Spatial Writing In Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age

Margaret Drabble(1939-)is one of the most distinctive female writers in British literature.Her works devote great attention to the inner worlds and living conditions of individuals.The Ice Age serves as a turning point from Drabble’s private fiction to social fiction and comprehensively depicts the turbulent British society of the 1970 s.Drabble places the characters in one complex space after another,creating a group of characters who bear multiple crises,experience confusion and struggle for survival,and then carry out self-transformation and seek spiritual faith through spatial practice.This thesis,based on Lefebvre’s tripartite model of space,examines the survival crises of characters under the complex representation of space through the analysis of enclosed physical space,turbulent social space and unequal gender space.Besides,this thesis elaborates the characters’ self-awakening spatial practices to seek spiritual faith,and their mental shifts under the representational space.Additionally,it further indicates the value orientation of spatial writing in this novel.This thesis concludes that the relationship between space and human existence is highly representational.The novel’s spatial writing reflects the existence of human beings in contemporary civilization and also demonstrates Drabble’s strong sense of social responsibility and concern for the living state of all humankind.In this novel,Drabble provides a feasible way for people to solve the survival crisis: when confronted with a survival crisis,people should not passively accept it but courageously break through the inner barrier in search of spiritual salvation.