Construction Of Female Authority:The Feminist Narrative Of North And South

Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the most famous female writers of the Victorian period.Her works are mainly industrial novels,which delicately depicting the lives of different classes of British society at that time.North and South is her representative work,in which Gaskell tells the fate and experience of female,awakening of female consciousness and the role of love in people’s growth in the Victorian period through the mouth of the protagonist Margaret.At home and abroad,related researches on North and South mainly focus on aspects of feminism and industrial perspectives,etc.Few researches on this novel are from the perspective of feminist narrative.Therefore,this thesis applies the feminist narratology theories of Susan Lancer to interpret it in terms of three aspects of narrative focalization,narrative voice and free indirect discourse,and delves into the process by which female writers construct female voices and female authority,demonstrating the subversion of female consciousness to the patriarchal society,thus showing Gaskell’s consciousness of constructing female authority.This thesis is mainly composed of three parts:The first part is the introduction.It mainly focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s works,the main content of North and South and the research status of this work at home and abroad and an introduction to feminist narratology.Feminist narratology is grounded in specific socio-historical contexts and reads the politics of gender in texts in terms of their narrative strategies.In North and South,Gaskell views narrative forms as sites and tools of political struggle,using her unique narrative techniques to construct female authority.The second part is divided into three chapters.The first chapter analyzes the omniscient narrator-focalization and limited character-focalization in the novel.Through the alternation of various narrative focalization,Gaskell created a unique female Margaret,who rebelled against the traditional male-dominated narrative mode.The second chapter analyses the narrative voice in the novel,both the authorial voice and communal voice.Gaskell establishes her female authority through the manipulation of the narrative voice,conveying her desire to establish equal and harmonious heterosexual relationships.The third chapter discusses the narrative technique of free indirect discourse,which functions to reveal the dual meanings of the narrator’s voice and the character’s voice.The congruence and conflict between the narrator’s voice and the character’s voice and the resulting sympathy or irony of the narrator for the character are explored to gain further insight into the author’s intention to establish the female authority.The third part is the conclusion.The conclusion summarizes the findings of the previous several parts and explains the significance of this thesis.The research holds that the use of feminist narratology theory to analyze and comment on North and South provides a new research perspective for the analysis of the work,enriching the academic research on Gaskell’s works,and promoting the application of feminist narratology in text analysis.Women in modern society are still faced with the same problems as the characters in the novel.The common predicament that women face and their sincere desires for equality are revealed in Gaskell’s feminist story.Therefore,it also provides reference and inspiration for modern women to re-examine their self-worth,awaken their self-awareness and cultivate peaceful bisexual relationships.