Imbalance And Reconstruction ——An Interpretation Of The Summer Before The Dark From The Perspective Of The Spiritual Ecology

Doris Lessing（1919-2013）is a celebrated contemporary British novelist and winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature,the oldest female Nobel Prize in Literature to date at the time of her award.She is also the recipient of dozens of literary awards,including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature Honorary Award,and is regarded as another great female writer after Virginia Woolf.Lessing’s works often focus on female characters,taking women’s lives as the subject matter and focusing on themes such as women’s spiritual growth,identity pursuit and self-realization.In 1973,a landmark work,The Summer Before the Dark was released,which was a unique look at the spiritual crisis of middle-aged woman and received rave reviews and was hailed by the New York Times as “the best novel since Marquez’s Cien a?os de soledad.” The Summer Before the Dark is a novel that portrays the emotional changes and psychological experiences of a middle-aged woman,Kate,who suddenly breaks out of her routine and steps out of her normative life when a summer day comes.Taking the spiritual ecology theory of Lu Shuyuan as the starting point,this thesis examines the author’s spiritual ecological thought in The Summer Before the Dark and reveals the process of “imbalance-reconstruction”.By exploring the various manifestations and causes of the imbalance in the spiritual ecology of the main character,we call on all human beings to pay attention to the healthy development of individuals themselves on the spiritual level,and aim to explore ways for modern people to achieve a balance in their own spiritual ecology.There are six chapters in this thesis,the first of which introduces Doris Lessing and her novel The Summer Before the Dark,the research status at home and abroad,the significance and innovation of the chosen topic and the layout of the thesis.Chapter two analyzes the theory that will be used in this thesis: the spiritual ecology theory,and provides a brief overview of the theory.Chapters three,four and five explain in detail the manifestations and causes of main character’s spiritual imbalance in the novel The Summer Before the Dark,and explore ways to reconstruct the spiritual ecological balance.Chapter six is a summary of the whole text.