Absurdity, Alienation And Choice

As a leading figure in contemporary British literary field, Margaret Drabble is famous for her feminist novels. She usually uses realistic techniques to depict the living conditions of modern intellectual women and explore their ideal lives. Her most autobiographical novel, Jerusalem the Golden, was published in1967and won a James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Most studies home and abroad analyze this novel from feminist perspective, exploring its theme and images, as well as its moral and ethnic issues. Few critics study this novel from other perspectives.This thesis tries to analyze Jerusalem the Golden from the perspective of Sartre’s existentialism, focusing on its three basic concepts, namely absurdity, alienation and choice. Introduction offers a general idea of Drabble and her literary achievements, points out the research object, and makes a literature review on the studies of Jerusalem the Golden. The main body contains four chapters. Chapter one explains existentialism briefly, focusing on three basic concepts of Sartre’s existentialism: absurdity, alienation and choice. The next three chapters analyze this novel in details from these three aspects respectively. Chapter two starts with the absurd world in this novel:the town where Clara grew up. Chapter three focuses on three kinds of alienation:interpersonal alienation in Northam, alienation between Clara and her mother and self-alienation. Chapter four emphasizes on different choices made by Clara and her mother, showing that people are the result of their own choice. Conclusion restates the main point of this thesis. By applying the existentialist method, it explores how Drabble searches a way for intellectual women to get rid of their dilemma in such an absurd and alienated world, and encourages people to confront life courageously, make unceasing efforts to change one’s fate, and make one’s own choice to surpass one’s being.