Construction of Three Major Female Characters’ Identity in The Thorn Birds

Abstract

Colleen McCullough is a famous contemporary Australian female writer. The Thorn Birds, one of her masterpieces, is praised as the most successful family novels and romantic legend after Gone with the Wind in western literary world, and is called Gone with the Wind in Australia by later generations. Colleen McCullough puts The Thorn Birds’ background in Australia, and this novel depicts the story of the three generations of Cleary family. Many scholars have tried to analyze this novel from different perspectives, such as intergenerational trauma, ethical dilemma, biblical archetypes, the view of marriage and love, religious thought, feminism. From the perspective of feminism and text analysis, this paper analyzes the construction of three female characters’ identity, in order to help the research to other writers' works in theory and text.

The introduction gives a brief introduction to the author and The Thorn Birds, summarizes the other scholars’ previous studies on the novel and gives a brief introduction to my research direction. The text is divided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces the author's life, the related content of The Thorn Birds, the concept of feminism, the history of feminism’s development and the significance of feminism in contemporary literature. The second chapter introduces Colleen McCullough's concepts of women, the progressiveness and limitations of it and the cause of it. The third chapter introduces the main plot of The Thorn Birds, and analyzes the identity construction of women from the perspective of feminism and the inevitability of their identity construction. 

Through the analysis of this paper, we can see that The Thorn Birds show us the images of the three generations fighting against fate and pursuing love and happiness, and reflects the process of women's consciousness from the initial repression, to the later awakening, and to the ultimate resistance and the pursuit of freedom.

Key words: The Thorn Birds; Feminism; Characters