摘 要

在过去一个世纪以来，三次女权主义浪潮的的兴起给女性的社会地位和自我意识带来了巨大的改变。《荆棘鸟》是一本成书于1977年，内容跨越1915年到1969年的家世小说，书中对克利里家三代女性进行了细致的刻画，对于女性意识发展的研究有其参考价值所在。本文探讨了女性意识和女性主义文学级理论的相关概念，通过对《荆棘鸟》中三位主要女性人物的分析，探究其中女性意识及性别成长的发展进程和具体体现。本文也尝试藉此作品的分析探究个人经历、成长环境和历史发展对女性个人成长的影响。

关键词：《荆棘鸟》；女性意识；女性主义文学；女性成长

Abstract

The three waves of feminism in the past century have brought great changes to the social status and self-consciousness of women. The Thorn Birds, a family saga, was first published in 1977, depicting the story which happened between 1915 and 1969. The book has a thorough depiction of three Cleary women in three different generations; therefore, it has reference value to the research on the development of female consciousness and growth. Based on the discussion of the conceptions concerning female consciousness, feminist literature and theories, this paper, through analysis of three main female characters in The Thorn Birds, explores the development process as well as concrete embodiment of female consciousness and growth. This paper also attempts to probe into the influence of personal experience, growth environment and historical development on women's personal growth through the analysis of the book.

Key Words: The Thorn Birds; female consciousness; feminist literature; female growth

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

3 Major Concepts and Theoretical Framework 5

2.1 Female consciousness 5

2.2 Feminist literature 5

2.3 Feminist theories 7

4 Female Consciousness as Embodied in The Thorn Birds 10

4.1 Fiona 10

4.2 Meggie 11

4.3 Justine 13

5 Influencing Factors on Female Growth 15

5.1 Life experience and growth environment 15

5.2 Historical development 16

6 Conclusion 18

References 19

Acknowledgements 21

Analysis on Female Growth in

the Thorn Birds

1 Introduction

The world has seen great changes over the past century. With the development of science and technology and the changing of social conception, the status of women has altered a lot both in society and at home. However, it’s axiomatic that Rome was not built in a day. Along with their steps of advancing, women, who used to be clinging to men and being the belongings of their husband, must have struggled a lot. The Thorn Birds has been reputed to Gone with the Wind in Australia. It has been warmly welcomed and appreciated by readers all over the world since it was published in 1977. Even nowadays, there are still people attracted by its unique charm. Except for the themes such as forbidden love and religion cause one to think deeply, the descriptions of the three Cleary women are of distinct features which also attract readers a lot. The three women in three generations hold their own opinions about love, family, children and their own occupations. Not only do they inflict influence on each other, but also change their conceptions constantly themselves in the trend of time, out of their own experience and under the effect of broad environment. New ideas of researches on it have been brought forth constantly over the past four decades. Researchers have given an ocean of analysis on the female characters. Also, due to vivid depictions and continuous character developments of the several women in the book, there are considerable researches with focus on female consciousness, however, most of which stay on the isolated analysis of the characters. Some researchers put up with new research fields such as shifts of the writer’s opinion on female consciousness, analyzing problems from the perspective of historical development etc. Nevertheless, topics listed above are often covered within just a few words in most papers rather than forming systematic comparisons, let alone looking at issues from developmental viewpoints. This paper will base on former studies to conduct systematic research of relevant contents of the Thorn Birds and strive to be comprehensive and thorough. This paper will be divided into five chapters. In the first two chapters, an introduction and literature review will be introduced; then in the third chapter, major concepts and theoretical framework will be thoroughly discussed, and definitions of feminist consciousness, feminist literature and feminist theories will be included in this chapter. Chapter four will provide analysis of three critical female characters: Fiona, Meggie and Justine. Nevertheless, the last chapter will deal with influential factors on individual growth including life experience, growth environment and historical development.

2 literature review

Born in Wellington, New South Wales in 1937, colleen McCullough dreamed of becoming a doctor but had to abandon her dream and shifted to the research of neurosciences when she suffered from dermatitis caused by surgical soap while studying at the University of Sydney. McCullough moved to the United Kingdom in 1963 and lived there for four years, then spent the next ten years in the United States at Yale Medical School, doing academic research and teaching there until 1976, during which she wrote her best-known fiction the Thorn Birds and published it in 1977.

In McCullough's fiction, she regards love and ideal family as the main or even the sole goal, her female self-consciousness pays too much attention to bitterness brought by female's disillusionment of love and disappointment of the ideal family. It has not been raised to the thinking and action of major issues such as politics, economy, culture and occupation, instead, falls into the dilemma of hoping that the society and men can understand more about women's feelings and stay on waiting and being understood. The author's personal experience will influence the plots. For instance, McCullough loves reading since she was a child, in the Thorn Birds, the Cleary family and Meggie's friends Anna and her husband are all avid readers; McCullough's younger brother Carl drowned in Crete island at the age of 25 when he tried to save other travelers, who has the same ending with Meggie and father Ralph's son Dane in the Thorn Birds. In the descriptions of the book, Dane faces death with a relieved mind and smiles into the arms of god, if the characters in the book are compared to people in real life, then McCullough is in the position of Dane's sister Justine, therefore the thoughts of Dane when he died may be McCullough's hope for his younger brother. Justine is a new woman with progressive ideas, she continuously pursues her own dream, and in McCullough's whole life, she has always been making efforts for her own career development.

The thorn birds is the story of the Cleary family happened from 1915 to 1969. Society at that time believed that women should be pious, pure, obedient, reclusive and taking good care of the whole family, this definition was imposed on women. Within the time span of the novel, the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution recognized women's right to vote and was officially ratified on August 18, 1920. The Women's Legal Status Act of 1918 in New South Wales, Australia, legalized all female occupations; Australia first clarified the legality of abortion in 1969.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, domestic research on the Thorn Birds has seen great increase, and the research scope has also been comprehensive. It mainly includes the female images, male images and female consciousness in the book. There are also researchers led comprehensive readings of the book with other well-known works from different aspects, such as the Scarlet Letter, Notre Dame DE Paris, and the Gadfly and so on. Most articles choose to generalize at the beginning, and then organized several independent paragraphs for each character or each work. Therefore, the analysis of characteristics of the figures in the work and the female consciousness contained in the book have already been discussed from all angles, however, there are limited further analysis of the whole growth processes of the characters focusing on the developments and alternations of female consciousness. The Thorn Birds is a saga novel, the time span has reached 54 years, during which female consciousness began to awake and the second feminist movement started. Therefore, therefore, it is necessary to analyze the growth experience of female characters in the book and discuss the influencing factors of their growth.

3 Major Concepts and Theoretical Framework

3.1 Female consciousness

During the Palaeolithic age, the female took up acquisition activities while male mainly dealt with fishing and hunting activities. Due to the higher stabilities on gaining of acquisition activities comparing to fishing and hunting activities, females became the centers of maintaining family production activities and the prosperity of ethnic groups, therefore, cultural centers at that time were all among the period of matrilineal society. However, with the raising of cattle and crops, the advantage of male strength began to emerge, status of females were in continuous decline due to lack of economic foundation， Human beings entered the patriarchal society. During the past several thousand years, it is not only in China but also in the whole world that paternity is from strength to strength. Productivity has seen continuous development since the modern times , the rise of industrial revolution has broadened people’s eyesight, physical strength has no longer been the restriction of productivity, females can also walk out of their home and create equal value to males in social production activities. Under such presupposition that females are in the historical position of being oppressed, their understanding and experience of their own value, especially the value as a female, can be called female consciousness. In a patriarchal society, it reflected in women’s refusal of the conventional definition on females, also in the query and overturns for male’s born rights. At the same time , it is also embodied in the attention and deliberation of women’s living condition, emotion and life experience.