Female Images In AS Byatt’s Historical Novels

A.S.Byatt postures one of the most influential representatives of contemporary English literature.Her works captured extensive concern and research since she became a winner of the Booker Prize for Possession:A Romance.She showed great attention and thoughts about female problems during more than 50 years of creation.However,she was not a theoretical feminist even obvious concern was showed to women in her works.Compared with contemporary feminist writers,Byatt’s view on women was not radical.She doesn’t want to prone to set fire to gender disputes.In accordance with the writing trend of historical novels prevailing in English literature at that time,she got accustomed to thinking of women’s issues in a historical perspective and formed a kind of female thought with historical consciousness.Historical reflection on previous women was presented in her historical novels.profound attention and thoughts about female problems from her were revealed byreflecting on the many achievements of the past and looking toher future.Set in the past,her novels tried to trace the history of women’s survival dilemma.The difficult situation of women in patriarchal society opened up before readers’ eyes by writing their experience and shaping their image.Longitudinally,Byatt looked back with a "root seeking" attitude to create women’s images in different periods and reconstruct the history that women were absent.Horizontally,she showed the most comprehensive concernabout women,the prejudice and contempt faced by female intellectuals in particular.She thought about women’s existence in an all-round way from the perspectives of their images,voices and living time and space by which women were suppressed and neglectedunder patriarchal culture could be seen.Fictional people together with rewritten characters from classic literatures and reshapedcharacters from actual ones were presented in her works.She was good at rewriting classic myths or fairy tales.Female characters were given new character by brand-new creation.old characters revitalized in her writings by taking the classic as prototypes,or recreating the classic ones.Previous stories had new meanings and characters were in contemporary temperament in her rewritten books.Her resistance to male rights and affirmations to female vitality were expressed by reshaping characters that were conductedby male authors traditionally.Byatt showed reasonable imagination on real characters and plots that were in line with true people and events in the novel way in the process of rewriting historical characters.The neglected female history was reappeared in a fictional way.Byatt held the point that historical novels were written to uncover previously unseen days.Women’s status,survival and strength were weakened and suppressed in patriarchal society.Byattreshaped women’s images in her historical novels and gave a voice tomarginalized women,which made up for the regret that women were absent in traditionalhistory.Historical reflection on female problems can lead to think nowadays.The paper is devoted to finding out the historical and practical significance of her works by exploring the rich connotation of female images and inner thoughts.