A Study Of The Metafictional Elements In Margaret Drabble’s The Red Queen

Margaret Drabble, a famous contemporary British novelist, is always considered to be a representative of contemporary British realistic novelists. However, her The Red Queen published in2004is a very different work. Through a close reading of The Red Queen, the author finds that this work contains a large number of postmodern metafictional elements, which make The Red Queen essentially different from Drabble’s previous works. Based on Patricia Waugh’s theory, this thesis will attempt to make a detailed analysis of the metafictional elements reflected in The Red Queen, namely:reflexivity, parody and uncertainty.In this paper, the introduction part reviews domestic and oversea research about Drabble and her works, introduces definition and characteristics of metafiction and also claims the research significance of this thesis.The first chapter makes an analysis of the self-reflexive feature in The Red Queen from the metafictional narrative perspective. The self-reflectivity of The Red Queen is mainly represented by self-reflexive narration of the ghost. In The Red Queen, the ghost of the Red Queen is the narrator, who has been reading Eastern and Western literatures and philosophies for two centuries. Drabble writes in the prologue of The Red Queen that the narrative voice is a mixture of her and the ghost’s, so the ghost narrator is actually Drabble’s spokesperson. Her self-reflectivity during the narration actually means the novelist Drabble’s self-reflectivity of creation. This chapter analyzes the ghost narrator’s self-reflexive narration from the five aspects, namely:the previous exposure of the plot, the communication with readers, the contradictory statement, the comment on her own creation, the novelist Drabble’s appearance in the novel. Through the above analysis, this thesis finds that Drabble tries to deliberately expose the creative process to readers, which reveals the metafictionality of The Red Queen and the innovation of Drabble’s creation.The second chapter discusses the parody technique in The Red Queen from micro and macro perspectives. The first part focuses on parody of the historical text from the micro angle. According to the records in the historical text, King Yongjo in Korea Yi Dynasty is a great king. However, based on the Memoirs of the Korean Princess two hundred years ago, Margaret Drabble created The Red Queen where Drabble confers the right of discourse on the Red queen, who is the marginalized Korean Princess in history. Through the retrospective narration of the ghost of the Red queen, Drabble parodies the "great" Korean king Yongjo and the famous "Silla Event" in Korean history. In this way, the relationship between historical text and truth is revealed:historical text does not mean the truth. Therefore, the records except historical text should also be attached importance to, because truth exists all the records. The second part deals with the parody of traditional literature genre in The Red Queen from a macro perspective. Traditional literary works usually belong to some specific genre. However, The Red Queen is a hybrid of genre, which consists of three parts:"Ancient Times" part,"Modern Times" part and "postmodern Times" part. The first part is (bio)graphical while the other two parts are fictional. Drabble deliberately puts the historical facts and fictional imagination together, exposing the ambiguity and contradiction of genre and subverting the traditional pattern of novel creation. In this way, the relationship between literature tradition and reality is revealed. Ingenious employment of parody shows that Drabble pays more attention to the creation process than the content of the work, which is actually a representation of Margaret Drabble’s metafictional theory via the form of fiction creation.The third chapter discusses the uncertainty in The Red Queen from two aspects: imagery and theme. The first part deals with the uncertainty of two imageries:"red" and "rice chest". On the one hand,"red" stands for blood and violence:On the other hand, it means the protagonists’pursuit of happiness. Besides,"rice chest" in The Red Queen is no longer a tool to contain rice. It means the Oedipus set membership as well as the horror of patriarchal society or more. The second part probes into the indeterminacy from the respective of the patriarchal repression and the freedom of choice in the existentialism. The uncertainty of imageries and themes requires readers to participate more in the creation of The Red Queen, thus providing a broad space for readers to make personalized interpretation of the text. In the postmodern context, the uncertainty of imagery and theme also highlights the Drabble’s new interpretation of the relationship between fiction and reality in metafiction.Through the above analysis, this paper tries to prove that The Red Queen is a work full of metafictional elements. Drabble always claims herself as a realistic novelist. However, the metafictional elements in The Red Queen suggests that in the "literature exhaustion" period, like some meta fiction writers, Drabble also rethinks the relationship between reality and fiction, and is also trying postmodern creation.