| As an important part of Anglo-Irish literature,the Big House novel presents mainly the complicated historical relationship between England and Ireland,which has rendered the Anglo-Irish ascendancy bound to their Big House in a predicament and to their hyphenated identity.As an epitome of a condensed history developing in a particular landscape,the Big House represents the compression of time and space and witness generations of growth and degeneration.Under double oppression of patriarchy and colonialism,female characters are silenced and marginalized in spaces,rendering their pursuit of identity a much more complicated issue in the context of Irish society.Derived from his phenomenological studies of space,Gaston Bachelard’s theory of space stresses that space is a product out of human behaviors.At the same time,space has a continuing informative influence on human beings,affecting their personality and their perception of the world around them.As a vehicle for carrying social and interpersonal relationships,which are constantly extending and changing,space is also vested the characteristics of mobility and variability.In a space,the current experiences of the body intertwine with memory,therefore influencing people’s sense of belonging toward this occupied space.Based on this theoretical framework and taking human-space relationship as a starting point,this dissertation attempts to explore the identity crisis of the two female protagonists(Lois Farquar and Laura Quinlan)in two Big House novels,Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September(1929)and Jennifer Johnston’s The Invisible Worm(1988).Although living in different periods of time(Anglo-Irish War and around the 1970s),Lois and Laura go through similar difficulties on their way of growth,and these difficulties are co-related with spaces surrounding them,as the overwhelming expectations,conventions,and past histories contained inside the houses have impeded their pursuit of identity.This dissertation endeavors to explore how these female characters are marginalized by the space and geographical properties of the Big House,how they are oppressed by underlying power relations,and how they are burdened by history in space.Through analysis,this dissertation aims to prove the bridging role played by time-space compression in the Big House and to interpret the influence of this peculiar landscape on identity formation.Although set in different periods of time,these two novels share a lot in common in terms of their efforts to give voice to women figures and to show the burden of history on them and to see how home has been constructed as a site of unease,struggle,conflict and resistance.The combination of history and geography enables people to bring what has been overlooked before to the front and thus provide a new perspective for interpreting Big House novels.The body of this dissertation includes four parts.Part One concentrates on the influences the accumulated history and traces left by former residents in the Big House have on people who live in the space now.Part Two examines the relationship between the gendered as well as history bounded space and the identity of female characters.Part Three analyzes the detrimental role played by space as the carrier of interpersonal relationships on two female protagonists’ identity formation.Part Four explores the characteristics of openness and closedness of the Big House,and the influences produced by these two characteristics on female identity construction. |
