A Feminist Reading Of Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage

Margaret Drabble (1939-) is the famous contemporary British woman writer. As a prolific writer, Drabble has written17novels and a variety of other forms of literary works including biography and literary criticism. Belonging to the new generation of well-educated women herself, Drabble’s novel creation focuses on the living condition of contemporary women, and truly reflects modern women’s confusion and awakening during the process of pursuing for and realising self-value. Drabble’s debut novel, A Summer Bird-Cage published in1963, has brought her instant reputation. As a modernist novel, A Summer Bird-Cage is a story of the protagonist Sarah, who tries to explore and find out the best life path towards women’s happiness, through observing and reflecting on the marriage or single life of her relatives and friends. By describing Sarah’s real life experiences and her own feelings, the novel reveals modern women’s pursuit for self-value and the awaking of self-consciousness, thus reflecting Drabble’s unique and deep feminist idea. The feminist elements penetrate into the whole novel.This thesis aims to, within the literary framework of feminism, provide a detailed analysis of themes, images, plots, symbols, and "self-reference" in A Summer Bird-Cage, for the purpose of probing into the feminist elements conveyed in the novel. Furthermore, this thesis makes a comparative study of Drabble’s manifestation of feminist elements in the novel and the feminist idea advocated by Virginia Woolf, the pioneer in feminism, in order to explore Drabble’s inheritance and development in the area of conveying the feminist idea compared to Woolf. Firstly, this thesis studies the women images and the elements of women’s self-consciousness, by deeply analysing the shaping of new images of well-educated women and the status of their discourse power in the novel. Secondly, it explores the issue of women’s destination from the angle of literary value and practical value mainly in the following two aspects:analysing the marriage status of different characters in the novel, and probing into the reflection of Drabble’s own destination of life in the novel from the "self-reference" perspective. Thirdly, it studies the close relationship between women and nature, along with the feminist idea advocated by the theory of ecological feminism. Fourthly, this thesis makes a comprehensive analysis of Drabble’s inheritance and development of Woolf’s feminist idea in A Summer Bird-Cage mainly in two aspects:the demonstration of women’s self-consciousness and women’s writing.The novel A Summer Bird-Cage, concerning the areas of the demonstration of women’s images and women’s self-consciousness, the exploration of women’s destination, and the conveying of feminist ideas, the feminist elements are deeply reflected. Moreover, Drabble’s creation of A Summer Bird-Cage not only inherits Woolf s unique feminist ideas, but also develops it by putting it into the new social background and gives it new literary value.