CONSTRUCTING A SELF: TRADITIONS IN THE NOVELS OF MARGARET DRABBLE.

摘要

Drabble writes out of a problematic realist tradition as well as a feminist tradition, and one must look closely at both traditions from which Drabble's art develops: feminism helps to give her a subject, but realism provides a way to explore that subject. Drabble also adds to the traditions in which she writes by evoking themes and situations from the everyday lives of women and by re-defining heroism as the act of constructing a self in the face of tremendous odds and then connecting with others to form small communities. She sees heroism in the midst of traditionally "anti-heroic" material, in domestic, familial, often-times female experience.;Drabble's accomplishment in her first eight novels is considerable. She carries on the Romantic and Modernist faith in the constitutive power of the imagination into the postmodern world. If we can no longer build coherent fictions of the world around us, we can still build coherent fictions of the self, according to Drabble. She provides her readers with a way to perceive the postmodern world which is different from many of her contemporaries', and she insists on exploring the issues of how one lives in the world today and in portraying the struggle to understand, to undertake the task of finding meaning in the world.;To construct a self, Drabble's characters engage in dramatic action, thereby building fictions of their own lives, and they must do so in a fictional world that offers little support. Drabble's characters are restricted by the conventions of her early realistic Bildungsromane and then freed by the romance of The Waterfall. They emerge into the new, more complex realism of The Needle's Eye and The Realms of Gold, only to be almost overwhelmed by the apocalyptic fictional world of The Ice Age. At the same time, Drabble's narrators progressively undercut the norms of realism to challenge the very concept of character-building.