On The Construction Of Female Subjectivity In Elizabeth Bowen's The Death Of The Heart

Elizabeth Bowen is a prolific and versatile Anglo-Irish female writer, who enjoys great popularity among readers and critics in the West and is praised to be one of the finest writers of fiction in the twentieth century. She is also considered to be on a par with Virginia Woolf and Henry James by many critics. Bowen is noted for her characterization of female characters and devoted to displaying and exploring women's quest for the self in her works. The Death of the Heart, the masterpiece of Bowen, depicts the awakening of Portia's and Anna's self-consciousness and their construction of subjectivity in a male-dominated society.By adopting Lacanian theory of the subject and on the basis of feminist literary criticism, this thesis aims at analyzing the way Portia and Anna construct their subjectivity and introspecting the construction of female subjectivity.The thesis falls into four chapters. The first chapter makes an analysis of Portia's and Anna's absence of subjectivity. Chapter 2 and 3 analyze Portia's and Anna's construction of subjectivity in detail respectively. Portia's construction of subjectivity is reflected in the following three aspects: the construction of the discourse power, the pursuit of the recognition of patriarchal mother and the quest for harmonious relationships with the male. And Portia's "gaze" arouses Anna's awakening of subjective consciousness. Anna's construction of subjectivity is mainly reflected in pursuing the dominance of house and challenging male domination in society. Chapter 4 introspects the construction of female subjectivity, elaborating difficulties, setbacks and arduousness female confront in the process of the construction and the dynamic feature of the construction.Through the detailed analysis, this thesis reveals Bowen's unique writing perspective, probes into the possibility of establishing subjectivity through language, demonstrates the arduousness of establishing the female alliance and constructing the female subjectivity, and finally concludes that the female quest for their subjectivity is in a constant state of changing and developing.