It seems unwise to compare Eileen Chang and Alice Munro, because at first glance the
urban traits of Chang's Shanghai and Hong Kong romances are dissimilar to the rural
idiosyncrasies of Munro's southwestern Ontario stories. However, both the female writers
describe in their fiction the women characters' romantic fantasies and their interrelationships
with reality. In Chang's Romances, in the westernized and commercialized cosmopolitan set, a
new age is coming, and the traditional patriarchal familial and moral systems are disintegrating.
The women try to escape from frustrating circumstances through the rescue of romantic love and
marriage. In Munro's fiction, the women attempt to get ride of their banal small-town cultures in
order to search for freedom of imagination and expression through the medium of art, although at ;
the center of their quest for selfhood is always their love and hate relationship with men. The
women are in the dilemma of "female financial reality" and romantic love; they express their
desires and fears through immoral and abnormal love relationships and vicarious escapades in
their imagination; their interpretation of life and love is in reference to art in general, but such
interpretation is full of disguise. Only in their unbound daydreams and imagination can they
express their desires freely. Alice Munro and Eileen Chang's fictional worlds bespeak a sense of
femininity. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16213 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Wang, Yuanfei |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 6678889 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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