A Study Of Female Consciousness In The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough is a versatile contemporary Australia woman writer. Her famous family saga "The Thorn Birds" caused tremendous sensation after publication in 1977. The novel follows the lives, love and deaths of one family -- three generations of the Clearys, vividly depicts a sentimental love between Meggie, the female character and Ralph, a Cardinal afterwards. On the basis of women's studies, this thesis first elaborates the basic connotations and the origins of the female consciousness, and then studies and investigates the females of three generations from a level related to social background and female consciousness of that time. The extraordinary life experiences of the three characters of the novel actually undergo a process from losing the self, bitterly investigating the self to fully awakening one's female's consciousness, which delineates the interrelationship between social development and the rising of female consciousness. To make a further inquiry into this motif, the author also explores some other reasons in respect to some relevant factors about the immigrant nation of Australia, namely, English origin, bush culture, and the interweaved force of nationalization and internationalization, as well as the author herself and the style of her work. In the end. the author clarifies the social significance of the female consciousness, pointing out that the contents of female consciousness are not irrevocable and that they change and develop continuously as a developing mirror of the times. Only by bringing the female consciousness into the social category, widening their spiritual vision and discovering their value in the reality, can the modern female acquire the emancipation indeed, and accomplish a breakthrough in female consciousness' socialization...