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Furthermore, Character-portrayal is one of the most outstanding features in his works. He creates hundreds of works, which vividly depict the characters from different classes and reveal different aspects of their living. There are a variety of characters in his books which give people a strong impression. I think that the success of his novels depends on the description of characters to a large extent. People who read the works of Dickens are all attracted by all kinds of figures in his books, especially various images of the females, including me. Great Expectations is one of his most representative and mature works and there are many different kinds of women images in this book, whose personalities are very vivid, distinct and unique. Some are gentle like Biddy, some are proud like Estella and some are crazy like Miss Havisham and so on. In fact, there are a lot of articles to analyze the characters and images of Great Expectations while there are few studies on the female images about the book, where it shapes many different kinds of female images. All they are of distinct and colorful character and leave us a deep impression. However, they more or less suffer the tragic fates and cannot achieve the really happy life. The status and living condition of females in Victorian age can be clearly reflected from these female images in this book. So in the following paper, I will explore the deep reasons of their tragic fates under the male-dominant society in Victorian age.
In this paper, I will apply the theory of feminism consciousness which is viewed as one of the most important standards of the literary criticism to study these female images. Here is some information by Wang Ming, which explicitly illustrates the understanding of feminist literary criticism.
“Feminist literary criticism can be traced back to the women’s liberation movement during the late 1960s. Generally, it exists to encounter, resist, and eventually eliminate the traditions and conventions of patriarchy-the ideology or belief system which sees as “natural” the dominance and superiority of men over women in both private and public contexts-as it exists in literary, historical, and critical contexts”(16).
The feminism consciousness means the subject consciousness of the females, the self-consciousness and the consciousness of equality. It is based on the perspective of women to perceive, experience life and the world and to convey their desire and pursuits, and certainly their own experience and values.
My paper mainly covers the following four parts. The first part is to study the background information of Victorian age and an introduction of my thesis foundation, the feminism; the second part is to explore the author’s view on the value of family about females; the third part is to probe the author’s other requirements of morality for females; the last part is a conclusion that the tragic fates of these women are inevitable in the Victorian period under the world which is dominated by the males.
Chapter One The Social Backgrounds and the Feminism in His Book
Through a detailed study of the novel, this chapter aims to give a brief theoretical frame of my research. I will explain my theoretical reference, the feminism, which will be used to analyze the study and then I will explore the background information of the Victorian age.
First and foremost, I will discuss theoretical foundation, the feminism. The feminist criticism will provide the main approaches of this study, which aims at taking the women figures in the Victorian age as the object of this research. According to Guerin, the author of A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, in her book, she provides a comprehensive guide to the major critical approaches to literature and there are two entirely new chapters cover feminist approaches. In the book, it refers to that the Feminist literary criticism can be traced back to the women’s liberation movement during the late 1960s and it exists to counter, resist, and eventually eliminate the traditions and conventions of patriarchy-the belief that men are superior to the women. Here, the feminism criticism is intended to seek the equality between men and women. Moreover, it has a basic precondition that women are oppressed, discriminated in the world as “the second sex”, which is presented by the feminist Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir believes that one is not born, but rather a woman. According to her masterpiece the Second Sex, “women, as the other, have historically been associated with inferior nature, irrationality, weakness, tenderness, care and timidity, in contrast to male-identified ideas of rationality, resolution, bravery and so on.”(3). It is clear that the inferior position of women is universal and lasting. In such a male- dominated history of society, women are always in an unequal position especially in the areas of political, economy, education and culture. Even in their family, women are also inferior to men. Feminists hold the opinion that sexual discrimination is not a natural form and it is build up by the society and culture. As Wang Min says, the target of feminist literary criticism includes “stereotypes of any of these groups seen as inferior from the exclusion of such groups seen as inferior from the point of view (or ideological bias) in literary history.”(16). Thus, I think that it is helpful to use such a theory to analyze the female images in the book Great Expectations. Not only to explore how the women images are treated in the book, but also to discuss that the lack of the feminism of the author leads to their tragic fates.