The Exploration Of Self In Yourcenar’s Novels

Yourcenar Marguerite(1903-1987)is a French writer,poet,and dramatist.She wrote five novels,three collections of short stories,three volumes of poetry,and two plays in her lifetime.Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Oeuvre au Noir stand out in the Prix Femina."Self" is the motif in literature and also the core of Yourcenar’s creation.It is the performance of the historical theme or the reflection of the individual mental state during the second world war,her works has the possibility of being constantly read and new,the meaning of exploration of self is constantly multiplied in the interpretation.The research of this paper based on the post-modernism theoretical perspective.This paper will expound the changing process of Yourcenar’s self-exploration in her life from the three dimensions:the self who speaks gender identity,the self who establishes world citizenship identity and the self who resolves the binary opposition between family and individual.There are four parts in this paper.The first part to make clear the reason and significance of choosing the topic,the present study situation and the research method.The second part takes the representative works of the early Yourcenar’s writing career,Alexis ou le traité du vian combat and Le Coup de grace as the research object.The research based on the theory of postmodernist scholar Judith Butler,we focuses on the anxiety of individual gender identity,which reflects the universal cultural identity crisis,it reveals the urgency of gender identity reconstruction in modern society.The third part focus on Mémoires d’Hadrien and L’Oeuvre au Noir,which is the representative works of her middle writing career.This part starts from the relationship between the individual and the world,analyzing how individuals break through cultural and identity barriers to open channels of communication with the world,the writer finds the universal symbol of humanity from the history and wants to summarize the universal good qualities of mankind.In the last part,we focus on the third stage of Yourcenar writing career:Le Labyrinthe du monde.From the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s resolution of center,we can see the self-conscious ancestors break the binary opposition between family and individual to realize self-worth,these valuable qualities directly or indirectly affect the formation of Yourcenar’s personality.The exploration of self in this paper is not only limited to the research within the text,it also extends the relationship between the shaping of characters and the image of the author,the dialogue between the protagonist and the contemporary culture.So the meaning of exploration of self is difficult to summarize,in deep mining,it is closely related to the genesis mechanism and cultural function of the novel.By summing-up the exploration of self in Yourcenars’ novels,we can get a key word: breakthrough.Break through gender identity,cultural boundaries and family constraints,as the postmodern scholars say,only by breaking the stability of the surface of things can we fully indicate the possibility of various meanings.Until now,the problems presented by exploration of self in Yourcenar’s novels still have profound practical significance.