The Diviners As A Feminist Künstlerroman

Margaret Laurence's The Diviners (1974) that mainly concerns a woman writer's growth from innocence to maturity is the culminating work of her Manawaka Cycle, and an intricately designed work.The present author attempts to interpret The Diviners as a feminist Kunstlerroman from the perspectives of its theme, characterization, and narrative strategies.Studying the woman protagonist's initiation, the present author argues that the novel, centered on woman's self-construction, is a feminist rewriting of the traditional male-authored Kunstlerroman in terms of its theme. As a woman, the protagonist is in pursuit of her self-definition and autonomous selfhood; as a writer, the protagonist is empowered to articulate both her emotions and the analysis of it through writing. This characterization device distinguishes the protagonist from the traditional images of women defined out of the patriarchal expectations.The present author also focuses on the analysis of the unconventional narrative techniques adopted in the text. These narrative strategies such as the shift in tense, switch between the first person and the third person narrator and the innovative "snapshots" and "memorybank movies" (the fragmented memory episodes) not only separate the novel from the traditional narrative patterns, but also enable the protagonist to reconstruct her self from a woman's point of view, thus underscore the feminist theme in the novel and challenge the male-dominated literary works structurally.