A Feministic Reading Of Ladder Of Years

Among the multiplicity of women novelists who have attained well-deserved places in the literary canon and the literature classroom over the closing decades of the twentieth century, Anne Tyler stands out. One distinguishing trait is her prodigious rate of productivity; between 1964 and 2004 she has published 16 novels, nine of which were released in the 1980s and 1990s. Also, while maintaining the Southern literary tradition in her choice of Southern cities as backdrops and in her emphasis on home and family relationships, she differentiates herself from such predecessors as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and Katherine Anne Porter in her admitted lack of a "world view".A human family is the basic unit of all society. Tyler loves to explore the tension between an individual character and her family, exploring the ways in which family relationships are formed; however, if ever, they change; and the ways in which each member of a family affects other family members. In response to the family's restrictiveness, Tyler's character dreams about escape. They yearn for the freedom that they think they will find out on their own in the world. From this aspect, some critics consider Anne Tyler to be a contemporary feminist writer.However, what usually develops in Tyler's novel is a sort of escape/return paradigm. Her characters run away from home but then return later to their original situations. What's more, in Tyler's vision, men and women are human beings first, males or females second. Thus in most of her works, she emphasizes the humanity of people and deemphasizes gender differences. Therefore, Anne Tyler is also regarded by many critics as a non-feminist writer for her lack of strong feminist viewpoints in her works.As illustrated above, this thesis aims to make a systematic and detailed analysis of the text Ladder of Years to present the author's feminist and postfeminist...