2024年5月15日发(作者：nvidia显卡驱动官方)

An Analysis of Female's Self-consciousness

in The Thorn Birds

1. Introduction

This part includes a brief introduction of the author and the novel The Thorn Birds,

a general description of the novel’s creation background, a review of the novel’s status

and influence, a presentation of the development of the females’ self-consciousness,

and a depiction of the main structure of this thesis.

1.1

The author

The famous Australia writer Colleen McCullough born on 1937, in Wellington of

New South Wales, she was born and grown up in there, and she hadn’t left it until

twelves. She has shown her great talent in science and arts. She made many poems

and stories and pictures. All this push her to success.

On the one side, she studied neurology abroad and taught the subject at Yale

Medical School. And then she moved to American to be a neurophysiologist after

working for ten years at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. Now,

McCullough is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American

Association for the Advancement of Science.

On the other side, McCullough has also been very successful in writing. Her

writing career has lasted for four decades, and she has covered a wide variety of

topics such as the Roman Empire and medical crimes. However, The Thorn Birds is

most arguably her best and most powerful novel of all time.

1.2 About The Thorn Birds

The book tell readers a story begin in 1915 and end in more than half a century

later, the Cleary family, which leave New Zealand to vast Australian sheep station, in

where their happiness and tragedies are developed with the wonder and terror of a

land destroyed by rought and torrential flood.

In 1977, The novel The Thorn Birds immediately caused a stir after it published in

the world. Some people even put it as the Gone With The Wind of Australia , and The

Time magazine has listed it as the top 10 modern classic works. The beautiful love

story scenes and twists impressed the whole world readers. The story takes the

Drogheda pasture as the background and the hot, contradiction deep-rooted love

between father Ralph who longs for the Vatican powerful and the kind, beautiful

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woman Meggie as the focus, and then developed the sorrow and happiness of more

than ten people of the cleary family. It stoped the oppression and bondage for

humanity of what religion gives, and praised the sublime and beauty of the human

nature and love. The novel especially depicts four female images of Mary, Fiona,

Meggie, and Justin, they dare to break the traditional and religious rules and still stick

to the pursuit of love. Their perseverance for the twist of fate, for the love they

pursuit , even for the path they gone through which full of thorns. But finally brought

about the happiness of love for them after the huge pain and changes in life, like the

thorn birds finally sing out the life song that belongs to itself.

1.3 Female’s self-consciousness

1.3.1 The explanation of female self-consciousness

Self-consciousness is an acute sense of self-awareness. It is a preoccupation with

oneself, as opposed to the philosophical state of self-awareness, which is the

awareness that one exists as an individual being; although some writers use both

terms interchangeably or synonymously.

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The sixties and seventies of the feminist movement belongs to the second phase of

the western feminist movement. The movement of this phase is characterized by the

criticism to male chauvinism and the awakening of female consciousness. With the

development of time, women starts to awake after thousand years mental bondage,

their independent consciousness becomes more and more strong, they began to pursue

their own independent personality, affirm their value and dignity, and express their

own feelings. This kind of culture conflict between female consciousness and male

chauvinism has become an important subject of western feminine literature in the 20th

century.

1.3.2 The development of female self-consciousness

With the development of different periods of social transformation and ideas, the

development of female self-consciousness has experienced three periods, each period

has different concerns of different level, they are the right consciousness, gender

consciousness and identity consciousness. Every development period always have

close relations with woman's reality status and the urgent need of the present ,

therefore the themes they focus on are different, and the specific manifestation they

emphasize on are also different. That is to say, in different historical stages, the

development of female self-consciousness always have different tasks.

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