On Female Survival Under Power Discipline In The Summer Before The Dark

Doris Lessing is a well-known contemporary British female writer,hailed as the epic author of female experience.Lessing's works deeply reveal the experience of women and depict a number of females struggling in troubles.The Summer before the Dark chronicles the departure and eventual return of Kate Brown,a 45-year-old middle-class British housewife,over the summer.It reveals the loss and incompleteness of women's inner heart behind the image of happy housewife and women's life under the oppression of patriarchal discourse.Unlike previous novels about motherhood,femininity and female's leaving home,Lessing does not construct Kate's story simply from the external oppression of women but focuses on how Kate becomes complicit and self-alienated in power discipline.Based on Foucault's micro-physics of power and feminist criticism,this thesis analyzes the various social discipline forces on female body in Lessing's The Summer before the Dark and further explores the mechanism of micro-power behind the disciplines of gaze,knowledge and discourse and women's strategies of resistance to find the survival of women in Lessing's works.Firstly,the thesis starts from the analysis of how female characters represented by Kate in the novel become the observed,studying the panoramic gaze focusing on female body and female's self-supervision after their internalization of social discipline.Secondly,the thesis analyzes female characters' identity crisis caused by their loss of subjectivity and self-division in the discourse field of family.Thirdly,the thesis analyzes the difficult process of female characters' quest for self-knowledge through their experience after leaving home:identity transformation,observation and anti-gaze from the perspective of a subject and self-reflection.Finally,it analyzes why women in the novel return to their family in a new state after thoroughly remold themselves.The thesis concludes that Lessing emphasizes women emancipation not only is the change of women's external roles but also lies in the original operation mode of gender difference in ideology and culture,which also directs women in the pursuit of happiness in future.