1) What women metaphors are used for representation of women in Eileen Chang’s fictions?2) What are the characteristics of women metaphors in Eileen Chang’s fictions?3) How are women metaphors related to the theme and plot development of Eileen Chang’s fictions?4) What is the social-cultural environment underlying women metaphorical expressions like "人像金瓶里的一朵栀子花”,“平常她像个焦忧的小母鸡,东瞧西看,这里啄啄,那里啄啄,顾不周全”?This paper answers the aforementioned questions and draws the following conclusions:1) Source domains for women metaphors are food, combustibles, mud, goods, burdens, one breath, sculptures, articles of daily use, birds, flowers, chickens, prisoners, supernatural creatures, spiders, specimens, most of which are trivial things in daily life.2) Chang’s women metaphors share the characteristics of being nostalgia, worldly, unique and representative.3) In Eileen Chang’s fictions, women metaphors are not only reflected in the title of her stories but also are interconnected to model and interpret her fictions by generating related metaphorical expressions across whole areas of discourse. They are the epitomes of the theme in Chang’s fictions and help to develop the plot of her stories.4) Women metaphors show that women in Eileen Chang’s fictions are considered as lifeless, valueless, humble, exploited and constrained by that social-cultural environment.This study is of significance because based on conceptual metaphor theory it takes a good try to fill the gap of applying conceptual metaphor theory in literature analysis of women in Eileen Chang’s fictions. It will help to understand the women image and reveal the cultural specificity of women metaphors in Eileen Chang’s fictions and provide cognitive evidence for literature interpretation of Eileen Chang’s fictions.