Abstract
Eileen Chang’s “Red rose, white rose” and Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Liebhaberinnen portray two heroines to reflect the hardships that women encounter when dealing with their surroundings. Despite these heroines’ divergent mentalities and aspirations, their interactions with men and family members are doomed to failure and tragedy because of the prevalence of the patriarchal hegemony, which is guaranteed and passed down by tradition or habitus in Bourdieu’s terminology. By reading these two works in juxtaposition, it becomes evident that technological progress is not sufficient to liberate women; the new order of society will only function well when the fundamental problems of its old order, such as the reification of women, have been solved. According to Simmel’s notion of contents beneath daily exchanges, this paper argues that women’s underprivileged status and doomed interpersonal relationships can only be changed when the social structure is transformed.
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Acknowledgements
This project is sponsored by OeAD (Österreichischer Austauschdienst). I am very grateful to Professor Eva Horn at the Department of German, University of Vienna, for her generous support during my post-doc research.
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Jiang, X. A Bourdieusian and Simmelian analysis of the doomed interpersonal relationships in Eileen Chang’s “Red rose, white rose” and Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Liebhaberinnen. Neohelicon 48, 267–280 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00572-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00572-9