Female quest narratives: Margaret Drabble's 'The Radiant Way', 'A Natural Curiosity', and 'The Gates of Ivory'

This dissertation examines Margaret Drabble's The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory as a female quest narrative, as an archetypal journey towards selfhood and wholeness. It explores narrative strategies that make possible the construction of a contemporary female quest set against the background of a world marked by violence and disintegration.; In the trilogy Drabble offers new patterns for the central characters' social and spiritual quests. The quests of the female heroes parallel the structure of the traditional male quests, but introduce elements typical of female experience and development. Providing variations on traditional quest patterns, Drabble contributes new paradigms to represent female consciousness.; The use of intertextuality conveys Drabble's relationship with an ever-evolving sense of tradition. Through intertextuality she explores the interactions among characters within her texts, subsumes earlier themes within her fiction, and comments on the sociopolitical scene. The use of intertextuality reflects Drabble's characteristic preoccupations with history and time, change and continuity, art and life.; In the trilogy Drabble rewrites traditional myths and fairy tales. The Medusa, the Minotaur, and the Labyrinth are recurrent motifs which connect the three female heroes with one another, to their pasts, and to the world they live in. Drabble probes into the world of the psyche and of mythology and invokes the forces her characters have to confront to come to an understanding and acceptance of their sexuality. Fairy tales offer women limited models for development, encouraging them to conform to stereotypes. Drabble's female heroes are able to rewrite the traditional scripts, departing from the conventional paradigms of female development offered by patriarchal narratives.; Drabble uses several narrative strategies that signal her shift from a realistic to a postmodern discourse. The trilogy represents the 1980s with its fragmented, speeded-up culture and suggests alternative ways of speaking our relationship to each other and to the world. Drabble's avoidance of closure, use of a boldly intrusive narrator, alternation between first- and third-person narrators, and presentation of multiple points of view articulate the contemporary world and the feminine in the trilogy.