Frost Hollow Hall's Continuity To And Change From The Victorian Feminist Fiction

Emma Carroll(1972-)is a contemporary British female writer.Her works primarily center on the growth of the teenagers.Frost Hollow Hall is Emma's first work.It tells a girl leaving home on her own to find out the cause of death for Kit Barrington the heir to Frost Hollow Hall and shows her initiating journey of stepping into maturity through adventures and ordeals.This thesis bases its research on close reading of the text and tries to interpret Frost Hollow Hall's continuity to and change from the three representative female works(Jane Eyre,Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the D'Urbervilles)in the Victorian Age.This thesis consists four parts.The first chapter begins with an introduction to Emma Carroll and her literary achievements,Frost Hollow Hall's current domestic research situation and studies abroad.Meanwhile,the research theory applied in this paper also will be briefly introduced in this section.The second chapter explores the novel's continuity to the Victorian feminist novels from three aspects.Through the traditional growth pattern of the heroines,the novel's descriptions relating to the heroine's growth motivation and its descriptions concerning the female discourse right.The third chapter focuses on Frost Hollow Hall's change from the traditional feminist fiction.The change from the roles of male characters: male characters in this novel were no longer the oppressors;the change from the thematic expression: this novel concerned with a little girl's experience on the subject of dream and emphasized its insistence on the theme of dream;the change from the female consciousness and social status: Tilly was a new female image keeping her own dream.She not only achieved economic independence but had higher female consciousness;the change from the gender composition of characters: in Frost Hollow Hall,male characters rarely appeared.Emma expressed her feminist point of view through the dominant proportion of female roles.The fourth chapter draws a conclusion.The novel described the heroine Tilly's dream pursuit experience with concise language and fascinating plots.It inherited many features of Victorian feminist fiction.Meanwhile,it also made a difference in various other aspects and presented its own modern characteristics.