Transformation,Reconstruction And Destruction: A Study Of The Character Of Father In The Gravedigger’s Daughter

The Gravedigger’s Daughter is a representative of psychological realistic novels by Joyce Carol Oates.The heroine,Rebecca Esther Schwart,is the gravedigger’s daughter who is an American-born woman of Jewish-German extraction.The novel unfolds the events happened in the past from the heroine’s point of view.The relationship between the heroine and her father Jacob Schwart is the potential thread running through the novel.The father’s presence of absence is actually common in many of Oates’ s novels,but the“father” is also the key character in the development of the plot.Such arrangement is closely related to the loss of father in Oates’ s own family.In recent years,some researchers focus on the male characters in Oates’ s novels,while only a few researchers pay attention to the character of the father.In accordance with Oates’ s rethinking of the Jewishness of Jewish-Americans who have suffered from both racial discrimination and social exclusion,this thesis takes the character of father,the “gravedigger”,as the point of entry,and then builds a consistent one-to-one match between the father’s three states of transformation,reconstruction and destruction and the three stages of loss of original identity,pursuit of new identity and failure of identity-reconstruction in chronological order so as to dissect the process that makes the Jewish father be trapped in the identity crisis and expound the internal and external causes of his physical deterioration and mental breakdown.This thesis reveals the fact that the Jewish father is not only a completely negative character,but also a positive one by exploring the Jewish father’s presence and absence and his influence on his daughter’s life,and further points out the importance of the father in The Gravedigger’s Daughter.