The Pursuit Of Gender Equality

Roses(2014)is one of the most famous works of the famous American writer Leila Meacham.Since it is published,it has received lots of praises from the readers.The book is widely praised as a great romantic American legend which can be compared with Gone with the Wind.The novel's background is based on the author 's wonderful life of Texas.It depicts love and hatred of three families among the three generations in the town.The book tells the life of a female,Mary,who has been imprisoned by "the Toliver Curse".She wholeheartedly put all her time and energy on her favorite land,Somerset,which made her missing her love with Percy.As the protagonist of the story,Mary was aware of his father's exhortations until she was dying and understood the hardships of the "the Toliver Curse" has brought her.In the end,she sold Somerset,which she has put all her lifetime to break the influence of "the Toliver Curse" on the next generation.In patriarchal society,it is a difficult task for women to gain discourse authority.No matter how hard the case Mary has met,she did not give up paying efforts for Somerset.Through her career success,she finally won respect and social status.This thesis uses the feminist narratology to analyze the narrative skills for the construction of Mary's female identity.The thesis starts from feminist narratologist Susan S.Lanser's narrative voice to analyze the construction of female authority.The first part analyzes the authorial voices for the construction of female authority.In the patriarchal society,the right to speak is generally in the hands of those well-educated men.Women want to get and enlarge discourse authority extent can be an author to gain authorial authority and then master the discourse authority.Writing skills are also critical ways of gaining discourse authority.The works which used a third-person narrative pattern allow the author to master the sound of all the characters and express the author's thoughts.At the same time,another way to obtain discourse authority is to choose female characters as the protagonist of the story.Through this narrative arrangement,the novel reflects the author's strong gender consciousness which has a powerful female narrative authority.The female personal voice includes the "self-advocate publicity" and "contradictory" interpretations of how the narrators narrate female consciousness.The novel expresses a strong female authority through Mary and Lucy's personal voice,expressing it in a straightforward way of discourse.This kind of voice allows the reader to feel their inner consciousness and takes the initiative to master the strong discourse authority.Through the "contradictory" personal voice,the novel also expresses the contradiction among marriage,love and career.Leila Meacham uses narrative voice and narrative point of view to integrate women's subjective consciousness and female resistance to patriarchy.The readers can get a feminist interpretation and deeper understanding of the book.Finally,the use of feminist narratology to analyze the Roses can not only deepen the reader's understanding and provide a new perspective of the novel,but also allow more people to use the narrative skills of feminist narratology to study Meacham and other writers' related works to provide a new interpretation.