A Study Of Metaphor In A.S.Byatt’s Tetralogy

A.S.Byatt is deeply loved by people for her rich novel style and bold experimental narrative techniques.In addition to the widely recognized feminist and Victorian style,her works are also characterized by profound literary accomplishment and conscious realism of academic writers,showing the many changes in British society after World War II.This thesis takes her four novels,Garden Virgin(1978),Still Life(1985),Babel Tower(1997)and A Whistling Woman(2002),as the research object,with the help of George Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory,analyzes the mythic,religious,biological,painting and literary metaphors in the four novels,and explains the operating mechanism of all kinds of metaphors.The Trinity mythological metaphor structure of the Virgin in the Garden shows the growth process of the heroine Frederica,who gets rid of the sexual experience under the discipline of the social power mechanism to the moral subject and inner self.The mythological prototype of the ancient Greek goddess of chastity Diana and her partner Adonis depicts the existence of the separation of spirit and flesh of post-modern human beings.Byatt juxtaposes Abrahamic son sacrifice in the metaphor of Christian father-son relationship with individual family’s son killing in the Second World War,questions the legitimacy of war,and looks at the sacrifice of small families in the great value mainstream.The three metaphorical modes of scapegoat in the text interrogated the theory of original sin,and explored the way for individuals to realize self-salvation and seek faith in religious experience.The types of metaphor in tetralogy transcend the boundaries between humanities and natural sciences,and Byatt realizes interdisciplinary interaction through the inherent perceptual similarity of metaphors.Biological metaphor points out the disappearance of spiritual wealth such as human reason and culture after the assimilation of human and animal in social Darwinian theory.The still life metaphor shows the power of stillness and makes people think about the dialectical relationship between stillness and movement,death and rebirth.The post-Impressionist paintings depict the lonely spiritual world of human beings in the post-modern society.The plot metaphors of resurrection and death in the Winter’s Tale and King Lear show the contradiction of belief in the family in the postmodern society,and the complexity of human nature and the heaviness of death in the great difference between literature and reality.According to cognitive linguistics based on conceptual metaphor of George Lakoff,metaphor is an important cognitive mode of human beings.Metaphors in mythology,religion,science,art and other fields all have intrinsic similarities and contain cognitive experience of human existence.Byatt through different types of metaphors in the tetralia,reflects the chaotic reality of moral and ethical disorder in Britain in the 1950 s and 1960 s after World War II,which experienced social movements such as sexual liberation and counter-culture.He deeply reflects on the cognitive experience of human’s sexual relations,inner self,moral subject and other important cognitive fields,and reveals the broken individual living state of human beings in the post-modern society.It expresses the pursuit of human self integrity and moral perfection.