The Decline Of Masculinity And Its Reconstruction In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age

Margaret Drabble, a British contemporary novelist, is one of the brightest stars in the present literary world. She was born into a middle-class Quaker family in Yorkshire. She got her BA in Cambridge University. In the year of 1963, at the age of twenty-three, she published her first novel---The Summer Bird Cage, which received favorite reviews from both readers and critics. Drabble is a diligent novelist. She has been awarded many prizes for her literary contributions. Influenced by western feminists and theorists such as Virginia Woolfe and Simone de Beauvoir, she weaves feminism into her literary works, so dilemmas women are faced with are found in most of Dabble's novels. Characters in her novels are created in such a real and subtle manner that readers are offered a perfect mirror to look into women's inner world and their quest for identity.Drabble is famous for the realistic portraying in her novels. She mainly lays her eyes on female intellectuals in the British society and analyzes their anxiety and agony when endeavoring to juggle the balls of career, motherhood and individuality. Meanwhile her novels are always reflecting current issues in the British society. That is why some critics say that"you will not really understand the present British society without reading Drabble's novels". Reading her novels enables readers to feel the vibrating pulse of Great Britain. Almost all the 20th-century events that took place in the British society have left a trace in Drabble's novels. All these contribute to her being called"a realist novelist, a feminist, a moralist and a recorder of the British history."(Singh, 2007 :21)Of all her novels The Ice Age is the only one to put males in the spotlight. But for a long time, male characters fail to attract the critics'attention, so most of the reviews of this novel are conducted from the perspective of feminism. That is why more attention is paid to the female character---Alison who actually occupies the second position rather than Anthony Keating who is the hero of the novel. The novel has its setting in the 1970s in Britain when the whole country was suffering from the great depression. Anthony Keating---a middle-class man in his middle age---is caught in the economic crisis and lost almost everything. But the economic crisis is not the only reason for his difficulty. The decline of masculinity under such a circumstance is more prominent. The decline of masculinity shown by Anthony Keating and other male characters in this novel is not an individual phenomenon. So the masculinity perspective will provide a valuable approach in analyzing Drabble's works. In this thesis, the author employs the American sociologist R. W. Connell, Larry May and British psychologist Harry Brod's theory on masculinity to analyze the text of The Ice Age and tries to detect the social and psychological causes for the characters'masculinity decline. At the same time, the author points out how the characters rediscover and reconstruct their masculinity, and what significance the reconstruction will bring to the British society.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction of Margaret Drabble, her literary achievements, the literature review and the theory of masculinity. The Second Chapter will make a comprehensive analysis on the male characters'physical, domestic and professional failures, their vulnerability and the precarious male-male friendship in order to prove the unavoidability of the decline of masculinity. In Chapter Three, the author will analyze how the traditional masculinity fails on the male characters in terms of social background, and try to find that the decline of masculinity is caused by the decline of British society and strengthened by the rise of Women's liberation movement. The fourth chapter will concentrate on the characters'rediscovery and reconstruction. In the conclusion part, the author points out that in The Ice Age, the decline of masculinity is a necessity for men to adjust themselves to the present society. Only through the reconstruction can men obtain new identity of masculinity and become"new men."...