Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011

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Making History Anew: Feminine Melodrama in Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City (1943)

By

Li Guo

Utah State University

This essay will explore the narrative mode of feminine melodrama in Love in a Fallen City, a novella by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995). Chang has gained international fame for her depiction of Chinese women in the tumultuous transitional period prior to the modern era, especially traditional women figures that are in stark contrast with the New Woman ideal portrayed by her contemporary writers. Born in Shanghai, Chang was a descendant of an eminent late imperial official and received western education in Hong Kong under the influence of her open-minded mother. A literary sensation at the age of twenty-five, Chang was applauded by audiences for depicting characters with an illustrative psychological depth, especially elite women or women of low social origins who strive to carve out their precarious spaces via their ventures in the marriage market. Unlike the revolutionary women depicted in many novels of the time, Chang's traditional Chinese women characters cannot do away with cultural capital and even aesthetic capital. Instead, they rely on the alliance of beauty and culture to achieve a matrimonial bond and the social recognition that comes with the marriage contract. Chang’s heroine is often such an “old-fashioned” gentry woman, who, in the historical swirl of decorum, romance, and commodity fetishism, explores a feminine consciousness overlooked by those May Fourth authors whose works were baptized with revolutionist politics.

Eileen Chang wrote the novella during 1941 and 1942, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese troops were occupying Hong Kong. This war-ravaged period inspired Chang to write more than a dozen short stories and numerous essays, all of which were published between 1943 and 1944.  Love in a Fallen City portrays a romance between the British-educated playboy Fan Liuyuan and the twenty-eight-year-old Shanghainese divorcée, Bai Liusu. Liusu, the daughter of a late imperial official, divorces her abusive husband and returns to her mother’s household, only to discover two years later that her close relatives resented her presence and spent all her savings.
 

The story begins with the news of the death of Liusu’s ex-husband. Liusu’s family, weary of supporting a divorced and penniless daughter, presses Liusu to either remarry another man or return to her ex-husband’s household. As Liusu is contemplating this difficult choice, she makes the acquaintance of Liuyuan, a Chinese man born in Britain and heir to a large family fortune, and introduced to Liusu’s young niece as a potential husband. When Liusu’s nervous niece asks her aunt to accompany her on her first date, Liuyuan falls in love with the refined Liusu as if by fate. With the help of a matchmaker, he invites Liusu on a trip to Hong Kong to escape her prying family. In the exotic setting of the Repulse Bay Hotel, the romance between the couple unfolds through a long series of flirtations. After much deliberation, Liusu, knowing that Liuyuan does not plan to marry her, nevertheless submits to his terms and becomes his mistress in Hong Kong. Shortly after, the Sino-Japanese War breaks out. During this turbulent period, the couple builds a true emotional relationship and, at the end of the story, is happily married. The narrator concludes the novella by comparing Liusu to the mythical femme fatale, whose charm “felled cities and kingdoms,” [1] thus evoking the title of the story, qingcheng zhilian, or “love that fells a city.” In the narrator’s sentimental storytelling, Liusu’s personal happiness is applauded as a woman’s triumph at the price of Hong Kong’s fall and countless people’s death.

This essay will study the ways in which Chang endows her female character’s presence with narrative power and agency in the diegesis. To trace the text’s melodramatic narrative mode, I will call upon Peter Brooks’s study of the melodramatic narrative model. As Brooks argues, “Melodrama is an expressionistic form.… It appears as a medium in which repression has been pierced to allow through articulation, to make available the expression of pure moral and psychological integers.” (Brooks 1976, 60) Brooks further explains that melodrama is "a drama accompanied by music," and locates its historical genesis within "the French Revolution and its aftermath" (Brooks 1976, 15).  Brooks describes the meaning of melodrama in terms of primal psychic integers, and argues that melodrama, in its desire to “say everything,” breaks down the mechanism of repression (Brooks 1976, 60). In melodramatic performances, the internal emotions of the characters are not so much articulated through language as embodied and acted out through gestures and postures. I will examine Chang’s narrative presentation of the female protagonist through meticulous close-up depictions, recalling Brooks’s discussion of gestures as non-verbal means of expression. I argue that Liusu’s acting in the diegesis of ancient narratives enables her to “speak” through her gestures and postures. The text thus brings forth the enunciation of a feminine consciousness from the intersections of mythical narratives and the discourse of feminine reality in the polemical socio-historical context of Chang’s time.

I. Reviving the Mythic in the Quotidian  

As previously mentioned, Love in a Fallen City begins with the death of Liusu’s ex-husband, a sudden incident that disturbs the silent atmosphere of the Bai family and presses Liusu to decide the direction of her life. Laura Mulvey argues in her discussion of “melodrama” in film, that when a story begins with the death of the male figure, “It is as though the narrational lens had zoomed in and opened up the neat function ‘marriage’ (‘and they lived happily…’) to ask ‘what next?’ and to focus on the figure of the princess, waiting in the wings for her one moment of importance, to ask ‘what does she want?’”  (Mulvey 1989, 30) Mulvey goes on to claim, “Here we find the generic terrain for melodrama, in its women-oriented strand” (30). She notes that in a woman-oriented narrative strand, the symbolic equation of woman-equals-sexuality still persists, but rather than being an image or a narrative function, the equation opens out a narrative area previously suppressed or repressed. The woman is no longer the signifier of sexuality (function “marriage”) in the “Western” type of story (Mulvey 1989, 32). Setting Mulvey’s study of melodrama against Chang’s story, I will argue that the melodramatic narrative mode complicates the symbolic function of Woman, who is no longer simply an object of masculine desire but is endowed with certain power to work against the traditional Oedipal narrative structure from within, by either facilitating or obstructing the movement of the narrative. In Chang’s story, the death or absence of Liusu’s ex-husband initiates the heroine’s journey of self-discovery and her exploration of an autonomous life outside her parents’ suffocating, swarming, and increasingly hostile domicile.

Liusu is, specifically, confronted with two choices. One is, as Liusu’s brother, the Third-Master, suggests, to “return to the husband’s family and go into mourning,” a common option for divorced women in patriarchal Confucian society. The other, more benign choice is to remarry. In classical Chinese, the word “return” is a formal term for “woman’s marriage”; a woman’s social identity, according to the classical belief system, does not fully come into being until her “return” to her husband’s household, which is considered her “original home.” In psychoanalytical terms, a woman’s social identity does not come into being until she undergoes the symbolic stage of the marriage, which upholds the law of the father and exerts the power of naming over the woman. Chang’s story, however, problematizes the concept of woman returning home. In a traditional Chinese context, the western figure of the “gay divorcée” does not exist; remarriage is not so much an individual choice as a social necessity. Therefore, a woman like Liusu, someone other than a “good wife and mother,” must endure both a “nonidentity” as well as relentless ridicule by her relatives and others for her failure in the marriage market.

This traditional context forces Liusu to seek a new marriage prospect. When relatives introduce her to the rich bachelor Liuyuan, Liusu is so eager to extricate herself from her family bondage that she takes the extraordinary step of joining him in Hong Kong, a place far removed from Shanghai. Critic Leo Ou-fan Lee notes that Liusu is compelled to define her individual subjectivity as a nontraditional woman, since most women characters in traditional Chinese fiction are not divorced. As an extension of and response to Lee’s argument, I will suggest that Chang’s depiction of Liusu represents a consciousness of Chinese women that deviates from and modifies traditional concepts of femininity. The author’s cogent deliberation, admirable self-control, and impulsive pathos masterfully sculpt the narrative flow, keeping the suspense escalating until the revelation of Liusu’s true emotions at the end. 

II: Gestures and Mute Pathos

Another arresting feature of Chang’s story is the detailed depiction of the characters’ gestures and emotive pathos; this is closely related to the author’s alleged fascination with traditional Chinese operas, in which facial expressions, gestures, and movements are important codes of expression for characters. (Chang 1943b) Western melodramas similarly rely on expressive gestures and movements as primary means of articulating characters’ emotions. In melodrama, Brooks argues, “subjects are evidently conceived for their plastic figurability, the dramatic interplay of posture and gesture. The spoken word is rarely used toward the formulation of significant messages; it is largely confined to emotional utterance, outburst, expressive cadenzas” (1976, 56). Hence, melodramas are often “texts of muteness” (1976, 56), as the representations of most significant meanings are acted out through non-verbal means within a limited or confined space. In films, this confined space is the mise-en-scène or décor; in theatre, it is the tableau, the visual representation of meaning.

Love in a Fallen City often represents bodily gestures as non-verbal means of self-expression. Liusu, when caught up in moments of claustrophobia, relies on postures and gestures to express her emotions. At moments of intensified passion, the narrative lens recurrently closes in on the heroine—on her face, her body, and her gestures, capturing the slightest ripples of expression. This image of the heroine became even more vivacious when set against the decadent household of the Bai’s family, where people’s lives are “behind the beat” of the modernizing city. (Chang 111) This spatial setting, like the tableau in a theatre, serves as the background of the story. The narrator, before introducing the female protagonist, evokes an imaginary female opera entertainer, who, in the undulating tune of huqin, delivers an exquisite performance.

When the huqin wails on a night of ten thousand lamps, the bow slides back and forth, drawing forth a tale too desolate for words--Oh! Why go into it? The tale of the huqin should be performed by a radiant entertainer, two long streaks of rouge pointing to her exquisite nose as she sings, as she smiles, covering her mouth with her sleeve… but there it was just Fourth Master Bai sunk in darkness, sitting alone on a ramshackle balcony and playing the huqin. (Chang 1943a, 113)

As in a melodrama, the story is launched with musical accompaniment. Chang has talked about the huqin, or the “Chinese two-stringed violin,” always brings on “a moment of high musical drama and innumerable melodramatic twists and turns, all of which are much too clearly intended to elicit the audience's tears.” (Chang  1944b, 205) In the flow of the melodies, the words of the opera singer are not intelligible; however, her humble gesture of covering her mouth while smiling reflects her hesitation to speak, which resonates with the narrator’s reluctance to tell the story. The storyteller, like a commentator in traditional Chinese fiction, intervenes with a lamenting voice, “Oh! Why go into it?”; the ancient tale is “too desolate for words.” The narrator’s sighing is a melodramatic expression, which, according to Brooks, is meant “to achieve the full expression of psychological condition and moral feeling in the most transparent, unmodified, infantile form” (Brooks 1976, 56). The narrative desire, though restrained, takes the form of an immediate and distinctive expression. Like the voice of a female character in a silent film, the opera singer’s voice is no longer retrievable. However, the singer’s gestures persist and become emblems of the possibilities of meaning, which is engendered in the absence of words. Although the woman remains an object of viewing, she is simultaneously free of action.

This possibility of action, or female agency, resonates with the tale of the legendary beauty Bao Si, which precedes and interpolates Liusu’s life story. This ancient femme fatale is evoked to illustrate a form of self-empowerment and agency. In a later scene, when Liusu is disheartened by her relatives’ attempt to force her to return to her deceased husband’s family, she hears the Fourth Master playing huqin and feels the invigorating effect of the ancient melody:

Out on the balcony, Fourth Master had once again taken up his huqin. The tune rose and fell, and Liusu’s head tilted to one side as her eyes and hands started moving through dance poses. As she performed in the mirror, the huqin no longer sounded like a huqin, but like strings and flutes playing a solemn court dance. She took a few paces to the right, then a few to the left. Her steps seemed to trace the lost rhythms of an ancient melody.

Suddenly, she smiled--a private, malevolent smile; the music came to a discordant halt. The huqin went on playing outside, but it was telling tales of fealty and filial piety, chastity and righteousness: distant tales that had nothing to do with her.  (Chang, 121-122)

Set against the dark interior of the Bai house, Liusu’s enlivened body becomes a mythical referent, resonating with the image of the ancient female opera entertainer. The melodies of huqin propel the female protagonist into a fantasy space in which women’s gestures, looks, and inarticulate cries are transformed into melodramatic meanings. The “solemn” air of Liusu’s performance revives the ancient “court dances” and transforms traditional dramaturgic codes into articulations of personal passions. As the mythic fuses with the real, Liusu’s performance becomes dangerously disruptive. Her smile, “a private, malevolent smile,” magically brings the music to “a discordant halt.” Liusu’s smile is reminiscent of the legendary femme fatale Bao Si who is a beautiful woman enslaved by Emperor Zhou Youwang after a battle against the Mongolians. Charmed by Bao’s beauty and eager to make her smile, Emperor jeopardizes the nation by lighting up fires on the Great Wall and sending false signals of foreign invasion, so that Bao Si could be pleased by the chaotic scenes of the beguiled armies and people. This subplot is interpolated into Chang’s story. In the narrator’s eyes, the mythic beauty wields a dangerous power, challenging ancient stories about “fealty and filial piety, chastity and righteousness.” Portraying Liusu as a reincarnated beauty whose power disrupts the dominant gender discourses of male-centric society, Chang foreshadows her subsequent adventure and success in love and marriage; and by reviving the mythic in the quotidian, the story represents new spaces of women’s imaginative agency.

III. Fetishistic Disavowal and Primitive Passions

When set against the social and historical turmoil of China’s transition to modernity, Liusu’s depiction as “a real Chinese girl” suggests a promise of integrity and permanency.(Chang 135) Liusu’s image has been fetishised and evokes a nostalgic longing for China’s historical past—for, that is, the traditions that the May Fourth reformists condemned and dispelled as outdated. As Haiyan Lee suggests, Chang’s work presents a poetics of the social through a fictional world in which “the old elite are making the painful transition to the regime of bourgeois respectability under conditions of the commodity economy, colonial (Hong Kong) or semi-colonial (Shanghai) domination, and even war and occupation.”[2] In this world, women, “both beautiful and not so beautiful, manage, manipulate, or maim social relationships through things (houses, gardens, dresses, accessories, and objets d'art) and their universal common denominator: money.” (Ibid.)
 

The 1930s and 1940s belong to a historical period during which revolutionist writers such as Ding Ling depicted women’s consciousness and agency as enabled only through fundamental social reform, and reproached commodities and romance as part of the old social order. Chang’s writings, however, suggest that women may achieve individual agency without conforming to the heroic ethic of revolution. As Lee puts it, Chang’s stories were warmly received by the audience of the time because they reflected the return of the “bourgeois social,” as people “eagerly re-acquainted themselves with commodity fetishism and the romantic mythology” (Ibid.)

The conflict between, and intersection of, romantic mythology and commodity fetishism is reflected in the image of the heroine. Liusu’s “Chineseness,” which is at once outspoken and out of place in semi-colonial Hong Kong, is undoubtedly a sign of cross-cultural commodity fetishism.[3] The text’s meticulous description of Liusu emphasizes her visual image, or rather, construes her stereotypical image as her identity. The female protagonist, fixed as a legendary or traditional Chinese beauty, becomes encapsulated in a narrative economy of voyeurism and fetishism. She becomes an object, which, for the dislocated male protagonist, represents sexuality as well as the myth of cultural purity and historical origination. Liusu’s depiction also recalls Homi Bhabha’s arguments on cultural stereotypes as fixed fetish objects. In Bhabha’s words, the fetishised subject functions at once as “a reactivation of the original fantasy--the anxiety of castration and sexual difference--as well as a normalization of that difference and disturbance in terms of the fetish object as the substitute for the mother’s penis” (Bhabha 1990, 78). For Liuyuan, who has grown up abroad and yearns for a cultural origin, Liusu, as a “true Chinese woman,” counters the trend of the linear, progressive erosion of modern civilization. Liuyuan is overwhelmed with joy at the discovery of Liusu and makes desperate attempts to “encapsulate” her: he takes her away from her family in Shanghai to the semi-colonial, cosmopolitan Hong Kong, and even takes her to a nameless forest in Malaysia, where “he cannot envision her running in a forest without wearing a traditional Qi-Pao” (Chang 1943a, 133). Liusu’s body wrapped in traditional dress evokes Liuyuan’s fantasy for a pre-Oedipal reality he can claim as his cultural origin. In this fantastic vision, Liusu becomes a woman in a time capsule, whose mystical beauty represents permanency, cyclical time, and a contented, pre-Oedipal state of being.

Love in a Fallen City further reveals the profound social and economic “lacks” attached to female sexuality in a particular historical context. According to Linda Williams, “the conventional masquerade of femininity can be read as an attempt to cover up supposedly biological ‘lacks’ with a compensatory excess of connotatively feminine gestures, clothes, and accoutrements, [while] fetishisation (often) functions as a blatantly pathetic disavowal of much more pressing social lacks--of money, education, and power” (Williams 1984, 313). In Williams’s view, women’s masquerade of femininity could be a compensation for their lack of social and economic power.  Liusu’s excessively refined gestures, looks, and movements bespeak not so much her presence as her absence, in that her elegance and ethereal beauty are but pitiful compensation for her lack of social and economic power. Her body, transfixed by countless close-ups, is submitted to narrative fetishisation. She is depicted as a “real Chinese woman,” “beautiful beyond reason, misty, ethereal” (Chang 142). The text directly raises a question to the readers. Is Liusu aware of her masquerade and consciously exercises her culturally-created beauty to compensate for her lack of power?  If so, would her effort succeed?

The text, in a later scene, reveals a prominent example of Liusu’s awareness of her powerlessness in her conversation with Liuyuan. Charmed by Liusu’s refined mannerism, Liuyuan offends Liusu with an unwitting comment that she has “little gestures and a romantic aura like a Peking Opera singer.” Hearing this, Liusu raises her eyebrows: “An opera singer--indeed! But of course it takes more than one to put on a show, and I’ve been forced into it. A person acts clever with me, and if I don’t do the same, he takes me for a fool and insults me!” (Chang 1943a, 144) Liusu’s displeasure at being compared to an opera singer (xizi) contains multiple meanings. In traditional China, opera singers occupied the lowest level of the social hierarchy. Opera singing was widely considered as akin to, and even more degenerated than, prostitution. From Liusu’s standpoint, Liuyuan’s comparison implies a moral and social downfall on the part of Liusu, which ironically speaks to both her family’s declination in the social hierarchy and her fear of degenerating into one of Liuyuan’s mistresses. Forced into putting on a show of femininity, Liusu does not perform the feminine behaviors out of narcissism or vanity. has nothing to rely on except her status as a shunü, a well-bred lady, who would never desert her gentry status and descend to the level of a working-class woman. On some level Liusu is aware of the fact her masquerade is no more than a woman’s means of finding dwellings in a world of triviality and petty desires. Chang’s delicate depiction of Liusu’s psychological activities presents the heroine’s desire and emotion vis-à-vis the setting of the marriage market, in which a woman’s value is inevitably subjected to the framework of commercialization.

Echoing Liusu’s feelings of isolation and displacement, Liuyuan’s love for Liusu manifests a nostalgic desire on the part of Liuyuan to return to the past and exile himself from a swiftly modernizing Chinese society, vividly captured in Chang’s depiction of semi-colonial 1930’s Shanghai and Hong Kong. From a psychoanalytic perspective, an “old-fashioned” gentry woman is the subaltern subject who suffers the dual repression of the semi-feudal Chinese patriarchal society and the dawning Western “modern” civilization, which doubly marginalizes her socioeconomic status. In metropolitan Hong Kong, Liusu feels like a “country bumpkin,” “old fashioned” and “utterly useless.” In her hometown of Shanghai, she is a well-bred but financially constrained woman who cannot afford to take a menial job and lose her social status. In a way, Liusu’s social disorientation recalls Chow’s discussion of femininity as it is represented in modern Chinese cinematic narratives, which “exhibit” the woman’s body as a living ethnographic museum that puts “Chinese culture” on display. Chow points out that “the ‘ethnicity’ of contemporary Chinese cinema--‘Chineseness’--is already the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism" (Chow 1995, 59). This fetishisation of the woman’s body reflects certain “structures of feeling” that Chow terms “primitive passions” (Chow 1995, 22). These passions, she says,  “emerge not simple as feelings of nostalgia but a coeval, co-temporal structure of representation at moments of cultural crisis” (Chow 1995, 43). From the 1920s to the 1940s, modern Chinese writers tended to depict women and subalterns in such a manner as to primitivize them. This “primitivism,” in turn, becomes “a way to point the moral of the humanity that is consciously ethicized and nationalized, the humanity that is ‘Chinese’” (Chow 1995, 21). In Chang’s story, Liuyuan’s infatuation with Liusu articulates an epochal fascination with the prehistoric woman. Conversely, the evolution of Liusu’s self-consciousness reveals Chang’s active exploration of a female-centered vision of historical possibility that is alternate to the dominant master narratives of revolution and liberation.

IV. Moments of Mute Pathos

As I argued above, the sentiment of pathos is of central importance to melodramatic narrative because it speaks to the subject’s pressing social “lacks” of money, education, and power. In essence, the confrontation between Liusu and the repressive social environment around her can be considered a “pathetic” melodramatic situation. Doane points out that pathos, the central emotion of melodrama, is reinforced by the disproportion between the weakness of the victim and the seriousness of the danger (Doane 1987, 89), and that pathos closely allies itself with the delineation of a lack of social power characteristic of the cultural positioning of children and women (Doane 2004, 15). This interconnection between pathos and the inarticulateness of the socially disadvantaged is well illustrated in Chang’s depiction of Liusu, who, oppressed in a domestic space, is recurrently seized by fits of claustrophia. An arresting example occurs at the beginning of the story, when Liusu refuses to return to her husband’s house and is verbally insulted by her brothers and sisters-in-law, who call her a worthless burden on the family:

She crossed her arms and clasped her neck with her hands. Seven, eight years--they’d gone by in the blink of an eye. Are you still young? Don’t worry, in another few years you’ll be old, and anyway youth isn’t worth much here. They’ve got youth everywhere--children born one after another, with their bright new eyes, their tender new mouths, their quick new wits. Time grinds on, year after year, and the eyes grow dull, the minds grow dull, and then another round of children is born.… 

Liusu cried out, covered her eyes, and fled; her feet beat a rapid retreat up the stairs to her own room. She turned on the lamp, moved it to her dressing table, and studied her reflection in the mirror. Good enough, she wasn’t too old yet. She had the kind of slender figure that does not show age--her waist eternally thin, her breasts girlishly budding…. (Chang 1943a, 121)

The compelling, pathetic effect of the scene is partly the result of the fact that Liusu is the embodiment of the very mechanism of pathos, illustrating the disproportion between means and ends, her desires and their fulfillment. As Elsaesser points out, “Pathos results from non-communication or silent made eloquent.” (Elsaesser 1972, 14) Liusu’s inarticulate cry is but a pathetic resistance, an expression of her incapability to find a habitable societal space. She can find consolation only by walking over to the mirror, an instrument of narcissism. The mirror reveals her spectacular beauty, which she’s managed to maintain over time, but it also ironically reveals Liusu as an ill-placed spectacle: her girlish appearance is askew against the decadent backdrop of the Bai household. Liusu’s reflection in the mirror only confirms her nonidentity as a “good wife and mother” (xianqi liaomu), or her inability to attain this ideal.

Pathos, in Chang’s story, may also be elicited by discrepancies between characters’ points of view. During Liusu’s first trip to Hong Kong, she and Liuyuan have a conversation over the phone at the Repulse Bay hotel. Liuyuan, who has an odd fascination with classical Chinese literature, recites a well-known ancient poem from Books of Songs: “Facing life, death, distance/ [Here is my promise to thee--]/ I take thy hand in mine, / We will grow old together.” Enchanted by the ancient poem, Liuyuan says to Liusu,

My Chinese isn’t very good, and I don’t know if I’ve got it right, but I think this is a very mournful poem which says that life and death and parting are enormous things, well beyond human control. Compared to the great forces in the world, we people are so very, very small. But still we say “I will stay with you forever, we will never, in this lifetime, leave each other”--as if we really could decide these things! (Chang 143, 149)

Liuyuan’s seemingly out-of-place apocalyptical feelings, however, fail to reach Liusu, who takes his indecision as an open rejection of marriage and angrily questions his intentions. Feeling emotionally cornered, Liuyuan retorts,

…I’m not such a fool that I’ll pay to marry someone who has no feeling for me, just so that she can tell me what to do! … Well, maybe you don’t care. Basically, you think that marriage is long-term prostitution—Liusu didn’t wait for him to finish. She slammed the receiver down, her whole face crimson with rage. How dare he talk to her like this? How dare he? She sat on the bed, the feverish darkness wrapped around her like a purple wool rug. (Chang 1943a, 149)

Liusu’s response to Liuyuan’s provocative comments reflects the extremely polarized emotion characteristic of melodramatic narratives. Caught up in “feverish” rage and “ice cold” desperation, Liusu is weighed down with emotion. This is the first moment in the story when Liusu’s desire to obtain Liuyuan’s love encounters direct frustration. The female protagonist’s sensational response evokes a feeling of pathos in the reader/spectator, who is aware of Liusu’s feelings and the effect Liuyuan’s comments have made on her, and so laments her pitiful situation. This particular scene also demonstrates the discrepancy between the two characters’ points of view. Liuyuan and Liusu have arranged for adjacent rooms at the hotel to avoid malevolent rumors about their intimacy. Although the phone is a physical connection between them, they cannot “see” each other. The scenario strongly recalls Steve Sneale’s discussion of point of view in melodramatic narrative situations. For Sneale, the term “point of view” refers to a position of knowledge. Melodramatic narratives often demonstrate the discrepancies between the narrator and the characters in their optical points of view and the eyeline match. The effect of poignancy and pathos, as Sneale notes, depends on this articulation of their separated points of view. In the above scene, for example, Liuyuan and Liusu are trying to reach out to each other. The lack of reciprocal interaction between their points of view when the characters are walled off from each other, intensifies the effect of pathos and poignancy.

Underlying Liusu’s muted pathos in these moments is a pressing sense of time. The story contains many pathetic scenes that reflect Liusu’s anxiety about the belatedness of her “time” to find happiness, or, rather, her fear of being too late. Melodramatic pathos, Doane argues, is related to a certain construction of temporality in which communication or recognitions take place but are mistimed. What the narratives demonstrate above all is the irreversibility of time (1987, 91). Likewise, Linda Williams notes that “Melodrama involves a dialectic of pathos and action--a give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time’” (1998, 69). A resonant example of this takes place upon Liusu’s second visit to Hong Kong. After she quarrels with Liuyuan over the phone at the Repulse Bay Hotel, the emotionally shattered Liusu returned to her mother’s house in Shanghai, where her relatives, having heard rumors of her supposed intimacy with Liuyuan, suspect her to be a morally degenerate woman. Two months later, Liuyuan sends another request for Liusu to meet him in Hong Kong, When his telegram arrives, Liusu is nearly vanquished by pressure from her family:

The message was terse: “PLS COME HK. PASSAGE BOOKED VIA THOMAS COOK.” Old Mrs. Bai gave a long sigh. “Since he’s sent for you, you should go” Was she worth so little? Tears dropped from her eyes. Crying made her lose all her self-control; she found she could not bear it anymore. Already she’d aged two years in one autumn--she couldn’t afford to grow old! (Chang 1943a, 153)

Liusu’s tears are a silent display of pathos, the tears of one who is wronged. Not only has Liusu been deserted by her own family, but she has also been unjustly suspected of promiscuous behavior because of her romance with Liuyuan. The grinding pressure of time increases her misery all the more, as she regrets over the loss of her youth and the fact that it is “too late” for her to make better choices. She has to submit to Liuyuan’s conditions and become his mistress, without the expected promise of marriage.

This moment of mixed feelings foreshadows the end of the story, when the couple forges an emotive bond against all odds and is happily married.  Shortly after Liusu’s return to Hong Kong, the Japanese besiege the city. During the fall of Hong Kong, Liusu and Liuyuan are forced to confront the imminent danger of death and realize their true affections for each other. Assured of his own feelings and of Liusu’s love for him, Liuyuan finally proposes marriage to Liusu. Hearing this long-awaited proposal, “Liusu didn’t say a thing. She bowed her head and let the tears fall.” (Chang 1943a, 165) The story thus ends “happily” with the achievement of the coincidence of points of view and the couple’s union. The outbreak of war represents the sensational development of the plot, the surprise or the coincidence (characteristic of melodrama) that aptly emerges into the plot and exerts a power over the characters. Liusu’s tears reveal her consolation at this last revelation of truth; the coincidence does come in time.

V. Hyperbolic Spaces

In Chang’s deployment of melodramatic narration, Liusu’s experience of peripety is also reflected in her sensational journey between her home city, Shanghai, and the spectacular urban space of Hong Kong. The city of Hong Kong, in particular, is illustrated with a compelling vividness and specificity. Chang depicts Liusu’s first glimpse of Hong Kong from the boat as follows:

It was a fiery afternoon, and the most striking part of the view was the parade of giant billboards along the dock, their reds, oranges, and pinks mirrored in the lush green water. Below the surface of the confusion, Liusu found herself thinking that in a city of such hyperbole, even a sprained ankle (from a fall) would hurt more than it did in other places. Her heart began to pound. (Chang 1943a, 160)    

Even the billboards and the crowded seashore seem to seduce, bewitch, and frustrate the unsophisticated Liusu. In Chang’s depiction, Liusu is enticed by this fantasy world and temporarily forgets her worries about marriage in a modern “city of hyperbole.” As in a traditional melodramatic narrative, the heroine is enthralled by the sight of the grandiose and spectacular scene of the seashore. In her trance of excitement, she imagines that “even a sprained ankle (from a fall) would hurt more than it did in other places.” This situation can appropriately be identified as melodramatic, for Liusu’s sight of the city, its hyperbole and excitement, conquers Liusu and threatens to bring her to her knees.

Chang’s filmic depiction of the fall of Hong Kong during the Anti-Japanese War reveals equal dexterity and vibrancy. During the fall of the city, Liuyuan and Liusu seek refuge in an international hotel guarded by British soldiers, only to find themselves enveloped in crowds of people.

Shells flew over the palm tree and the fountain in both directions. Liuyuan and Liusu, along with everyone else, squeezed back against the wall. It was a dark scene, like an ancient Persian carpet covered with woven figures of many people--old lords, princesses, scholars, beauties. Draped over a bamboo pole, the carpet was being beaten, dust flying in the wind. Blow after blow, it was beaten till the people had nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. (Chang 1943a, 160)

In this fictional “cinemascape,” neither plot nor character is significant, and human beings are reduced to cardboard figures caught in the whirlwind of the war. The scene powerfully stresses the claustrophobia of the setting, the enclosed space that overwhelms and ensnares the characters. The wall against which people of all classes are squeezing is compared to “an ancient Persian carpet covered with woven figures of many people.” The wall is thus transformed into a tableau, or, in Brooks’s words, a dramatic scene that “groups the persons in postures and gestures that show their reactions to a strong emotional peripety” (1976, 65).  The symbol of the wall, as likened to a stage tableau, acquires great plastic quality because of the strong emotional charges attached to it. As Williams puts it, the characters, like actors on a stage, enter into the “picture” self-consciously imitating the conventional poses of grief, anger, and threat.

VI. Return to/of the Past?

Aside from these hyperbolic spaces charged with emotional intensity, a pervading apocalyptic pathos also penetrates the characters’ inner worlds. During Liusu’s first visit to Hong Kong, she and Liuyuan passes by a grey brick retaining wall near the hotel. Liuyuan, striken by the desolate appearance of the wall, sighs, “Someday, when human civilization has been completely destroyed, when everything is burnt, burst, utterly collapsed and ruined.… If, at that time, we can meet at this wall, then maybe, Liusu, you honestly care about me, and I will honestly care about you” (Chang 149). Such ominous evocation of a wasteland suggests that love has no end result in the modern world. Liuyuan’s pathos recalls Chang’s frequent comment on the desolate state of “our civilization” in her works. She notes that in her era, when “the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born,”

People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a bit out of order, out of the order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory. (Chang 1944a, 17-18)

In Chang’s view, the hurried march of modernity, and the deterministic notion of history as progress, will eventually make the present civilization a thing of the past through the force of its destruction. The prospect of death necessitates a gain of love. The ideal love relation is created as a secondary effect of the loss. Thus, the great displeasure of confronting death paradoxically becomes “a promise” for the eventual pleasure of finding love. In this light, ultimate love takes place only at the moment of narrative satisfaction. Liusu and Liuyuan’s relationship thus represents the prolonged process in which this primary fabula (that is, the union of love) is carried out in the narrative.

As the ancient poem from Books of Odes goes, “Facing life, death, distance/ Here is my promise to thee --/ I take thy hand in mine:/ We will grow old together.” Liuyuan’s unwitting omission of the line, “Here is my promise to thee,” from the poem, highlights the ironic absence of the “promise of love.” Chang’s interpretation of the poem, however, has an ironical twist. Liuyuan, because of his difficulty with the ancient Chinese language, unwittingly omits the important line “Here is my promise to thee.” Liuyuan’s perhaps unconscious hesitation to “promise” marriage to Liusu leads to prolonged misunderstandings between the couple. The absence of this “promise” reveals the distance between desire and its fulfillment, between the dilatory development of narration and its pleasurable return to narrative closure; that is, to the happy union of the couple. The absence of the “promise” also implies the obstruction, the delay, and the partial revelation of the fabula in the unfolding plot sequence. Liuyuan’s apocalyptic pathos demonstrates man’s profound anxiety over death and his desire to scramble back to a place where he cannot be harmed, to a primordial domain that existed before all conscious life. It is the anxiety over “life, death and distance” that generates man’s desire for the unreachable and keeps him striving forward. Terry Eagleton argues, “narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are cause of anxiety to us, symbolizing certain deeper unconscious losses (of birth, the faeces, the mother), and it is always pleasurable to find them put securely back in place.” (Eagleton 1996, 163) This issue of “narrative consolation” is manifested in the novella’s title, Love in a Fallen City, which, in Chinese translation, reads “Love that Fells a City” and recalls the legend of Bao Si, whose dangerous allure leads to the fall of cities and nations. Chang remodels the mythic structure of the original, utilizing a modern setting and portraying Liusu as a reincarnated beauty who could “with one smile fall a city, with another topple a kingdom.” The story ends with Liusu’s triumph,

Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause from effect? Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated? Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering, after that an earth-shaking revolution…. Liusu didn’t feel there was anything subtle about her place in history. She stood up and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellant incense under the table. (Chang 1943a, 167)

By relocating the myth in Hong Kong immediately before the Anti-Japanese War, Chang  endows the mythical elements of the original story with new meanings. Liusu’s love story is no less than a metonymy of the ancient fable, bound to carry on the action of transmitting the goal-oriented and forward-moving structures of the narrative. In the final scene, Liusu’s smile signals both the self’s gratification and narrative consolation, and is reminiscent of the smile of the transgressive Bao Si.  Empowered through the mythical narratives, Liusu is transformed into a woman of individual agency. The ending of the story witnesses Liusu’s “return” to a viable social status through marriage, and the return of the narrative to the coinciding point of myth and reality. However, a deeper analysis of the story’s ending reveals a situation in which the narrative presents itself as a repetition of events that have already happened. Brooks notes,

Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of: for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed. Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments together as a middle that might turn forward or back. (1984, 100)

Brooks’s distinction between “return to” the origins and “return of” the repressed has prompted interesting interpretation. Garrett Stewart recalls Brooks’s saying that “the anticipation of retrospection is our chief tool in making sense of narrative,” and relates the “return to/of” paradox to film studies. For Stewart, “return to” and “return of” reveal the spatialization of time (Stewart 2007, 204). The readers, and even the heroes and heroines, cannot be sure whether the past is catching up with them or they retreating or otherwise returning to it. The difference between the “return of” the past and the “return to” it can be further understood in relation to the melodramatic narrative mode of Love in a Fallen City. In melodrama, there is a moral, wish-fulfilling impulse towards the achievement of justice, or a “return to” the point of innocence and origin.[4] Thus, the endings of melodramas often stage the return of the virtuous to the “innocence” of their origins, albeit teasing the readers with flashes of doubts and haunting sense of loss. In the story, Liusu’s marriage enacts both her successful “return” to a social identity as Liuyuan’s “wife” in name and in fact) and the fulfillment of her desire to make a love match. Liusu’s story is mythmaking at the personal level and ultimately reaches a moment of individual totalistic pleasure. At the end, the readers hear the melodies of the huqin again:

Liusu didn’t feel there was anything subtle about her place in history. She stood up, smiling, and kicked the pan of mosquito-repellant under the table.

Those legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms were probably all like that.

Legends exist everywhere, but they don’t necessarily have such happy endings.

When the huqin wails on a night of ten thousand lamps, the bow slides back and forth, drawing forth a tale too desolate for words--oh! why go into it? (Chang 1943a, 167)

The ending of the story presents the ambiguous distinction between the “return to” and the “return of” the past. Liusu is unwittingly engulfed in a mythical diegesis without anticipating the “return of” her tale in someone else’s story. The huqin music returns, suggesting that man’s wish and fantasy are not lost and that they can be rearticulated, and perhaps find fulfillment in a future story. In Chang’s words, as bleak as huqin sounds, “when it reaches some sort of conclusion it always ‘comes around again to the beginning,’ …circling and perambulating its way back to the world as we mortals know it.” (Chang 1944b, 204) Echoing the beginning of the story, the music again evokes the ineffable pathos of the storyteller, whose lament, expressed in a sentence left dangling and punctuated by a question mark, demanding a continuation of the narrative.  

When considered in the context of modern Chinese literature, Eileen Chang’s literary status, like the story she tells, raises more questions than can be fully addressed in the limited space of this essay. In comparison with the revolutionary New Literature of the 1910s, Chang’s narratives distinguish themselves through their focus on ordinary people’s desires and their richly textured portrayal of the minute but heartrending details of quotidian life. The pervading sense of desolation in her works, which portray man’s feeling of disorientation in the modern era, also makes her writing incongruent with the light-hearted love romances of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s.[5]  Nonetheless, Chang’s portrayal of the feminine consciousness, embedded in the melodramatic mode, has enchanted her audiences at home and abroad for decades. Liusu’s tale epitomizes Chang’s sympathetic depiction of the “outmoded” woman, who, haunted by the raucous give-and-take of modernization, writhes against the profound irony of individual existence. In the grand scheme of history, Chang’s work presents the disquiet and unwholesome experience of the individual positioned in the mélange of the past and the present, the mythical and the mundane quotidian. For those disempowered in the modern economy, melodramas enable them to imagine a space superior to the world of pettiness and calculations, and in the tunes of ancient melodies, find a gratification of their individual desire. Perhaps Chang’s evocation and representation of the melodramatic form in the story could be best summarized in her own comment on traditional drama as representations of recurring historical motifs which persist in people’s everyday life. In her words,

The relation of Peking opera to the society of today… takes on an epigrammatic quality. Each of the scores of popular plays that make up the bulk of the operatic repertoire provides us with standardized and thus eternal narrative molds: the daughter whose father wants her to marry for money, sons who fail to live up to the family name, the conflict between love of one's family and sexual love…all work strenuously to prove the old adage that "a girl's best route is to be married out." (Chang 1943b, 108)
 

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