| Since its publication in 1972,Philip Roth’s novel The Breast has been a controversial work.As the first book in the Kepesh novels,The Breast recounts a professor of comparative literature David Kepesh’s metamorphosis into a breast.Through the lens of Melanie Klein’s object relations theory,this thesis argues that the metamorphosed body of Kepesh highlights the issue of his failure in constructing the gendered self,eventually leading to the deconstruction of his gendered self.The thesis mainly consists of three parts: introduction,body and conclusion.The first part briefly introduces Philip Roth’s The Breast,a literature review of the novel,the theoretical framework and the outline of the thesis.The body is divided into three chapters.The first chapter centers on the metamorphosed body of Kepesh,analyzing his confusion generated by part of the female body,his desires that grow abnormal,and his crisis of faith.His epistemophilic instinct,amid such chaos,drives him to unravel the mystery of his transformation and to stubbornly grip the gendered self.The second chapter indicates that Kepesh’s transformation into a breast has a symbolic significance,representing his regression to the oral stage,one of the phases in the development of sexuality.With a developing attitude towards objects,he acquires completely new experiences of splitting and integrating,through which he yearns to reunite with the former gendered self.The third chapter explores Kepesh’s cemented vision of binary oppositions through construing interpretations and counterinterpretations of his metamorphosis,the result of which merely produces an outcome of the novel’s narrative,and demonstrates his failure in constructing the gendered self.The conclusion points out that through the portrait of a contradictory image of androgyny who challenges yet fails to redefine himself,Roth,therefore,deconstructs Kepesh’s gendered self and dissolves the strict binary of gendered subjectivity. |
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