Kate’s Self-discovery And Her Seal Dream Sequence

Doris Lessing (1919-) is regarded as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf Many of her works are well-known to us, but "The Summer before the Dark" is often ignored. In this novel, Lessing made focus on general women instead of those irrational "free women". Actually,"The Summer before the Dark" is a novel about female self-disco very. It tells a story about that the45-year-old English middle-class housewife named Kate Brown left home in the beginning of the summer of1973and returned home in the end. Kate obtained new knowledge about the self, the marriage and the responsibility through the journey in reality and in dream.This thesis tries to use Jung’s archetype theory and dream analysis theory to analyze Kate’s change in the reality and her experience in her dreams, in order to go deeper into her self-discovery. Chapter one uses Jung’s archetype theory (persona, shadow) to analyze Kate’s social role and mind/action, and points out the harm brought by the persona and the shadow. Then, this chapter tries to proclaim that after retrospection and introspection, Kate can restrain the persona inflation, and transfer the negative energy to the active energy. Chapter two uses Jung’s dream analysis theory to interpret the rich meaning of Kate’s seal dream sequence, and analyze how the dreams impact Kate’s reality and her thoughts. The dream sequence not only reflects real life, but also anticipates the future and gives compensation to one’s psyche. Chapter three focuses on the most controversial Kate’s returning home, discovers Kate’s recognition for self, social role and responsibility, then explores the positive impact of returning home on Kate’s self-fulfillment. What’s more, this chapter takes the dream sequence as a whole to explore the ambiguity of the symbol world as well as the equivocal relation between the symbolic world and the real world so as to find the symbolic world’s function.