An Analysis Of The Female Images In Saul Bellow's Long Fictions

Saul Bellow is one of the most renowned contemporary American novelists. His intellectual and verbal brilliance, comic gifts, and imaginative craftsmanship have won him popular and critical acclaim. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. Philip Roth highly regards him as one of the two giants in American history of fiction by saying that "to my mind, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner form the backbone of the 20th-century American literature." Saul Bellow is a keen observer of the spiritual crisis of the intellectuals in prosperous American. All his works repeat a theme that is the spiritual crisis of contemporary American intellectual. He employs the many kinds of fictional technique of realism, modernism and post-modernism. With his talented irony and compassion, he offers us a profound picture of human spirit and consciousness.This thesis is a study of the female images in Saul Bellow's long fictions. Through detailed analyses of the texts, this thesis reveals three predominant female images which frequently recur in his works:the maternal woman, the destructive woman and the independent woman, and illustrates their influence on the heroes. This thesis concludes that all the women that Bellow has laboured to give them distinctive traits fall into easily identifiable stereotypes and appear in a negative light. The most important reason for Bellow's inability to portray vivid female characters is that the women are perceived through the male protagonist's perspective, as a result, they remain unspecified women in many essential ways. The second explanation for the recurring of stereotyped women in Bellow's novels is the lack of dramatic plot. Finally, Bellow's Jewish identity also affects his portrayal of women considerably.Although the female figures in Bellow's works are not as satisfactory as male figures, Bellow has witnessed the feminine movement in the last century. This research on the female image and the relationship between man and woman will make its contribution to the study of female representation in contemporary American novelists.