Gender And Space In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Zadie Smith,the talented British Jamaican writer,has received instant attention since her debut in the literary circle in her twenties.In her third novel On Beauty,Smith’s artistic creativity was fully unleashed.Critics,both at home and abroad,are usually drawn in the first place by the intertextuality between On Beauty and E.M.Foster’s Howards End.Others come to analyze its obvious themes-beauty,cultural conflict and so on-or interpret the novel by using literary theories,such as feminism,post-colonialism and so on.However,only a few of the critics noticed the relationship between space and gender in this novel.Based on the dialectical relationship between gender and space,this thesis strives to explore the change of gender space in On Beauty.Some of the female characters in On Beauty are bounded by the traditional female characters,imprisoned in the private space of family and restricted by the family life of the husband and the son.Besides,in the novel,space is not only a means for men to control and manipulate women,but also a possibility for women to subvert the dominant position of men and obtain their sovereignty.In the first part of the thesis there is an introduction which is divided into two parts.The first part of the introduction is about the author and the novel,and the second part is the literature review on the researches of On Beauty and the theory of gender space.The main body of the thesis will fall into three parts.The first part of the main body will analyze the oppression of both sexes in this novel and try to reveal the oppressive life of both male and female characters in a patriarchal society.The second part will analyze the collision of the two genders in the novel to show that because of such oppression,both genders want to find a way out.The third part will show that after the collision,the two genders reach the conciliation.With the housewife’s advance towards freedom and the male character’s return to family space,the two genders also reach the conciliation in public space.Finally,the conclusion is about reflections on the male-female relationship based on the researches above.With the help of feminist geography,the family space,the body and the public space will be the main objects of study.This thesis will analyze the gendered feature of these particular spaces,and explain how the gendered feature of these spaces influence the characters in the book,and finally,the characters’ actions or thoughts counteract at the space.