The Analysis Of The Robber Bride From The Perspective Of Freud's Anxiety Theory

The Robber Bride is one of the most famous works of Margaret Atwood.This story depicts the resentment,enmity and affection between the demonic woman Zenia and other three women with totally different personalities.Through the narrative skills of flashbacks and narration interspersed with flashbacks,Margaret presents the mental sufferings and anxiety state of the three heroines in different times to the readers artfully.At present,both the domestic and foreign academic researches on The Robber Bride are mainly from the perspectives of feminism and post colonialism,but there are still some blanks in other fields.The anxiety state of modern people reflected in this novel provides a new perspective for the study.This paper studies the novel from the perspective of Freud's anxiety theory literary criticism,which provides a new way of thinking about the modern human mental state.This paper consists of six parts.The first chapter is an introduction.It mainly includes the topic background,research significance and structure framework of the thesis.The second chapter includes two parts: literature review and theoretical basis.First of all,this chapter introduces Margaret Atwood and her main works,and it sums up the research status of The Robber Bride.Secondly,this chapter sketches the theoretical basis of literary criticism in this thesis: Freud's anxiety theory,including the development stages and its basic classifications.Freud has divided anxiety into three categories: reality anxiety,moral anxiety and neurotic anxiety according to the origin of anxiety.The third,fourth and fifth chapter are the main parts of the whole thesis.According to this classification,these three chapters respectively analyze the anxiety in different types of the three protagonists,Charis,Roz and Tony.The third chapter discusses the reality anxiety of the three heroines when they are faced with Zenia's conspiracy and persecution.It focuses on the different kinds of manifestations of the reality anxiety.The fourth chapter analyzes the moral anxiety of Charis and Roz in emotion and life.They have been cheated by Zenia at first and their revenge plan has been failed in the end,to some extent,for they cannot overstep the bounds of superego to self morality,thus they has fallen into the predicament of moral anxiety.The fifth chapter illuminates the origins and manifestations of neurotic anxiety through the analysis of the three heroines' childhoods.Tony,Charis and Roz have experienced different childhood traumas,which make them fall into the pain and anxiety again and again in the face of Zenia later.The last part is the conclusion which summarizes the whole thesis and suggests that,individuals will be able to face up to the constant impermanence of life and to seek the independence of inner spirit for self-fulfilment by examining the mental anxieties.