Love-a Way To Spiritual Salvation On Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age

As "a woman's writer", Margaret Drabble is now a world figure. By discussing the various options of women today, she often puts forward the theme of female self-identification. While passionately objecting to solipsism, Drabble has moved from the semiautobiographical to a wider and wider canvas. Critics often see The Ice Age (1977) as Drabble's artistic and thematic breakthrough. During this period, instead of women issues, her writings are mainly from the humanistic point of view. While projecting a panoramic examination of British society in crisis during the Mid-1970s, The Ice Age repeats the theme of salvation through love. Though an increasing amount of research has been made on Drabble's novels, there are few comments on The Ice Age.This thesis aims at the characters' spiritual exploration through love in The Ice Age under the depressing circumstances. It makes a deep and systematic insight into the changes in the characters' minds and focuses on the course of people's regaining spiritual homeland and inner self-definition by love after the dramatic social changes.Chapter One endeavors to depict the images of crisis and alienation in the modern British society, and employs these images to illustrate the characters' spiritual wasteland. Accustomed to the modern life, people are alienated from each other as well as from the nature. So when they are faced with the social changes, they lose their spiritual niches in life. The images of dead bird, dogs and elm mentioned in this chapter that symbolize respectively the spirit and future of the British people reflect the spiritual numbness of the characters. Through these images along with the plot, the theme of spiritual displacement finds its full expression. This chapter uses the existentialist ideas to analyze the relationship between the human existence and the crude reality, which is a prelude to the following chapters that state the course of spiritual exploration through love.Chapter Two discusses the theme of the spiritual awakening through devoting...