Memoirs Of A Midget:Three Women’s Spiritual Journeys

Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), born in the Victorian Age whose standards for women are harsh and severe, is a forward-thinking male writer and takes the lead in the literary circle in his time. He never creates female characters in accordance with the patriarchal programming but reflects truly their spiritual outlooks within their social environment. This thesis, based on the novel Memoirs of a Midget, endeavors to make a thorough analysis of the spiritual journeys of the three female characters with the theoretical guidance of feminism.Caroline, Miss M’s mother, is a traditional housewife, just like thousands of Victorian women. In the novel, she is described as an "angel in the house," an image that receives vast protests from modern feminists. However, Caroline has her own ideas and is frequently lost in her spiritual journey of dreams. Fanny, an English teacher, is tortured in the bewilderment of ridding of the patriarchal ideology. Unexpectedly, she becomes a "bad girl" in the public eye when she refuses one of her admirers, who commits suicide afterwards. Finally, she surrenders to the society and gets married with someone rich from the upper-class to end her journey of bewilderment. Miss M, as a representative of the New Woman in the age, is an intelligent "midget", which symbolizes the oppression that any New Woman has to bear in a patriarchal society. Through the portrayal of Miss M, Walter de la Mare pays deep respect to the New Woman who start off courageously in their journeys of independence and equality.Walter de la Mare, through the panorama of the three female characters’spiritual journeys in the novel, seems to tell his readers that when women step upon the journeys of independence resolutely, they could, in some way, achieve their aim of self-realization. According to the famous critic Lurie, Memoirs of a Midget could have become the canon of feminism in the early times if its writer were a female.