The Сoncept “home-family” in the early works of Zhang Ailing (张爱玲, 1920–1995)

This article presents a study designed to analyse the concept “home-family” in the early work of сhinese writer Zhang Ailing. The research shows the transformation of the concept and the way how new writers confronted the tradition in the first half of the 20th century. The idea of a patrilineal, hierarchical, patriarchal system, and the family as the basis of the world order were reassessed at the beginning of the 20th century. Participants of the May 4th movement severely criticized the old family system. In the works of “new women” writers Bing Xin and Ding Ling, the new semantic content of the concept “home-family” appears: the image of an ideal home in Bing Xin works transforms into Ding Ling’s fictional home of the childhood memories. The Zhang Ailing’s “home-family” concept presents a structure that is skewed to the one side. There is only one binary opposition (“warm” — “cold”) represented in the texts. All other meanings of the concept are marked negatively. Even if there is a pair of words that have opposite meanings, they complement each other rather than oppose each other. Combined together, the meanings of the “home-family” concept construct a hopeless, terrifying family image, which consists of obsession, illusory, fixation, instability, disappointment, indifference, moral injury, sacrifice, burden, fatigue, crampedness, emptiness, senseless.