Possession，power And Love Under Gaze：a Post-Psychoanalytical Reading Of The Unicorn

Iris Murdoch (1919,7-1999,2) was a British novelist and philosopher, who wasIrish-born and best known for her novels about political and social questions of goodand evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. The plotsof Murdoch’s novels are intricate, the relationships of the characters are complex andher works are full of imagination and meticulous description which involve moraltheme. At the same time, her works are fused with myths and daily lives together, thenovel “The Unicorn "is one of the model. Unicorn is a legendary mascot whichsymbols beauty and purity, whose head and body like a horse, hind legs like a stag,tail likes a lion, on the central forehead is a spiral horn.In the novel the unicorn is melted into the protagonist--Hannah, a beautiful,detached lady, who bears all the suffering silently, and as a prisoner does not to doany resistant. She becomes a legend in the eyes of the local people. The unusualexperience of Hannah makes the people around her gradually coated her with a layerof riddling color. Especially Marian.Tayloy and Effingham.Cooper, who are other twovery important persons in the novel, are even occupied in their imaginationunconsciously. Under their gaze, according to their imagination and psychologicalneed, Hannah is fashioned into an unicorn, a god, a scapegoat, an object of the perfectlove and even a romantic legend. But in Murdoch’s work Hannah is not like this. Shedoesn’t love her husband Peter and has committed adultery with Pip. She puts herhusband down to the cliff to be disabled when he finds the adultery, and then she is inprison in Gaze Castle for seven years. As an object for being looked at and theornamental object for people’s consumption, Hannah has been doing resistance in bitby bit. She refused to leave away following Marian and Effiham, she pointed out thatthey did not really love her, Pip had no right to love her and have her. Hannah’s soulis growing dissimilative, distortive and degradative, she no longer endures thesuffering in silent, she shot Gerald to be dead and chose suicide in the several days toend everything. She put all her property to Max, a beyond all people’s expectationoutsider. Hannah has done the resistance to all the gazers by her own ways. She gets out of the beautiful and holy aperture of the unicorn, gets the real freedom in the wayof her death.The paper makes a Post-Psychoanalytical reading of Murdoch’s novel the Unicornaccording to Foucault’s gaze theory which is based on the power of the gaze, andmakes a concretely describes of the relations between the gazers and Hannah who isgazed by others in the novel.The purpose of the paper is to get a new cognition ofMurdoch’s work The Unicorn on the angle of the relation between the gaze and thepower under the gaze, to get a deeper understanding of the influence which is fromthe gazers on the person, and to analyze Hannah, her comprehension and pursuit oflove and freedom on the viewpoint of Murdoch’s morality and philosophy.