Distortion Of Female Image

Herzog was one of the bestsellers after its publication. Written by the famous American Jewish writer, the 1976 Nobel Literature Prize winner, Saul Bellow, it creates a wonder for it is a popular novel by a senior intellectual and it is highly praised by readers of various intellectual levels. Its humorous style of writing, self-mocking tone, continuous thought, multifarious plots, internationalized characters and complicated historical and cultural background makes it readable and appealing. Besides, it deeply reflects the life of American Jews from early 20th century to 1960s, especially the struggle of a Jewish intellectual. It reveals the affliction of being clashed between history and reality, margin and mainstream, material and spiritual world. Chicago Daily News comments,"If ever a novel laid bear the soul of a man, Herzog does it."From the third person point of view, it narrates a university history professor's life story, his spiritual ravage and his rough way to his regain of inner balance after his second divorce. The novel is most characteristic of the center-consciousness, i.e., Herzog's permeating thought, with characters and plots not only existing in the five narrative days but also being mixed in his limitless reminiscence, in which the dominating character is his second wife-Madeleine. And due to the male narrator and male center-consciousness, the image of Madeleine is distorted under the male hegemony. She is described as a beautiful-faced, but evil-souled woman. Her image is objectified to a great degree.Appealing to the feminist criticism approach, this paper intends to expose the invisible hand of male hegemony behind the distorted female image, to reconstruct the image of a beautiful-faced, also a spiritually independent female intellectual, to break through the misleading of male writers for female readers, to provide a female perspective,to dig out the real life and thought of the female character in the novel, and echo to the feminist movements and feminist literary theories.This paper is divided into five chapters:Chapter One: Introduction. This chapter presents a brief introduction of the author's family background, life career and the novel's background, characteristics, literary position and current research status.Chapter Two: An analysis of Madeleine's image. Contrasted with the image formed in the narrator and the center-consciousness's view, the image of Madeline is absolutely different from the perspective of the resisting reader.Chapter Three: The reasons for the image distortion. Based on the American social and cultural background in 1960s, applying the feminist theories, integrating women's status and research, this chapter explores the social and cultural reasons for the image distortion.Chapter Four: The typical significance of Madeleine's image. This chapter focuses on the significance of the reconstruction of Madeleine's image: women are breaking through men's traditional expectation, overthrowing male verbal hegemony, and pursuing the real spiritual freedom so as to build an equal and harmonious relationship between the two sexes.Chapter Five: Conclusion. This chapter summarizes the argumentation of this dissertation: it's a vindication for women, a re-naming for women, a reconstruction of image for a female character in male writer's great literary work.