"I" And Authority: A Feminist Narratological Reading Of Margaret Drabble's A Summer Bird-Cage

While postmodedrnism pervades,Margaret Drabble distinguishes herself by displaying realism in her literary creation.After she established a great fame through publishing her first novel—A Summer Bird-Cage in 1963,Drabble's continuous writing and fruitful achievements have secured her literary position.She grows among the second wave of feminist movement;the feminist thoughts of Simone de Beauvoir profoundly influence her and encourage her to voice the existence and the aspirations of contemporary women.Western critics have appreciated Drabble and her works from various perspectives. Drabble is thus called a symbolist,a humanist,a realist,a feminist,and so on.However, domestic study on Drabble is just at its beginning.Many scholars take her as a feminist. As a prolific writer,Drabble attracts critics' attention to her new works while the interest in her first novel A Summer Bird-Cage has gradually faded away.Nevertheless, as the first and representative work by Drabble,A Summer Bird-Cage is worth a close reading.It is undoubted that the novel reflects the writer's consciousness and endeavours,at the beginning of her writing career,to establish a female narrative authority if a close reading of the novel is conducted.The efforts made by Drabble greatly catch the writer of the thesis in inquiring into the relationship between female narrative and gendered politics,and moreover,the enlightening feminist narratology provides the thesis with the necessary theoretical framework.The thesis reads A Summer Bird-Cage from a feminist narratological perspective. Based on Susan Lanser's and Robyn Warhol's theories on feminist narratology,the thesis,through the analysis of narrative voice and focalization presented in the novel, attempts to explore the ideological subversion of the novel and thereby display Drabble's consciousness to establish the narrative authority.Besides the introduction and the conclusion,the thesis falls into three chapters. The introduction mainly includes a brief introduction to Margaret Drabble and her literary accomplishments,the literature review and theoretical framework of the thesis.Then Chapter One will briefly present the interior connection between Margaret Drabble's life and her fictional autobiographical novel A Summer Bird-Cage since the novel is written according to the writer's own life and experience.As a complement to structuralist narratology,feminist narratology stops isolating the text from the context, and probes into the relationship between female narrative and female authority in combining narrative texts with gendered politics.In analyzing the self-reference aspects presented in the novel,such as the family background,sibling rivalry,religious influence,the mirrored identity,this chapter argues that Drabble creates Sarah in A Summer Bird-Cage to refer to herself and the young intellectual women as a group in life.She endows Sarah with the narrative authority to voice the feelings of contemporary women and tries to establish her own authority outside the text.Chapter Two goes on to analyze the relationship between narrative voice and narrative authority.The first section introduces Lanser's theory on voice in feminist narratology.The second section points out that Sarah's narrative voice belongs to the public personal mode and discusses how Sarah is endowed with the courage to challenge male narrative authority.Sarah's first step to arrive at this stage is her articulation of dissatisfaction with the female condition of dependence.Her second verbal struggle against the presumptions of women is other possibilities for women that Sarah envisions.The last section expounds the intervening voice of Sarah.The exposure of the writing procedure,the deliberate comments on other characters,and the familiar voice to address the reader all inevitably demonstrate Drabble's intention to construct the female freedom and autonomy.This multi-functional discursive voice enables the narrator or the author to generate a dynamic unifying and diversifying force in the novel.Chapter Three tries to reveal the underlying intention behind Sarah's active and sharp focalization and to argue that Margaret Drabble has created Sarah with her female stance as to establish her own narrative authority.Feminists defy and undermine the male authority by transforming female "gazee" under the dominated "male gaze" into female "gazer".Instead of being an object to be watched by male gaze,Sarah becomes the bearer of the gaze,deconstructing the male gendered narrative tradition.As an active focalizor,Sarah gazes into both the masculine world and the feminine world to quest the identity of her own.Sarah's gaze undermines the norm of male narrative and establishes an authority within the narrative which Drabble fails to achieve outside the fictional world.Based upon the above analysis,it is to conclude that Margaret Drabble successfully deploys different narrative strategies and language unique to female to subvert male narrative authority and thus construct the female authority outside the narrative discourse in A Summer Bird-Cage.The efforts she made in her literary practice consequently prove the longing for the autonomy for intellectual young women to control the fates of their own.