Female Images in the Shanghai Culture Depicted by Eileen Chang—Take Half a Lifelong Romance as an Example

Abstract

Eileen Chang is a representative writer of Shanghai literature, playing an important role in the modernization process of 20th-century Chinese literature. This paper takes Eileen Chang’s novel Half a Lifelong Romance as an example and focuses on the character analysis of the two main female characters, Gu Manzhi and Gu Manlu, to further explore the impact of Shanghai culture on female images in the 20th century. Shanghai culture is a unique culture that emerged after the opening of Shanghai to the West, and the taxi-dancer culture it produced led to the tragic origin of Manlu. The characteristics of Shanghai society such as gap of wealth, low status of women, and backward thinking all affect the fate and image of female characters in the novel. Half a Lifelong Romance provides a lot of writing possibilities for analyzing the female images in Eileen Chang’s works, enriching the description of Shanghai in modern Chinese literature, and providing more perspectives for further analyzing Shanghai culture.