| Doris May Lessing, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in2007, is widely regarded as one the greatest and most productive English writers since Virginia Woolf. Though her works cover various subject matters and themes, women’s issues have always been her focus from the very beginning of her writing career. Through her expressive description of those women images in her works, women’s spiritual confusion and identity crisis, particularly their anxiety, depression, frustration, fear and despair, are all vividly presented to the readers. Furthermore, most of the heroines in her fiction have once gone through periods of insanity and suffered inner split and inner breakdown during their long search for the self, some of whom even undergo total mental collapse and madness and eventually choose death as their own way to break through desperation and madness. Just as Lessing once said in the preface of the1971edition of The Golden Notebook, breakdown is "a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and division"(Lessing,1971:2). Therefore, the present thesis will make an overall study on those insane women images selected from Lessing’s five representative novels and one famous short story covering the early, middle and late periods of her writing career, namely:Mary Turner in The Grass is Singing, Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebooks, Kate Brown in The Summer before the Dark, Sarah Durham in love, again, and Susan Rawlings in "To Room Nineteen". To some extent, these works put together can be taken as a longitudinal overall combination of those women’s searching for their own identity and their own real inner self, and an overall analysis of those women images is perhaps the only way in which one may achieve a full view of their self-exploration and self-realization in Lessing’s fiction.The journey of those insane women’s searching for a complete real inner self is highly consistent with the individuation process mentioned in Jungian psychology. In view of Jung’s theory, one’s self-searching process is actually the process of his searching for an integrated inner self. Jung held that during that process, one is going to encounter successively the following four archetypes:the persona, the shadow, the anima and animus, and the Self. Since the lifelong task of a person is to achieve individuation, the purpose of such an individuation process is to bring him or her both a courageous confrontation and a positive recognition of those archetypes one encounters in the process of individuation, which consequently contributes to the final achievement of an integrated real inner self. A text-based study on those representative insane women images in Lessing’s fiction will use Jung’s archetypal theory, particularly the above-mentioned four archetypes which one may encounter successively in the process of individuation, as the theoretical framework for the whole thesis, aiming to interpret how those insane heroines suffer inner split and mental breakdown and even total madness and death under enormous anxiety and repression during their long journey’s search for an integrated real inner self.Through the analysis of those typical insane women images in Lessing’s representative fiction, not only Lessing’s concern about modern women’s survival status and their inner world but also her exploration of and reflection on human nature can clearly be shown for the readers. In particular the issue of how human nature under enormous stress and depression goes to the extreme would arouse readers’attention and consequently stimulate their reflection upon the ways of maintaining and achieving an integrated real inner self. |
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