A Study Of The Hamlet From The Perspective Of Archetypal Criticism

William Faulkner(1897-1962), one of the most outstanding and influential writers in America, has successfully won a worldwide attention by many scholars in the modern literature sphere due to his excellent language skills and unique writing styles. In 1949, William Faulkner was awarded the Noble Prize by Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences due to his great contributions to American Literature.Most of Faulkner’s works are set in the South of America which stresses the theme and the consciousness of the South. William Faulkner keeps writing over his lifetime and writes altogether 19 novels and 75 short stories. The novel, The Hamlet is the first of Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, completed by The Town(1957), The Mansion(1959). This novel mainly describes an outsider named Snopes who comes to Frenchman’s bend and gradually takes control of the whole land and people. In a deeper sense, William Faulkner shows a picture of how the society in the Southern America after the Civil War transforms from the traditional one into the capitalism. In The Hamlet, Faulkner creates a classical artistic image of Snopes which has already been coined into a new vocabulary to represent the insidious and shameless politicians or merchants. From this sense, William Faulkner as a master of language indeed makes a great contribution to human beings.The researches on William Faulkner’s works by the domestic and foreign scholars largely center on his early works such as The Light of August, As I Lay dying,The Sound and Fury. Neverthless, studies of his works at post period are quite few,especially from the perspective of archetypal criticism. This thesis analyzes The Hamlet from the perspective of archetypal criticism. This thesis consists of six parts,namely the introduction, the main body and the conclusion. And the main body includes four chapters.The introduction is firstly about William Faulkner’s life, career and his main works, especially the main idea of The Hamlet. Moreover, it broadly reviews the research status of the novel at home and abroad. Apart from those, the introductionpart also explains the writing significance of this thesis.The second chapter analyzes the characters in The Hamlet in detail from the perspective of archetypal criticism, including these core characters--Flem Snops, Eula and Mrs. Littlejohn and in which the writer of this thesis finds the corresponding archetypal images in the Bible and Greek mythology so as to discover the similarities between them. Through the archetypes of these characters, especially the background cultural material of the prototypes of the heros, we can grasp different kinds of people’s character. To some degrees, these well-known archetypal images play a role as a bridge to help readers better understand the novel.In the third chapter, the thesis focuses on some recurrent images in The Hamlet,including fire, darkness and water. By interpreting the several recurrent images such as darkness and fire, this thesis conveys the original deep cultural meanings and the deeper connotations of the work to the readers. Besides the two images of fire and darkness, water also denotes rich connotations which is the purification of villagers in the Frenchman’s bend.In the forth chapter, this part discusses the structure of this novel as a whole.This novel employs Frye’s four season’s circular structure in a skillful way to narrate the four phases of the protagonist Eula’s life.The conclusion summarizes the main contents and the significance of this paper.This thesis makes an attempt to analyze the novel in detail from the view of archetypal criticism. Through the analysis of the novel, this thesis proves how William Faulkner borrows some classical archetypes in the Bible and Greek mythology in characterization and image. Undoubtedly, these classical archetypes and images in The Hamlet are the best embodiment of the richness of the novel...