From Voiceless To Voiced: Kate's Passage To Maturity In Doris Lessing's The Summer Before The Dark

Doris Lessing(1919-2013)is one of the most prominent and prolific contemporary British novelists,whose representative literary works include The Grass is Singing,The Golden Notebook and The Summer Before the Dark etc,all characterized by profound social meanings behind an exquisite writing style.As the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in the year of 2007,she has been universally appraised as the most excellent writer after Virginia Woolf in Britain.Lessing is such an assiduous and persistent explorer that she has devoted all her time and energy to the reflection on those pressing social problems ranging from racial issues,cultural conflicts,gender relations,environmental contamination to the scientific crisis.Also,Lessing's works have concerned with women issues,and she has displayed immense interest in women's spiritual growth,the quest for identity and the realization of self-value.The Summer Before the Dark,punished in 1973,has been appreciated as the best novel following One Hundred Years of Solitude created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.The novel depicts Kate Brown,a middle-aged housewife's self-discovery journey in one summer,which successfully provides Kate with a thorough understanding of family life,sex and marriage relationship when the tour finally ends.The thesis attempts to analyze the protagonist's psychological growth from the perspective of female Bildungsroman.As “the Other” in the patriarchal society,Kate's growth from a voiceless angel to a voiced one is destined to be harsh and difficult.According to the time sequence,the plot involves three stages—before the journey,in the journey and after the journey.Before the journey,the protagonist appears as an innocent and traditional housewife.She acts as a slave-like mother and a doll-like wife.She is available at everyone's disposal.Her family role is a voiceless angel with absolute passivity and obedience.When Kate summons up the courage to step out of the family,she starts the extraordinary journey of self-exploration,self-discovery and self-growth.In the journey,the revolt against the patriarchal culture gets fully revealed in both voiceless and voiced forms.When the vacation finally comes to an end,Kate contemplates and learns a lot.She chooses to return home with a new marriage ideology and gender identity after encountering a series of physical and mental ordeals.It can be deemed as a successful transformation from a voiceless angel to a voiced one.Through the analysis above,the author hopes that this thesis will provide a better understanding of women's domestic responsibility and induce readers' contemplation about women's living circumstance.