As a novelist, biographer, literary critic and editor, Margaret Drabble is one of the most important women writers of contemporary English literature。 She is the second child of John Frederick and Marine Bloor Drabble。 Her father was a successful barrister, then a circuit judge for Suffolk and Essex and later in retirement a novelist。 Her mother was an English teacher at the Mount in York, a Quaker boarding school。 Margaret Drabble followed her elder sister to the Mount and later, on a scholarship, to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she received a starred first in English in 1960。 论文网

Drabble’s works are contemporary, confessional, and readable with focus on ordinary, particularly ordinary women’s lives, and complete involvement with the culture in which she lives。 Her early works generally follow her personal life and inner experience; her protagonists have more or less followed the course and concerns of her own life: young women leaving university, getting married and separated, giving birth, having affairs, bringing up older children, reaching middle age then wondering what to do next。 In young Drabble’s fictional world, her young, highly educated and articulate women are always faced with the predicament of being a new type of woman, and yet trapped by the old snares。 A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) focuses on two rival sisters; The Millstone (1965) explores the effects of unmarried motherhood on a young academic woman; The Waterfall (1969) chronicles the romantic passion of a poet and her lover。 Each of these novels explores the female identity by examining one specific feminine role, as wife, mother, lover, daughter, sister, or professional woman。 For this reason, she is generally regarded not as a woman who writes novels, but as a “women’s novelist”。

   Her fifth novel, The Waterfall, is considered one of the best novels written by Margaret Drabble, of which the most basic theme is the pursuit of inpidual identity, female self consciousness, anxiety of making mistakes and how to adapt to the barren world where determinism thought occupies the dominant position。 Margaret Drabble makes an attempt in The Waterfall to see the possibility of a married woman in achieving the balance between her sexual love and her independence。 The protagonist of The Waterfall, Jane Gray, finally reaches transcendence in gaining her physical, emotional and spiritual independence。From+优|尔-论_文W网wWw.YouErw.com 加QQ752018.766

Drabble has created a series of decisive, independent, and intelligent women’s images through her novels, truly and roundly presenting the world of modern intellectual women who share a common destiny with the society。 Along with the changes of the times, they can always maintain independent personality, and make sensible choices of their own destiny。 These images give modern women much useful inspiration for how to treat their own path in life, which has profound social significance and practical significance。

1。2 Literature Review

   Study of foreign scholars on the writing of Drabble mainly focuses on the pursuit of female identity and sexual problems。 Myer says that Margaret Drabble is exploring persistently what she witnesses or thinks about women of her age。 She is more competent in writing about women and women’s issues。 It is understandably true that Drabble’s profound female perception stems from her female identity in the first place (Myer, 1974)。 In her novels, Drabble pictures a panorama of contemporary women, bringing up a ray of hope of women’s searching for proper existent condition in a male-dominated society。 Anne Pratt evaluates in her book Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981) that Drabble’s female writing is a historical writing monument of the accumulated building of women’s authentic desire for sex。文献综述

   Some Chinese scholars analyze The Waterfall from the perspective of narratology。 Liu (2014) analyzes the “polyphony” art in The Waterfall from three aspects of narrative perspective, narrative voice and narrative structure。 The change of first person and third person, the argument of protagonist, and the uncertainty and incompletion of the end of the novel all show the author’s unique writing skills (Liu, 2014)。 Wang (2015) thinks Margaret Drabble manages to enrich The Waterfall thematically through intertextuality by discussing that the names of the main characters in this novel are the same as or similar to those in British history, that the narrator refers to the true life experiences of some British writers, that compares her own story with those literary works in British literary tradition, and that borrows such themes as love, death and renunciation from Emily Dickenson’s poems (Wang, 2015)。 Zhou (2014) presents the narrative characteristics from the four aspects of narratology, narrative time, focus and narrative voice (Zhou, 2014)。 Yang (2010) links The Waterfall with other two novels of Drabble The Millstone and The Realms of Gold, assuming these three novels not only form a progressive trilogy in theme, but also in the adoption of narrative perspective (Yang, 2010)。