Immersion and Transcendence: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between Eileen Chang’s Literary Narrative and Simone de Beauvoir’s Gender Theory

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Eileen Chang; Beauvoir; Othering; Female Liberation; structural oppression

Abstract

This paper examines the divergent explorations of female liberation pathways within Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical framework and Eileen Chang’s literary narratives. The philosophy The Second Sex published in mid-twentieth century drew on the idea of “othering” as Beauvoir showed that women are framed as othering as opposed to men and that the liberation of women depends on the ability to go beyond othering and become self-defining subjects. Meanwhile, with the help of novels The Golden Cangue, Love in a Fallen City, and Lust, Caution, Eileen Chang revealed the tragedies of women in the world of men. As argued in this paper, Beauvoir offers theoretical foundations of female liberation, which is economic self-sufficiency and political position. Chang however, portrays the fall of women, the historical boundaries of liberation. They are not mutually exclusive in their arguments: Beauvoir provides the transcendent enlightenment and Chang the concrete and unresolved dilemmas of female liberation under the structural oppression.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Yixu Lin
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/13
TI  - Immersion and Transcendence: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue Between Eileen Chang’s Literary Narrative and Simone de Beauvoir’s Gender Theory
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language and Cultural Communication (ICLCC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 80
EP  - 87
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_10
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-597-3_10
ID  - Lin2026
ER  -