Pauline's Growth Journey In The Amateur Marriage

As a famous southern woman writer,Anne Tyler is known for her works about life of the small town in American literary field.Most of Anne Tyler's works pay more attention to family and marriage.In order to reveal the complicated relationship between people in the family and society,she not only focuses on ordinary family life full of conflicts and tensions,but also describes individual life in this kind of background.Among those themes,she concentrates on women's survival dilemma and fate.In her works,the female consciousness develops from confusion to awakening,from germination to maturity.As Anne Tyler's sixteenth novel,The Amateur Marriage has obtained high praise since it was published in 2004.The author illustrates the hard process of the heroine's self-examination and reconstruction with a unique point of view.Till now,some scholars have studied the novel's themes and artistic features from different perspectives.However,analyzing the heroine's growth of the novel is still limited.Drawing experience from the analysis of Bildungsroman on male growth,it can still be used to study the theme of female growth in this novel as well.Thus,this thesis attempts to analyze female growth process of the heroine from the perspective of female Bildungsroman in The Amateur Marriage.Bildungsroman is mainly based on the growth journey of the character,focusing on the protagonist's mental development from innocence to maturity.In accordance with the mode of Bildungsroman,the growth pattern of the thesis is divided into three stages: lost-awakening-return.The author tries to present heroine's identity exploration during the hardship of her growth journey step by step,in order to further understand the living plight and spiritual predicaments faced by middle-aged women and arouse the whole society to think deeply about women's value and female awakening.