Construction Of Female Authority—A Feminist Narratological Analysis Of Jamaica Inn

Daphne du Maurier is a famous English writer of the 20 th century.Deeply influenced by Gothic novels,she produces a series of Gothic romances.Jamaica Inn,as one of her earlier classic Gothic suspense novels,concerns about the destiny of women.By relating women with suspense,it makes a big hit when published.No doubt the author's skillful narrative techniques contribute to its success.At home and abroad,only a few researches have been done on this novel.Related researches mainly focus on its Gothic writing style and feminism,etc.There are few researches on this novel from the perspective of feminist narratology.Therefore,based on the theory of feminist narratology,this paper will explore the narrative characteristics of the works from the perspective of narrative voice and narrative perspective,and also explores the positive effect of the narrative techniques of novels on the construction of female authority in the text.This paper is composed of five chapters:Chapter one introduces the author and Jamaica Inn,narrates the literature review,and points out the significance of this thesis.Chapter two mainly introduces the origin and development of feminist narratology and two concepts: narrative voice and narrative perspective.Chapter three analyzes how female authority is constructed by two kinds of narrative voices in Jamaica Inn.Daphne employs the authorial voice to relate the story and by focusing on the female characters and their fate,she conveys her feminist consciousness,and thus constructing female authority.Communal voice,including a singular form mainly through the heroine and the sequential form through dialogues between the heroine and other characters,reconstructs the females' subjectivity and construct the protagonist's female authority.Chapter four illustrates the application of narrative perspective in Jamaica Inn:the third-person narrator's omniscient perspective,the heroine's fixed internal perspective and the conversion of the two perspectives.The omniscient perspective applied to the narrator is mainly used to describe the scenery and character's mentality,which enables readers to better understand psychological activities of the female protagonist,so as to construct her subjectivity and female authority.While the heroine's fixed internal perspective overturns the male's narrative order on one hand by making female as the gazing subject instead of the gazed object;on the other hand,the heroine's perspective presents her inner activity and thoughts,thus strengthening the feminine consciousness.The conversion of the two perspectives enables readers to feel the change of female consciousness and also opportunely creates lots of suspense.Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis.Daphne subverts the narrative tradition of males by employing narrative voices and narrative perspectives so that she constructs her female authority as a female writer.