The Construction Of Female Authorial Authority

Aphra Behn is the first professional female writer in the history of English literature and plays a vital role in promoting the development of fiction,the new literary genre.Women are in an inferior position in the 17th-century male-dominated Britain.Behn who changes the traditional passive position of the female characters is one of those early writers that express female consciousness in their works,and she reflects the true voice of women with narrative techniques and from her unique perspective.With the development of feminism more researches on Behn have been carried out internationally and domestically.Nonetheless,her first novel,also the first epistolary novel in British literature,Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister has not been fully studied.This thesis therefore interprets Behn?s trilogy from narrative focalization,narrative voice,free indirect discourse and amatory narration to deeply explore the ideological subversion of male-dominated society and to display Behn?s establishment of authorial authority via employing feminist narratological theories of Susan Lanser?s and Robyn Warhol?s etc..The main body of the dissertation contains four chapters.The first chapter proceeds from narrative focalization to analyze the role of first-person internal focalization and the omniscient narrative focalization in the establishment of female authorial authority.Chapter two analyzes the two major functions of the authorial narrative voice in the novel: narrative and commentary,and the subversion of the character’s voice to male voice.The third chapter discusses the usage of free indirect discourse and duplicitous voice of the narrator and characters it has produced,so the author?s intention to establish her narrative authority can be further learned.The last chapter focuses on the amatory narration and the transformation of the sex role in the novel and how they reflect her attempt to subvert the authority of male writing and her female consciousness of equality and freedom.Based on the analysis above,it is to conclude that in this novel Aphra Behn has overthrown the tradition of patriarchal narration and built the authority of female writers via using various narrative strategies and the charm of female language.