The Individual And The World

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987) is the first female academician inCollege de France, and she had got the Status of “Immortal”. Most of Yourcenar’swriting program mostly came into being in her twenties. The relationship of individualand the world, individual how to keep the “integrity” of oneself and to realize the value,are the main thread among many themes in her works. I learned from her creativeexperience, and selected each stage of the representative works to explore howindividuals adhere to realize their own value in the world, and how to find the rightdistance from the individual and the world from different levels, then we can knowYourcenar as an European writers, who experienced the most moments of the20thcentury how to recognize and understand individual themselves in the world.The first chapter focuses on that Yourcenar explored the struggling of individualemotional field with the gay theme. In this chapter, from the author’s tworepresentatives earlier works: Alexy and Coup de Grace, I analyzes the confusion ofemotional values when the value orientation of the individual conflict with socialmorality. Through her works, we understand not only the author’s thinking of individualemotional and the world, but also her exploration and efforts that true feelings getapprove.I take the author’s two masterpiece Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss for examplein the second chapter, to analyze how the individual values integrate to social valuewhen the individual lives in the novel’s historical background and the author’s timebackground. Meanwhile, I reveal the author’s thinking of how individual and socialvalue to combine.In the third chapter, I take author’s later masterpiece World Maze whose theme isher family history as a basis, to discuss the relationship of individual and the world,when the writer back to her family which is a "small community". As individual on thedialectical relationship between the "family interests" and "individual values",I alsoanalyze that individual who want to keep self "integrity" will face many obstructions,and show author’s determination to get rid of the shackles of the family and achieveself-realization by her works and herself.