Women’s Pain Of Living And Way Of Liberation

Susan Sontag’s historical novel In America is loosely based on the true story of Polish actress Helena Modjeska (called Maryna Zalewska in the book), her arrival in California in1876, and her ascendency to American stardom.The Christian Science Monitor comments this novel as "A fascinating exploration of what’s real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality." Sontag weaves a broad narrative cloth here, using dense, elegant language, inventive dialogue, impassioned monologue, and diary entries to attract the reader into the fascinating historical journey. Ever since its publication, the critics have made various comments on the novel from different perspective, ranging from feminism, writing methods, historicism to psychology. The thesis applies Michel Foucault’s aesthetics of existence to analyze the novel In America. It is thought that in the modern society, women suffer the double pressure from their existence and gender; by two ways of caring for the self-picking up knowledge and the care for other people as well as utilizing some forms of existent games, namely, language, love and belief. Women can relieve the pain of living and seek the way of liberation.The main content and outline are as follows:The study contains four chapters. The first chapter is about the introduction of the novel. To begin with, it summarizes research including overseas and domestic research on Susan Sontag and her novel In America. Then it briefly points out the central argument, research methodology, including the brief introduction to Michel Foucault’s aesthetics of existence, the research significance as well as the framework of the thesis.Chapter two and three are the analysis of the novel.In the second chapter, it analyses Maryna’s pain of living in two aspects. Firstly, it states her pain of living during the different periods of her existence. According to the order of what happened, it describes three periods in her life, which are all filled with sufferings. In Poland, she suffers from the pressure from the invaders; in Utopian community, the conflict between the reality and dream spoils her hope; even after she achieves great success on the American stage,"the rename event" makes her deeply painful. And these painful experiences lead her to seek for the way of liberation. Then it analyses her life respectively from her different roles in the family and the career as a female. Living as the daughter, sister or wife, Maryna never gets the whole-hearted support from her family, and her pursuit for the truth of art is denied by the people in the show business.In chapter three, the first section "the care of herself" explores Maryna’s pain of living in two steps by respectively applying two major points:the knowledge of herself and the care for others. In the first step, two key factors are designed according to Maryna’s process of success including the mastery of the knowledge in science-which refers to the techniques that help her to go to the stage of performance as well as the discipline in the society in an effort to analyze how Maryna works hard to lay a foundation for her future success. Learning how to perform starts her way on the stage; learning English paves her way to the American stage and learning the social rules protects her from being interrupted by the invaders to her way of immigration. In the second step, it discusses Maryna’s care for other people-which is also a form of the "care of herself" from two aspects:Maryna’s governing of the family as well as her willingness to take advice from other people to help her to step the way to success. In Utopian community, she takes charge of the daily chores in person and when encountering with crisis, she stands out to settle the problem. Even if being praised as "the queen one the stage", she takes advice from her husband, making a right choice for the debut in America.The second section is a detailed interpretation of some forms of Maryna’s existence which contributes to her liberation, explaining in detail how language, love and belief-forms of people’s existent game-are applied in her life to relieve the pain and help her to lay a foundation on the way to success. Both the self-analysis in the written language and the pun of the oral language on the stage help Maryna to liberate herself from pain of living. Besides, her husband Bogdan’s love comforts her when she is weak and makes her realize what the truth of love is. Her religious belief urges her to explore her inner world in her confession to God and at the same time, the creed of God teaches her how to tell the good from evil and survive in the existent game.Conclusions are drawn in chapter four as follows:in order to dispel the pains the patriarchal society put on a woman, especially a career-oriented one, she should use the aesthetics of existence as a weapon to explore her way of liberation. Firstly, she should care for herself by equipping herself with knowledge of science and knowledge of discipline, which can grant her the techniques of earning her living in the society. Another thing can be beneficial for a woman is caring for other people, by way of taking charge of the life in a big family as well as listening to the advice of others. For creating the beautiful life, she should care for herself, satisfying her desire for self-actualization. Secondly, being in the existent games, a woman has to take good use of the forms of the games to change her destiny from a painful living to a valuable living. As the basic elements in a human existence, language, love and belief can be of great help in dealing with the relationship with oneself and with others to defeat the darkness and liberating oneself. At last, the problem of existence, in essence, is the practical process of art and aesthetics, which can not only lead us into the palace of truth but also shape us into promising human beings.