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Born by British parents in Iran in October, 1919, Lessing lived a poor life and quitted school at 16 years old, got married and porced for two times. Her life experience has great effect on her later writing career. The themes of her works have been changed with the time. In the early period, her novels were based on the political struggle for freedom and equality, adopted realistic writing style. During the later period, she focuses on the difficulties faced by the modern women and their pursuit of self and attempts to reveal the deeper psychological activities of the protagonists. Her books, especially the Martha Quest series, The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, have traced an evolutionary progress of the soul, which to some extent transforms the reader as he reads. The Summer before the Dark is the representative novel of this period. This novel is about a forty-five-year-old woman’s confrontation with the threat of annihilation, the terrors of old age and death. It is the story of Kate Brown and her transcendence of the social conventions, of her awareness of how she has allowed them to define her, and of her burgeoning social subversion in a time and a place where simply to question was itself unconventional. The Summer Before the Dark is told in direct narrative, but through dreams, through archetype and myth.源'自:优尔-'论/文'网"www.youerw.com
This paper studies the novel with the help of Jung’s archetypal theory. In the first part, it mainly explores various archetypes hidden in kate’s unconscious, which suggests the possibility of her wholeness of personality. In this part, persona archetype, shadow archetype, animus archetype and self archetype will be applied into the analysis of the character. In second part, it is to examine the implied meanings of the archetypal images in the novel. The archetypal images such as dreams, hair and seal are used meaningfully, which make the connotation of the text more suggestive. The symbolic meanings of images give the story a mysterious aura. The last part is the conclusion, which sums up the archetypal reading of the text, pointing out that kate’s process to the inpiduation highlights the story.
2. Literature Review
Roberta Rubenstein uses Jung’s psychological theory to analyze Kate’s transformation of consciousness and the relationship between perception and experience, self and others, self and self-image or personal in “The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness”. In the essay “The Summer before the Dark: Closed Circles”, Gayle Green analyses the self-discovery of Kate through breaking down patriarchal values and gender roles in it. Jacquelyn Bonomo once talked about the heroines distorted awareness and female role in “The Free Woman and the Traditional Woman in Novels by Doris Lessing: Analysis and Poetry”. In addition, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis in his thesis “Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing” discusses the spiritual journey of the females in Lessing’s novels. Barbro Pakiam’s essay “A Dilemma of choice in Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark and Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac” makes the dilemma as a main theme, concentrating on the inner journey and in this thesis, of importance is the development of three stages: pre-dilemma, the dilemma as such, and its outcome.
In recent year, some domestic critics have begun to pay more attention to this novel. On the WANFANG, there are about 30 journals on this novel. Liang Yan launches a discussion on the feminism interpretation in “An Angel’s Running-away and Returning--A Feminist Reading of The Summer before the Dark”, which discusses the troubles and spiritual dilemma of middle-aged housewives presented in the work and their way out so as to reveal Doris Lessing’s mature and profound feminist thoughts. Tang Teliang’s paper “A Feminist Narratological Interpretation of The Summer before the Dark” analyzes the novel from feminist subjectivity and narrative perspectives.