A Lacanian Reading of Kate’s Self-Discovery in The Summer Before the Dark

Yechun ZHANG

Abstract


Doris Lessing is a prolific and prominent female writer in English literature. When she is in middle age, Lessing focuses on the living situation and spiritual crisis of middle-aged women, depicting their inner worlds and bewilderment of marriage, family and self. There are many researches focusing on Lessing’s works, but few on The Summer Before the Dark. This thesis employs Lacan’s theory of mirror stage to interpret Kate’s mirror image, its causes and its destruction, Kate’s self-recognition and self-discovery in order to disclose her spiritual journey from confusion and agony to awaken and rebirth. Moreover, through Kate’s story, Lessing not only expresses her sympathy for the dilemma of the middle-aged women, but also helps them to find a way to deal with the relationship with the male, with marriage and with the family properly.


Keywords


Mirror stage; The Summer Before the Dark; Angel; Self-discovery

Full Text:

PDF

References


Baumeister, R. F. (Ed.). (1999). The self in social psychology. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

Freud, S. (1997). Interpretation of dreams(A. A. Brill, Trans.). Wordsworth Editions Limited.

Gay, P. (1995). The freud reader. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Greene, G. (1994). Doris lessing: The poetics of change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Higgins, E. T. (1996). Social psychology: Handbook of basic principle. New York: Guilford Press.

Klein, S. M. (2002). First and last words: Reconsidering the title of the summer before the dark. Critique, 43(3), 228-238.

Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar II (S. Tomaselli, Trans.). John Forrester.New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lacan, J. (1988). The seminar I (S. Tomaselli, Trans.), John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lessing, D. (1973). The summer before the dark. New York: Penguin Books.

Pickering, J. (1990). Understanding doris lessing. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press.

Woolf, V. (2004). A room of one’s own. Penguin Book Ltd.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/9540

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2017 Yechun Zhang

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture