Anita Bruckner’s Writing Of Psychological Realism

Anita Brookner is a contemporary British novelist and art historian.Most of her novels are about middle-class single women,with delicate psychological description to show the protagonist’s self-pursuit process in the face of frustration.Brookner’s psychological writing is one of her most typical characteristics.Based on the definition of her writing as "psychological realism",this paper discussed her psychological writing content and skills.Although psychological realism novel is the product of modern times,psychological novel,as a relatively broad literary concept,has a profound literary tradition.Brookner’s novels are influenced by Henry James,the founder of psychological realism novels,both in theme and creative thought.At the same time,Brookner’s personal French complex is also reflected in her novels.France has become an important cultural symbol and plot mode to express the psychological changes of the characters.Brookner’s novel has a similar narrative structure,and that serves to show the characters’ psychology.She uses several different forms of internal-focus in her novels.Fixed internal-focus and first-person narration make the psychological activities of the characters appear naturally while hiding the narrator;The transform internal-focus observes the protagonist from different characters’ perspectives to make his image more vivid.Also,Brookner integrates the voice of the narrator and the protagonist,and subverts the dominant position of men in the story at the discourse level.Brookner also uses stream of consciousness to express the characters’ irrational thinking in their subconsciousness.This kind of psychological activity is unrestrained,connecting memory with reality.In her novels,she often uses the techniques of painting to metaphorize the psychological state of the characters with Impressionist scenes and paintings.Besides the direct writing of stream of consciousness,the characters’ subconsciousness is often projected into the real world in Brookner’s novels.The red room and the sun,which appear repeatedly in her novels,are a kind of psychological symbol of the characters.Dreams are often taken by Brookner as the carrier of the character’s subconscious mind.From the content of writing,the psychological patterns of the protagonists in Brookner’s novels show a similarity,that is,the development and change of confusionexploration-freedom.This dynamic pattern is not only contained in the different psychological clues produced by different stories,but also reflected in the psychological feature of loneliness and anxiety shared by all the characters.From the above dimensions of Brookner’s novel,we can find that whether from the perspective of writing thought or narrative style,her novels have strong psychological realism characteristics.She expresses the characters’ psychology delicately,and at the same time,she has placed deep ethical and cultural thinking in the story,which makes her a very special contemporary writer.