Women’s Awakening Under Double Oppression

As a contemporary female writer of Australia, Colleen McCullough is noted for her classical masterpiece The Thorn Birds (1977). While The Touch (2003) is regarded as her returning work of family saga after The Thorn Birds. Taking the background of Australian early industrialism and "White Australia Policy", the novel portrays numerous figures, especially those women images with distinctive characters. Their living conditions under oppression of colonial hegemony and patriarchy arouse wide attention from readers and researchers.Postcolonial feminism pays attention to the thinking of the marginalized unprivileged classes and truly cares women’s living conditions under the interaction of race, class and gender, which is an appropriate theory to analyze women under double oppression. Based on the theory, the thesis firstly tries to interpret women’s subaltern position and loss of identity caused by double oppression and then explores women’s different manifestations on their way of finding outlets and achieving self-redemption, disclosing a process of women’s reconstruction of lost identity through the awakening of their female consciousness.The thesis, based on the theory of postcolonial feminism, tries to provoke more thinking about women’s awakening under double oppression and hopes to provide some enlightenment for women who are eager to break through the barriers of double oppression.Through analysis, the author concludes that women have to get rid of internalized stale ideas, adhere to their feminine quality, achieve economic independence and treat each other equally if they want to realize the awakening of female consciousness. Actually, the process of women’s pursuing identity is also a process of their gradual awakening of women’s consciousness and different women should take defferent measures to realize their awakening.