Control And Manipulation:a Study Of The Three Types Of Characterization In Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent And A Far Cry From Kensington

Muriel Spark is an important woman writer in post-war British literature. Her fiction involves moral and philosophical issues such as good and evil, order and chaos, and weakness of humanity, showing the author’s deep concerns about the lives of ordinary people living in the modern world. Catholicism plays an important part in Spark’s writing career, and she is considered as a Catholic writer, a satirist and a moralist. This thesis focuses on her Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington. On the basis of Spark’s religious background and artistic style, the study explores the characterization of the two novels, attempting to reveal the significance of control and manipulation in Spark’s literary world.Loitering and A Far Cry are both written in the first person and are highly autobiographical. In Spark’s40-year-long writing career, blackmail is almost an indispensible element in all her novels, usually categorizing people into two groups, the blackmailers and the victims. Meanwhile, there exists a third type, the artist/believer, who exerts great influence on the whole narrative with his/her artistic power of control. All three types of characters are closely related to the theme of control and manipulation.In these two novels, the manipulation of others exerted by the blackmailers is evil and unstable, and the control over one’s own fate, which the victims attempts at, often fails as a result of human’s intrinsic weakness. Based on their religious faith, the artists have a special ability to control themselves as well as the artistic power of "manipulation", which represent the possibility of individual freedom and the quest for truth and faith.Chapter One analyzes the blackmailers’ evil manipulation of others, which is in itself unstable and unreliable. While depicting the serious destruction caused by the blackmailers, Spark also deliberately impairs the evil power by demonstrating the ridiculous and banal side of the devil figures and indicating the inconsistency of domination. Chapter Two explores the images of the female victims, whose tragedy symbolizes the weakness of human and the limitation of human freedom. In Catholic religion, there exist various conflicts of different traits within human nature, and faith leads to goodness and redemption. Lacking true faith, the victims are subjected to external forces and internal drives, which makes control over themselves an unreliable idea. Chapter Three discusses the key role of the artist/believer in both stories. In contrast to the first two groups, the artists are endowed with the ability to control themselves as a result of a clear sense of the boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, and fiction and reality. Meanwhile, artistic power enables them to pursue order, truth and balance through fictional manipulation.The theme of control and manipulation in Spark’s novels implies the author’s deep concerns about humanity and human suffering, which are very complicated and always appear in various forms and on different levels. The examination of the different forms of control reveals Spark’s condemnation against and contempt for evil as well as her reflection and anatomy of humanity. But most importantly, art and faith will always fuel people with power and control in the relentless pursuit of truth and balance.