An Interpretation Of Heroine Ginny In A Thousand Acres From The Perspective Of Existentialist Feminism

Jane Smiley,a celebrated contemporary American female writer,is well known for her in-depth descriptions of the contemporary American ordinary people.As a prolific writer,Smiley has published fourteen works to date,including The Age of Grief,Moo,Some Luck,etc.Among them,Smiley’s masterpiece A Thousand Acres was well received after being published in 1991,and successively won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award.In this novel,Smiley describes the rise and fall of the Cook family from the perspective of female first person narrative,which reveals the process of consciousness awakening of the heroine Ginny in the patriarchal society.The researches on Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres at home and abroad tend to be diversified,mainly from the aspects of intertextuality of A Thousand Acres and King Lear,Ecologicalism and Ecological Feminism.This thesis will interpret the heroine Ginny in this novel from the perspective of existentialist feminist theory,aiming to supplement the research of A Thousand Acres.This thesis is composed of three parts.The introduction part gives a brief account of Jane Smiley,A Thousand Acres,literature review and thesis statement.The main body of the thesis consists of four chapters.The first chapter is the theoretical foundation,which expounds the origin,development and connotation of existentialist feminism.The connotation includes three aspects: female survival situation,female “the other”identity and self-consciousness,as well as female self-transcendence.The next three chapters elaborate the heroine in A Thousand Acres in detail from the above three aspects of theoretical connotation.The second chapter mainly analyzes Ginny’s survival situations from two aspects: her objective and subjective survival situations,exposing the outer oppression as well as the inner trauma confronted by women.The third chapter further states Ginny’s “the other” identities relative to patriarchy and manus in her family and her resistance to these identities from attitude to behavior.The fourth chapter mainly elaborates Ginny’s self-transcendence from two perspectives: her choice to pursue spiritual and physical freedom,and the responsibility-taking for herself and others.The conclusion part summarizes the thesis and presents the significance of thisthesis.Based on the analysis of the process of female self-awareness awakening in Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres,the thesis explores the plight of women in the patriarchal society and the suitable way to achieve independence,aiming to trigger our deep thinking on the issue of gender relations in modern society and strengthen our confidence in building harmonious gender relations.