A Study Of The Typical Women Characters Of Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark (1918 -- ) is a central figure in the development of the modern British literature after the war. She has been known as a Catholic writer, a satirist, a surrealistic writer, and a moral philosopher. Spark is a quite exuberant writer and her literary creation involves different types of literature, including poem, river novel, short story, children?ˉs story, biography and literary criticism. Some of her works have been translated into more than twenty languages and some have been adapted into movies and TV series. She is always conscious of her unique writing style and has carried out her themes remarkably with experiments of all kinds of modernist forms. With her innovative talents and stylistic brilliance, Spark has proved herself to be an outstanding novelist. Spark?ˉs earlier works, like The Comforter (1957), Memento Mori (1959) etc., mainly reflect the confrontation between the free will of human beings and the dominance of the omniscience; while in her later works, like the trilogy The Driver?ˉs Seat (1970), Not to Disturb (1971) and The Hothouse by the East River (1973), Spark pays more attention to the description of human beings?ˉ predictability and dominance towards their fates. As a brilliant contemporary writer, Muriel Spark has been studied by many critics in terms of the faith and fictions in her creative career. In the 1980s the study on her reached new heights as scholars from home and abroad approached her works from different perspectives and with diversified theories. Some critics explore the features of her novels according to different periods, i.e., how her fictions demonstrate her acute awareness of the external world outside the fictional world. Other critics pay special attention to the religious factors which are frequently reflected in Spark?ˉs novels. As far as the writing method is concerned, Spark has always been praised for her acute perception, concise description and incisive style. Many critics often compare the writing technique of Spark with that of Earnest Hemingway -- they both share the iceberg writing style (a writing style using simple language to express profound meaning; just like the iceberg, with only a small part of it is above the surface and a large part beneath). Bernard Harrison once compares Spark?ˉs works with those of Jane Austen, for Spark, just like Jane Austen, is also a moral satirist. The present study on Muriel Spark is rather abundant and deeper, but not all-sided. Many of Spark's most convincing fictional characters are women and as a woman writer, Spark's achievements in constructing female characters are unrivalled in the twentieth century literary world. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to her literary presentation of women. Therefore, the author of this thesis particularly focuses on the female characters Muriel Spark has created and aims to have an overall understanding of Spark?ˉs creative intentions through the analysis of the three typical women characters, and at the same time to fill in some blanks in the study of Muriel Spark. This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction to the whole thesis. This chapter includes a brief introduction of the present research, in which the rationale and methodology to carry out this present study has been stated. The objective of writing this paper has also been clarified: through the exploration of the three typical women characters of Muriel Spark, the present author intends to decode Spark's outlook on creation, outlook on human life and the ultimate pursuit of human existence from a new angle. Chapter Two is the literature review, including the present study situationsand the representative comments on Spark. Chapter Three will explore the topic "woman in disillusionment". Lise, the female protagonist in Spark's most controversial novel The Driver's Seat, can be regarded as a typical representative of woman in disillusionment. In this novel Spark tells us a rather chilling story: the heroine finds her life meaningless and determines to se...