An Analysis On The Heroine Kate’s Psychological Process In The Summer Before The Dark

Doris Lessing, a contemporary distinguished British novelist, is regarded as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf. She appeals to a large readership with her profound exploration of the relationship from different angles between the individual psyche and the moral, sexual, social ideologies that structured it. Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark probing into the psychology of a middle-aged housewife, Kate Brown, objectively and genuinely reflects the troubles that a middle-aged female has to face in her family and social life, and the new knowledge that she has obtained from the marriage. Called by critics as “the best novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude”, the novel put Lessing on the list of nominees for the Nobel Prize for literature and won it in 2007.Based on Freud’s psychoanalysis, the theories of personality structure, interpretation of dreams, anxiety and ego defense mechanism are employed to analyze the novel. With these theories, the thesis discusses the spiritual dilemma that a middle-aged housewife presented and the way in which she got out. This thesis makes an in-depth analysis of the heroine’s psychological process: from self-struggle to self-disillusion, from self-fulfillment to self-reconstruction, and finally reaches the balance of personality. It reveals the essence of self-exploration in both the spiritual journey and real journey.The thesis tries to employ Freud’s psychoanalysis theories to analyze the heroine Kate’s experience in the real world and her exploration in the inner world. Kate’s psychological growth has undergone three processes. The first process focuses on the heroine’s psychological struggle in the two aspects of unbalanced personality structure and internal battles, respectively analyzes Kate’s id, ego, superego, and the internal conflicts between the three elements, which is not only the root of her leaving home and starting a journey of self-awareness, but also directly affects her control of id, ego and superego. The second process demonstrates the heroine’s psychological disillusion and fulfillment through interpretation of dreams. This thesis interprets the rich meaning of Kate’s dreams, and analyzes how the dreams impact Kate’s life and thoughts. The first one comes to the latent dreams which not only reveal Kate’s disillusion to her suffering in the dreams, but her hidden desires to escape from the identity of housewife. The second one comes to the manifest dreams retrospecting the process of Kate’s self-salvation and exploring the positive impact of returning home on Kate’s self-fulfillment. The third process explores the heroine’s psychological reconstruction, presenting the threat to ego defense mechanism, the achievement of ego defense mechanism, identification and final return, which ultimately is the process of self-destruction, self-awareness and self-construction. With the defense of repression, displacement and identification, Kate finally breaks the anxiety dilemma. The thesis not only makes the readers have a better understanding of Kate’s personality, but also predicts the certainty of her final return.Kate’s experience not only reflects her individual destiny, but also reflects women existing as “the other” in patriarchal society whose growth is destined to be difficult. From the microcosmic view, this thesis presents the psychological process in which Kate finally achieves balance of personality after losing herself; from the macroscopic view, based on the analysis of Kate’s spiritual exploration, it draws much attention to middle-aged females’ spiritual confusion. Facing reality, a middle-aged woman needs to find and realize her self-value, deal with the contradictions of the roles in society and at home, the contradictions of ideal and reality properly, and develop a healthy personality in the daily life.