A Summer's Journey Of Self-discovery

Doris Lessing (1919-), one of the leading British writers today, is noted for her innovative writing skills and her wide and ever changing scope of subject matter. She is also famous for writings on women problems. Her novel The Summer before the Dark, published in 1973, is a story about a summer's journey of self-discovery of Kate Brown, a middle-aged housewife, who suddenly finds herself unwanted. This thesis is a tentative study of the novel's theme of female self-discovery. It aims to explore the process and the significance of the self-discovery. In the novel, the female protagonist achieves her discovery through three levels of journey: physical, symbolic, and intro/retrospective. The physical journey provides the realistic narrative framework; the symbolic journey, in the form of a series of dreams about a seal, highlights the theme of self-salvation; and the intro/retrospective journey, which consists of two complete dreams in the pattern of the old fairytale and romance and a large amount of memory, examines the protagonist's married life in the past 25 years. After much pain and misery, the protagonist comes to realize and becomes courageous enough to confront the dark reality: the deceptive romanticizing of love and marriage, the unhappy married life of her past, the loss of her true self, the fear of aging, and the double standard of sexuality. The study confirms Doris Lessing's belief that choices for married women are quite limited, but the important thing is the knowledge of self as well as the freedom to choose. The other significance of the novel is found in its deconstructive reinterpretation and continuation of the Biblical archetypes and the old fairytale romance.