The Unyielding Quest

Doris Lessing (1919--)is one of the leading writers today, who is extolled as the great female writer after Woolf in Britain, and called the "Double Star in British Literary World" with Woolf. Her writing career is long and colorful, which has spanned nearly six decades, and thus she is extolled as the "Evergreen Tree in British Literary World" .Doris Lessing is well-known in the world literature because of her innovative, varied literary perspective and rich creations,and received the Nobel Prize in 2007. Her works have been translated into many kinds of languages, and have got the international influence widely.The foreign researchers have studied Doris Lessing and her works, by using new theories such as narrative, Jung, feminism, structuralism and post-colonial theory, and has made great achievements. But, in our country, the researches on Lessing still have been limited in the analysis of her single works, whose depth and breadth should be expandded. In this thesis, I select her representative works, "The Grass is Singing" , "Children of Voilence" and "The Golden Notebook" , and analyze the development of women's consciousness in Lessing's works, taking the female images in these works as an example, and provide new perspective and contents for studying of Doris Lessing.This thesis mainly consists of three parts. In the first part,taking Mary as an example, I analyze the germination of women's consciousness of in Lessing's works;In the second part, taking Martha as an example, I analyze the confirmation of female subjectivity in Lessing's works;In the third part, taking Anna as an example, I analyze the "free women" described by Lessing and her exploring the way out for women, which reveals such a difficult and tortuous process that women grow from the germination of women's consciousness to the confirmation of female subjectivity, and to the exploring the way out for women, shows that women constantly think about and explore their own life and resist the male-dominated society, and they unremittingly pursuit the female subjectivity and freedom. And further,I explore the women's growth in Lessing's works and her profound thinking about female's survival predicament, and her seeking the way out for women.Doris Lessing insists that women's liberation is one of the problems in the world's progress, and should be gradually resolved with the settlement of the other issues and the liberation of the whole world, and women's liberation eventually need men's participation and support, so gender harmony is the way by which modern women can get out of the predicament.