Dichotomy, Struggle And Laminations

A. S. Byatt is a respected female novelist in contemporary Britain, who shows aconstant concern for female artists, especially female writers, in her novels. Many peoplestudied her novels from the feminist perspective, but few tries to explore her idea onfemale self. This thesis，with a close examination of the female writer Olive in TheChildren’ s Book (2009), aims to analyze Byatt’ s view on female self through anexploration into her understanding on the autonomous self and relational self.The thesis falls into five parts:Introduction presents current studies on Byatt’s view of self. With a brief review ofher previous works in this respect, this part states the approach, method, structure andorganization of this thesis.Chapter1focuses on the analysis of the female writer’ self trapped in the patriarchaldichotomy of thinking mind and feeling body. It analyzes that the female writer is on theone hand a victim whose autonomy is erased in the patriarchal society, and on the otherhand a victimizer who can be extremely destructive to her relationality.Chapter2studies the female writer’s struggles against patriarchal norms and effortsto realize the autonomous self. But with all the self-centered efforts to establish herautonomy, she goes another extreme and establishes herself as a “matriarch”. So, in herstrive for the self, she goes astray.Chapter3first analyzes Byatt’s “impersonal” writing practice in The Children’s Book,which breaks through the self-centered feminist writing. Then, in this part the author of thisthesis will closely examine Byatt’s “laminations” of the seemingly ambivalentself-expunge awareness and self-conscious tendency in her writing.Conclusion summarizes that in Byatt’s view, the female self is realized bytranscending the delimiting conventional patriarchal discourse and laminating theautonomous and relational self.