Toward a Regime of Emotional Authenticity: Eileen Chang’s Literary Transmediation of Theater and Cinema in Two 1940s Love Stories

Abstract

This essay examines Eileen Chang’s transmedial theater and cinema in two 1940s love stories and draws attention to the historical transformation of the emotional regime underlying these literary reworkings. By canvassing the theatrical impulses in “Love in a Fallen City” (1943) and the cinematic residues in “So Much Regret” (1947), this essay argues that Chang’s depictions of romantic relationships in 1940s Shanghai suggest an incompleteness of what Eva Illouz calls the “great transformation of love” from a regime of ritualized emotions to one of emotional authenticity in Late Imperial and Republican China. The essay also demonstrates how the great transformation of love is gendered: what Chang underscores is the modern woman’s lack of “moral clarity” in her pursuit of love as a result of the painful clash between a theater-based presentational style and a cinema-based representational style of affective communication.