Escape And Return

Themes of the ancient Greek tragedy writer Euripides’ Medea,Norwegian playwright Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the 19 th century and contemporary Canadian novelist Alice Munro’s Runaway all express a deep insight into the living condition of females.They are excellent works from the perspective of contemporary feminist criticism and theories.Despite the long time span of the three works,their heroines share the same characteristic – they‘escape’ from romantic relationship,marriage and family,presenting a series of female escape.This paper selects basic subject of female escape as basic object of study,partly because that female escape is a common social phenomenon that runs long and deep in Western history,and partly because that it has been constantly written and recreated by writers of different times,nations and countries since ancient Greek literature and thus becomes a perpetual theme in literature.On the whole,using the parallel study method,this paper makes an in-depth research on the basic subject of ‘escape’ in combination with feminism theories to explore the characteristics and development tendency of the subject in Western literature works.This paper is divided into 4 parts: an introduction to expound the subject selection of this paper,the research significance and innovation of this paper,to tease out domestic and international research findings regarding the basic subject of escape,and to provide an overview of relevant studies on Medea,A Doll’s House and Runaway.The first part is to define the concept and characteristics of the basic subject,determine the concept of ‘basic subject’ given by ‘escape’,tease out its development history in Western literature and set forth the feasibility of study on the three works based on the theories and works of such scholars as Le Daiyun,Chen Dun,and Chen Zhaorong.The second part refers to a text analysis on the basic subject of female’s escape.It compares the similarities and differences among the three works in terms of females escaping from patriarchy,which is divided into paternity and authority of the husband.Meanwhile,it analyzes the promoting or impeding effect of bystanders in the escaping of females.The third part draws a comparison of the peculiarities of and inherent relationship among the three works in the depiction of the basic subject of female escaping at a macro level,in respect of the text and the writer’s view on female.The last part emphasizes on females’ returns after escape,exploring reasons for theappearance,as well as profound gender and era significance of this subject.The basic subject of female escape boasts profound gender significance,literary significance as well as era significance and social significance.From its perspective,females should firstly know themselves and seek for identity so as to be ultimately themselves.