Abstract

Is to love someone good? Or is to be loved better? Is love in the past or at the present passed? Or is love in the past or at the present really existent? Is love of the past better than love of the present? As T.S.Eliot argues, “…a synchronic view of history, where the past is always with us, and diachronic view, where the past is passed” (Eliot, 109). This paper mainly scrutinizes a sense of time over love affairs of four major characters in TV series titled Womanizer, P.S. Man which had been released in Taiwan earlier before long. And, the second part of T.S. Eliot’s essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” will be approached to explore a sense of time based on Modernist viewpoints. The issue of love affairs sounds cliche but it does not. Instead, I argue that four major characters, while facing and pursuing their true love in the past, present, and future, keep calculating how they could win over the battle of love. However, calculation, in turn, entraps them. Also, although some critics of TV series in Taiwan have argued that “Xia He-Jie,” for example, fits this typical type of man–womanizer–who regards his family, friends, girlfriends as his substitutes and affiliates as his emotional outlet,” I find, however, that his strategies of dealing with people does not construct upon self-confidence but his sense of loss on the identity of the self.

• Chien-Yu Kao is a Graduate Student, National Chung Cheng University, Chia-yi, Taiwan, R.O.C.