Female History And Female Authority

A. S. Byatt is one of the most prominent female novelists. The novel Possession: ARomance is considered to be her most successful masterpiece since its publication in1990,and wins the highest academic award in Britain—the Booker Prize. Meanwhile it isacknowledged to be a magnificent literary work, which encompasses poetry, correspondence,journals, fairy tales and other narrative genres. The novel transcends from the ancient time,through the Victorian age to the modern period with the vivid portrayal of various femaleimages to unfold a panoramic picture of women’s living status. As a female writer with mildfeminist ideology, she concerns herself deeply with feminist domain.The thesis attempts to provide a feminist narratological reading of Possession. Feministnarratology began in1980s with Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol as the prominent leaders.As an interdisciplinary subject, it combines classical narratology with gender politics,providing the narrative strategies with ideological implications. Through the analysis ofnarrative voice, narrative focalization and free indirect discourse presented in the novel, thethesis tends to reveal the underlying subversive intention and to present the construction offemale history and authority.Besides the introduction and the conclusion, the thesis falls into three chapters.The introduction includes a brief introduction to A. S. Byatt and her literaryaccomplishments, the literature review and the theoretical framework of the thesis.Chapter One briefly analyzes the novel from the perspective of the feminist narrativevoice initiated by Susan Lanser, which covers a detailed analysis of authorial and communalvoice applied in the novel. The authorial narrative voice used by Byatt in the Victoriannarration is necessary and crucial for the construction of Victorian history and the author’sauthority. At the same time, in the process of reestablishing the Victorian history, thecommunal narrative voice enables the silenced female characters to become the subjects ofnarrative discourse and make their own voices heard so as to change the phase of being marginalized and reshape their own history.Chapter Two goes on to deal with the novel from the point of feminist narrativefocalization proposed by Robyn Warhol. For feminists, being gazed signifies being objectifiedand then being marginalized to be the “other” in the society, but Robyn Warhol provides anew context to understand its ideological implications. In the novel, the female characters arenot only the objects of the gaze, but also the gazers of others. Through the detailed depictionof female characters under gaze, Byatt vividly portrays laterally a series of independentfemale images with budding feminist consciousness, and links the female protagonistsrespectively in ancient time, Victorian age and modern society with spiritual or kindredrelationship to reestablish a long lost female history. Through the gaze forced upon themasculine world, she claims the decline of masculinity to undermine the traditionalmale-dominated narration.Chapter Three tries to point out that the application of free indirect discourse in the noveltruly testifies the psychological status quo of the characters as well as the covert authorialvoice. Free indirect discourse plays a unique and distinctive role in expressing the characters’speech and thought. In the domain of feminist narratology, the narrative strategy of freeindirect discourse is a kind of ideological construction of authorship and femininity. Theindirection and ambiguity of free indirect discourse helps the author to construct femalenarrative authority in the text. By employing such a flexible narrative technique, Byatt leadsreaders to the inner world of the characters to perceive the profundity of the characters’consciousness and disclose her feminist awareness to rebuild female history and authority.The conclusion will restate that in the novel A. S. Byatt successfully deploys uniquenarrative techniques and poetic language to reveal the subversion of the male-centerednarrative tradition and to construct feminine historical truth in her mind. The distinctivestrategies enable Byatt to unfold the brilliant experiences and true life of intellectual womenwith exquisite content, and meanwhile establish her narrative authority as a female writer.