| Hilary Mantel is generally recognized as one of the most excellent novelists in contemporary Britain. Since the publication of her first novel Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985), her creative enthusiasm has made progress all the more. As a prolific writer, historical genre might be her preference. Before Wolf Hall (2009), she wrote A Place of Greater Safety (1993) and The Giant, O’Brien (1998) successively. Mantel does not follow the traditional way of history writing in the West. Instead, she is more concerned with the submerged or marginalized histories of the unimportant persons.In2009, Mantel’s latest novel Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize. It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, a lowly-born man who grasped the opportunity of England’s Religious Reformation and climbed to the sunnit of political power as the most powerful civil servant to Henry VIII, the famous blue-beard king in the Tudors. With a vast array of characters and overflowing with incidents, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and the political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.Due to the fact that Wolf Hall is less than two years old and its Chinese version didn’t come out until the October of2010, although it has attracted enormous attention from readers and critics, researches on it are not systematic so far. Related comments are scattered in newspapers and the Internet, which are mainly discussions of major characters and general introductions of the writer’s creative techniques.The present thesis attempts to interpret Wolf Hall in light of Greenblatt’s New Historicist theory. As a representative of New Historicism, Greenblatt has developed Foucault’s thought of power. He has examined the "subversion" and "containment" of power and employed them as feasible tools to expose the system of power and its operation. While subversion means a reaction to dominant power structure, containment is the control of those subversive forces. The authority permits and encourages their coexistence to stimulate appropriate subversion to the ruling system from the ordinary or the oppressed. As he claims in The Improvisation of Power, power needs to have subversion to justify its legality and make it visible as concrete power forms, consistently maintains its control without resorting to military means. The relationship between them, he says, is dialectic as it keeps changing simultaneously for long. He also declares that human nature is not a stable and completed existence, but rather a dynamic, mobile and changing process with historical features. Based on a review of previous comments on Wolf Hall and an introduction of the New Historicist power theory, the present thesis aims to probe into Thomas Cromwell’s self-fashioning by examining the relationship between three pairs of major characters, i.e. Cromwell and Wolsey, Cromwell and Thomas More, Cromwell and Henry VIII. The analyses suggest that Cromwell has undergone a process in which he was first suppressed, then showed himself up as an able man, and then suppressed again since power is bound to maintain its own interests. Since Hilary Mantel has received influence from New Historicism, she deliberately makes Cromwell the narrator of the story. Anecdotes, legends and personal stories are used or excavated in order to expose the histories under History. As a result, in this complex network of literary text, everyone is inevitably involved in the field of power, and Cromwell’s self-fashioning is achieved in terms of the contradictions, subversions and suppressions between the mainstream ideology and dissident factors. Such self-fashioning reflects the dynamic process when the self is suppressed and relieved during the fashioning process, and demonstrates the omnipresent inherent connection between self and power structure and ideology. |
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