The Reconstruction Of Female Discourse In Parody Texts

Hamlet is the center of Western literary classics.The critics tend to focus on the humanistic of the work,but ignore the female characters in the play,especially Hamlet's mother,also Claudius' wife,Gertrude,has not received enough attention.Shakespeare Ieft a lot of blanks in shaping Gertrude's character and figure,which led to this role only as a victim and bystander of the male power war.The commentary on Gertrude was unfair in the early days.The main reason was that readers easily resonated with Hamlet,and the image of Gertrude only existed in Hamlet's description.As a character described by others,Gertrude does not have the authority of discourse,and her subjectivity is seriously lacking.In the end,she can only play the role of a sinister disaster and end in tragic death.The first part of this thesis analyzes the image of Gertrude in the source text Hamlet.The two symbols "mother" and "wife" became the shackles of Gertrude's life.The psychoanalytic school has made a series of expositions on the image of"mother",the most famous one is "Oedipus complex".However,the psychoanalytic theory depreciates women's physical value which is not appropriate to analyze the source text.The author believes that Foucault's power theory should be used to analyze the complex power relations in Hamlet and to innovate the literary criticism of Hamlet.Next,the author notices that the fate of women as a "wife" is dominated by the male power order.In Hamlet,Gertrude is unable to escape the control of Phallogocentrism,and is eventually forced to suffer from "female aphasia",which means she can be commented by any male characters.Therefore,Gertrude in Hamlet is a female image bearing the shackles of male power.Postmodern feminists have noticed the phenomenon of the partiality of the women characters in classic text.Therefore,the parody text,Gertrude Talks Back and Gertrudc and Claudius came into being.The second part of this thesis focuses on the refactoring of female images by parody writers Margaret Atwood and John Updike.They start from the two aspects,the reconstruction of female desire and discourse and the thinking of post-modern marriage relationship,which rewrites the fate of Gertrude in Hamlet.As a female writer,Atwood has a sense of mission for feminism.Saving the "stupid woman"in the classic text is one of the salient features of her parody works.Updike is good at describing the marriage dilemma and middle-aged crisis of American middle-class families,so he created a post-modern family atmosphere in the parody text,and moved the serious medieval court to the eastern United States in the 20th century.From a wanton,ineest queen to a woman with a similar fate to Mrs.Bovary,in two different ways,these two writers reached the same goal,which is reconstructing Gertrude's women discourse power.The third part of the thesis summarizes the commonality of the two parody texts,which is hypertextuality.As a narrative strategy,Parody in the early stage was not welcome in literary world,and it was called a low-level,eomical,ehildish method.With the study of intertextuality and dialogue theory by post-modern theorists,parody gradually moves from the margin to the center of literary criticism.The canivalism and demotion of the parody texts have been favored by post-modern writers,and a mass of reconstructed classic texts were bom.These two parody texts analyzed in the thesis,reversing the source text from the narrative perspective,the subversion of the character image,and the replacement of the theme ideas,reflecting the efforts of later writers to counter the "anxiety of influence" of the Western canon.The parody text deconstructs the meta-narrative,which responds to the call of postmodernism,and reinvents the female discourse,promotes the development of feminism,and achieves a new breakthrough.