The Analysis Of Gothic Elements In The Fifth Child From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Doris Lessing is praised as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf. During the sixty years of Lessing’s writing career, she is very popular with readers and attracts many critics’ attention because of her high production and various writing styles. After Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007, her works have been paid more and more attention by scholars and literary critics. And Lessing’s rich life experiences and multiple cultural background make her works contain a respectively broad themes. Most of the researches on Lessing’s works mainly focus on the study of the feminist themes at home. As for the studies on her The Fifth Child, some are conducted from the theory of postmodernism and inter-textuality, some are analyzed according to narratology and so on.Conceptual Metaphor theory is first proposed in the book Metaphors We Lived By written by Lakoff and Johnson. This theory holds that metaphor is a cognitive mode of human beings and is also a kind of thinking mode. Actually, it is a “cross-domain mapping”in nature. That is to say, human beings use familiar and specific concepts to describe strange and abstract concepts. From the perspective of cognitive linguistic, Lakoff and Johnson divide metaphors into three types: structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and orientational metaphor.This thesis is based on the theory of cognitive linguistics andtakes Lessing’s The Fifth Child as the study object,which belongs to her later literary creations.The thesis displays the Gothic elements in The Fifth Child from the scene settings, the plot-wavingand characterization, and analyzes the conceptual metaphor of Gothic elements which is contained in the scene settings, the characterization and the theme. Lessing adopts the Gothic writing techniques during the creation of The Fifth Child, which not only breaks through the limitations of her previous realism works, but also makes the metaphorical meaning involved in the Gothic elements of the novel more profound and obvious. Meanwhile, it also shows that Lessing has made the cruel criticism toward the dark side of the society and felt sympathy to the situation of the marginalized people in the society.This thesis is divided into six parts. The first chapter gives a brief introduction to Lessing and her works. Besides, this chapter also includes an overview of The Fifth Child and states the significance and purpose of the thesis. The second chapter is the literature review on Lessing’s works at home and aboard. Chapter three, as the theoretical support of this study, introduces the related concepts of conceptual metaphor, the origin of the word Gothic and main features of the Gothic novels. In chapter four, the research focuscombines with the novel from the scene settings, the plot-waving as well as the characterization, unfolds the Gothic elements in The Fifth Child. Chapter five analyzes the conceptual metaphor of Gothic elements which is contained in the scene settings, the plot-waving, the characterization and the theme from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis, it summarizes the Gothic elements in The Fifth Child from the perspective of conceptual metaphor and makes further analyzing and makes a further interpretation of them.