摘 要

《岛》是英国当代著名作家维多利亚·希斯洛普的长篇小说，书写了三代人深受麻风病折磨并被放逐孤岛，却在与麻风病的不断对抗中重获新生的故事。本文以小说中的三代女性人物为主要研究对象，探讨《岛》所反映的重生主题。

本文包含五部分。导论介绍作者以及国内外对于《岛》的研究状况。第二章，“第一代人的重生”，分析主人公的曾祖母伊莲妮在与麻风病战斗中重拾对家人、事业和生活的热爱。第三章，“第二代人的重生”，一方面谈论姨外婆玛利亚在病痛后学会爱护亲友和自身，在爱中重获新生；另一方面，分析外祖母安娜未获重生的根源在于自私。第四章,“第三代人的重生”，强调索菲娅勇敢面对身世，找到自我，重获新生，以及阿丽克西斯的自我重新认知。最后总结三代人的重生，提出重生在于平衡个人和社会，梦想和现实的价值观，同时延伸了“重生”一词在现代社会的丰富和发展。

关键词：重生; 麻风病; 比较分析; 价值

Abstract

The Island is a novel written by the famous British contemporary writer Victoria Hislop. By exploring how these three generations fight against the disease, the paper aims at a thematic study of the novel—the theme of rebirth. Set on the island of Spinalonga, it tells about the stories of three generations fighting against the disease of leprosy.

This paper contains five parts: the introduction, three chapters as the main body and the conclusion. The introduction introduces the author and the novel. Chapter Two, “Rebirth of the First Generation”, analyzes the fighting destiny of the narrator’s great grandmother, Eleni, and her process to rebirth. Chapter Three, “Rebirth of the Second Generation”, talks about the successful revival of her grandma aunt, Maria and the failure rebirth of her grandmother Anna objectively. Chapter Four, “Rebirth of the Third Generation”, emphasizes the redefinition of Sofia and Alexis. The conclusion summarizes the whole paper, and figures out that rebirth as the main theme in this novel which means the balance of values of individuality and society, the dream and the reality. It brings up some essential connotations of rebirth in modern society.

Key Words: rebirth; leprosy; comparative analyze; value

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Introduction to Victoria Hislop and The Island 1

1.2 Literature Review 2

1.3 Structure of the Paper 3

2 Rebirth of the First Generation 4

2.1 Eleni’s Regaining from the Leprosy 4

2.2 Giorgis’s Regeneration of his Honorable Insistence 5

3 Rebirth of the Second Generation 7

3.1 The Successful Renewing Life of Maria 7

3.2 The Failure in Rebirth for Anna 8

4 Rebirth of the Third Generation 11

4.1 Sofia’s Recognition of the Inglorious Family 11

4.2 Alexis’s Redefinition of Herself 12

5 Conclusion 14

References 15

Acknowledgements 16

A Thematic Analysis of Rebirth

in The Island

Introduction

Introduction to Victoria Hislop and The Island

The famous British contemporary writer Victoria Hislop worked earlier in Daily Telegraph and many other mainstream British media as a columnist, who also had accumulated a profound literary skills. She is one of the most famous female novelists in Britain. The Island is Hislop’s first attempt to interpret life, which preceded her latter works. Thus, it was regarded as “the new Captain Corelli's Mandolin” in Sunday Express. What’s more, Victoria was the Newcomer of the Year at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007 and won the Richard amp; Judy Summer Read competition. She shows her readers a rich and exquisite female inner world and expresses the warm and optimistic spirit of life. Her literal works have accumulated millions of copies in 24 languages all over the world.

Born in 1959 in London, Victoria Hislop studied English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and worked in publishing, she worked as a journalist before becoming a novelist. The experiences for being the journalist and the novelist make her own a good understanding of social life and the complex humanity for different classes of people and build good writing habits along the way. On April 16, 1988, she married with Private Eye editor Ian Hislop in Oxford and now they have two children. This lovely and peaceful family provides Hislop with a comfortable writing environment and opportunity for her to unleash her full potential and creativity to write.

In 2006, Victoria Hislop published her debut The Island that caused a great sensation, and quickly jumped up Selling Book Championship. Although this novel has come into notice over recent years, few people have studied this work. Hislop isn’t a productive writer who has only four novels so far, which is The Island(2006), The Return(2009), The Thread(2012), and The Sunrise(2015).

The Island is a historical full-length novel written by Victoria Hislop and it tells about a fighting history or a rebirth journey of three generations who have suffered the leprosy, even deported from their home to an isolated island, Spinalonga, the Greece’s main leper colony from 1903 to 1957. Among the three generations in this novel, the first generation, represented by Eleni, had suffered the leprosy a lot but regained herself in the fighting against destiny. The second generation obtained both the successful revival of Maria and the failure rebirth of Anna. As for the third generation, Sofia and Alexis(the narrator in this novel), they redefine themselves with success in the end.

Literature Review

It’s 10 years have passed since Victoria Hislop’s extraordinary debut novel was published in 2006, and it has won several awards and had been translated into more than twenty languages at the same time. The research into this novel is quite limited. There are only few book reviews about this novel in EBSCO and other foreign language databases. On the whole, they are based on the cultural and historical perspectives. For example, Paul, Kelbie(2007) studies the history and heartbreak of The Island in Kirkus Reviews. Some articles in Observe have mentioned its researches into Cretan culture in The Island. Those limited researches have been conducted on the novel’s textual meaning.

Compared with its limited research abroad, there is less academic theses or dissertation on this novel in China so far. After researching CNKI(Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure), only fifteen essays have been found about this novel. In General, these essays mainly focus on the relationship between the mental ecology and natural environment or images. Yu Xin, in her essay “Interpretation of the Ecological Criticism in The Island”, surveys from the perspective of eco-criticism, mainly discussing the impact of environment factors on human beings and different attitudes of people about the vital disease(余欣, 2010). However, she ignores the relationship between human ecology and human spiritual ecology. And Liu Jiongyi, in his essay “Survey of Eco-feminist in The Island”, consummates Hislop’s eco-feminist consciousness by applying Yestra King’s eco-feminist theory(刘炯驿, 2014). And Zhang Chunyan, in her essay “The Connotation of the Image Analysis of The Island”, points out the understanding of the Crete and the island Spinalonga by comparison, and that Spinalonga is treated as a taboo and despair meaning but Crete represented health and vitality. Moreover, some researchers like Peng Zhixian and Guo Yahong study the main roles’ personal characteristics, like human goodness by nature in The Island. Although some researches have been conducted on this novel, few touch upon the theme of rebirth to the present. This paper aims at a thematic analysis of rebirth in The Island.

• 1. Structure of the Paper

This paper tries to make a further study on the Rebirth theme from the perspective of the three generations from a lepers family. By analyzing emotional maturity and thematic complexity for different background, the author will define the word “rebirth” as various connotations on the stories of Eleni, Maria, Sofia and Alexis. Meanwhile, to support the theme of rebirth, the thematic analysis puts emphasis on the connection between main characters and destiny as leprosy in these four stories, through the textual analysis based on the description of main character’s psychological activity to research the transformation of their conscious-nesses. At the end of this paper, the author will put forward expansion sense of our enlightenment “rebirth”, solve the mentioned key problem of narrow mental space and bring up some essential connotations of rebirth in modern society.

Rebirth of the First Generation

The novel The Island is based on the two islands in Mediterranean—Crete and Spinalonga as its background. The British girl Alexis goes to explore her mother’s family. It tells the story about three generations of Keith Pate family who tries to fight against leprosy invasion. There are two groups in three generations, represented by of Eleni, Alexis’ great-grand mother. One group has a resolute struggle with leprosy, and another group choose to escape from the suffering from the pain of their family.

Eleni’s Regaining from the Leprosy

At the beginning of the World War Two, Eleni became infected the leprosy through her student Dimitri and exiled to the leper colony, she was compelled to separate from her husband Giorgis and her two young daughters, Anna and Maria. The time far away from the homeland and family seemed to be period of the death in Eleni’s life.

Eleni is a charm female with tolerance and gentleness. As a good primary school teacher, she spares no efforts to love and teach her students and daughters even when she is suffering from the pain of leprosy. From the healthy body to the suffering death, she is reborn with her love and responsibility as a role of a mother, a wife and a teacher(王忠霞,2014). Though suffering from the disease, Eleni achieves a rebirth of spirit.

As a virtuous mother, Eleni made everything at home settled before she left to Spinalonga. When it was time for departure, she even got used to putting a bunch of flowers into the vast on the desk. “She felt the strongest desire to hold them, to crush them in her embrace, to feel their hot tears on her skin, to still their shaking bodies.”(Hislop, 2006, p.59), but she couldn’t do anything as she desired for preventing her daughters from the leprosy. And after being isolated on the island, she still shared the active and inspired life in Spinalonga with her daughter in letter. What’s more, she solved the problem between her two daughters with different characters easily in the way of writing two similar letters for them. Though she could not accompany her daughters, she still fulfilled her responsibility as a mother.