Between the Theater and the Novel

Chapter 4 investigates the domestic novel as a literary form in which the woman as protagonist and the site of the household come to the fore as subject and scene of modernity. It concentrates on novels by two of the form’s pre-eminent practitioners in English and Chinese, Jane Austen and Eileen Chang, who have drawn comparisons to each other for their clear, even cold-eyed, depictions of social and economic constraints on femininity and the complexity of feminine interiority. It reads together Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park and Chang’s 1967 novels, Yuannü and The Rouge of the North, rewritings of her 1943 novella Jinsuo ji. These novels show how changes in the articulation of femininity in different historical and cultural contexts take place in correlation to redefinitions of the status of the household itself as site of modern life. Each novel incorporates the medium of theater to restage “woman” as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary.