'THE PILGRIMAGE INWARD': THE QUEST MOTIF IN THE FICTION OF MARGARET ATWOOD, DORIS LESSING, AND JEAN RHYS

Most of the literary criticism which examines the quest rests upon the assumption that the quest of a male character in male literature is the norm. Thus, the problems I proposed to explore were as follows: does the female question contemporary women's literature differ significantly from the male quest? are aspects of the quest--the departure, the initiation, the return--altered when the quester is female? do contemporary women writers conceive of the quest in a different manner? what are the implications of difference for our understanding of women's literature?;The dissertation focuses on three recent novels by women for whom quest has been a major motif in their fiction: Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark, and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. The methodology is a rather eclectic combination of the close textual analysis of formalism and the perspective of feminist/archetypal literary criticism. All three writers, as I discovered, had been influenced by the quest fiction of their childhood reading to such a degree that they reworked and transformed these fairy tales and novels in their own adult fiction. I concluded that they thereby created novels with dual texts: a surface text which is fairly realistic and a subtext which takes the form of an ongoing dream sequence or set of images which counteracts the surface text. This dual structure allows these writers to achieve two things: first, a fusing of the realistic tradition of the novel with fairy tale romance, thereby demonstrating the integration between the rational and the irrational which is the goal of the quester; secondly, a commentary upon the impossibility of describing a female quest according to the male "norm." The response, then, to my initial inquiry was affirmative: the female quest does differ significantly from the male quest and women writers are exploring and creating new paradigms of quest in their fictions.