The Seeker Of The Free Will

As the Nobel Literature Prize winner in 2005, Harold Pinter won a great reputation in the world. And his works has been classified as the theatre of menace by many scholars and critics, most of whose researches and criticisms were focused on the theme of menace, language features and Pinter's existential thought. Meanwhile some critics also expressed concern about Pinter's shaping of the female characters, and the opposite relationship between male and female. However, by now there are few articles to explore Pinter's work The Homecoming from the archetypal perspective in detail. On the basis of close-reading of Pinter's play, The Homecoming, this paper with the help of Fraser's The Golden Bough and Northrop Frye's theories about archetypes, is going to analyze Ruth's characterization at full length in the play by using three female archetypes.Introduction mainly gives a brief introduction to Harold Pinter and his play, The Homecoming, being analyzed in this paper and states the purpose of the research. Apart from the Introduction part, this thesis has five chapters. The first chapter focuses on the literature review on this play both in China and abroad.Chapter two presents the theoretical framework of this study, the archetypal criticism, and Pinter and his work, The Homecoming. Generally speaking, archetypes are universal images that recur often in literature. It is commonly used to describe an original pattern or model from which all other things of the same kind are made. Its critical strategy is to back up from the text, to find out the underlying correspondences or analogues in works so as to apprehend the recurrences of certain archetypal themes, figures, images and narrative patterns. Thus, the significance of literature can be fully understood.Chapter three is going to analyze Ruth's characterization at full length in the play by using three female archetypes, respectively in three parts. The first part:the Fallen Eve. Ruth's stay in her husband's family echoes the pattern of Eve, who is a fallen woman and has strong self-consciousness, and is given up by her husband. The second part:the Great Mother. In Archetypal Criticism, there is an archetypal image called the Great Mother, in western mythology, who possesses the dual power of creation and destruction. This double characteristic can be easily found in Ruth, a mother figure in this play. The third part:the Goddess Fertility. With the myth of the fertility goddess Diana in The Golden Bough, this part is to analyze Ruth's transformation from prostitute to goddess. Ruth's involvement of family life and abandoning her husband is like the fertility goddess Diana's choice of abandoning the old priest and welcoming new one. To subvert the old order, at the meantime, is to restore the spiritual wasteland to life.Chapter four further analyses the characterization of Ruth, pointing out that she is a seeker of the free will. From the findings and discussions above, it can be summarized that the image of Ruth is a mystery, and several archetypes are embodied in her actions, thus make her figure become more complex and multifaceted. On the surface this play is talking about Teddy's homecoming, but as a matter of fact, it's Ruth's homecoming, coming back to her spiritual home and during this process, she found her true self. Her unusual behaviors not only reflect the absurdity of life and the world, but also praise the consciousness of sex and life, and advocate the development of human body and mind return to nature. Only in this way, people, who are living in today's rapid development and materialistic society, can get healthy psychological development and lead a normal life.Chapter five brings this paper to conclusion.