Free Women And Their Quest For Identity

The thesis is a study of the"free"woman Anna Wulf in chaos and her effort to avoid the approaching mental breakdown, with a theoretical basis of feminism and psychological analysis. To begin with, contrary to women's writing being defined as the product of a subculture, the thesis elaborates the scale and the scope of The Golden Notebook which deserves a brilliant place in the world dominant mainstream. Then we must shape an objective attitude toward free women, both from the ironical sense and their dilemma in marriage and relationship with men and children. There is no real freedom for women in the present. They need help and support from men. More important, women consciousness and their identity problems have always been a central point in women study. Women have their right to define and dominate themselves. To probe the source of her disorderly life, Anna split herself into mother, lover, artist, and communist, though those multiple selves fragments her personality and makes her life unbearably painful. Through such an analysis, we may more clearly witness how Anna undergoes from fragmentation to unity, from awakening to maturing. Dreams and fantasies also play a vital role in the fiction in that those are another embodiment of Anna's split selves. And"joy-in-destruction"principle enables Anna to accomplish the assimilation of her negative self and the chaotic world and thus to begin her gradual progress of self-reintegrating. In a word, what matters to a woman is not an ultimate victory in the gender war, but a sane awareness of her true position and a persistent quest for freedom and identity.