Construction Of Female Identity:a Feminist Narratological Interpretation Of The Summer Before The Dark

The Summer before the Dark (1973) is a masterpiece of Doris Lessing. It shows us Lessing’s concern for the female fate and experience and reveals her brilliant narrative skills as well. Though there are abundant dissertations and essays analyzing the novel, most of them focus on psycho-analysis and thematic analysis. There are few narratological studies of the novel while feminist approaches of it are not systematic enough. Studies from the perspective of feminist narratology which is an interdisciplinary approach are hard to be found. This dissertation employs feminist narratology to analyze the female authority, female subjectivity and female identity constructed through narrative strategies as narrative voice (including authorial voice, personal voice and communal voice), narrative point of view (including the female protagonist Kate’s point of view, narrator’s point of view and the shifting and clapping of point of view), and narrative discourse (including direct discourse, indirect discourse and free indirect discourse). The application of feminist narratology affords a new angle to the interpretation of the novel, enriches the studies of it and gives new vitality to the feminist narratological theory itself.