The Woman Image In Zweig's Letter From An Unknown Woman

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was one of the greatest serious authors in the world, but it seems that he was neglected by the contemporary literary world. As John Fowles wrote: "Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century." Therefore, the author of this thesis really wants to contribute her efforts to arousing the interest in Zweig, of those literature enthusiasts around her.In some of his novels, such as Letter from an Unknown Woman, 24 Hours in a Woman's Life and Fear, Zweig created several unforgettable women images, owing to his deep psychological insight. However, all those women images were evaluated from Phallocentrist perspective. Therefore, the heroines in Zweig's novels were thought of as tragic models --- they are mad, abnormal, and deserted by the world.In this thesis, the author introduced a reading theory --- Feminist Reading Theory, which got a lot of support from Reader Response Theory. Reinterpreted by this theory, a brand-new woman image was born in Letter from an Unknown Woman. The heroine got strong vitality which rose from her creativity to her own life and her resisting power to patriarchal fetter. This image is completely different from the ones in the existing researches. Thus, Feminist Reading Strategy liberated not only the heroine in the text, but the mentality of the author, for this thesis was her practice to be "a resisting reader".