摘  要

澳大利亚女作家考琳•麦卡洛的传奇家世小说《荆棘鸟》被誉为澳大利亚的《飘》,小说以牧场主的女儿梅吉与罗马大主教拉尔夫之间缠绵悱恻的爱情故事为主线，讲述了克利里家三代人的人生经历和情感历程。它以所描述的唯美动人的爱情故事及所刻画的丰富饱满的人物形象深深打动了亿万读者。本文主要通过多个层面，对女主人公梅吉这一生命运、性格等进行评论浅析。首先是内外界因素，再者是她对爱情及婚姻的态度，再是她对孩子的影响，以及最后孩子对她的影响。从而展现这一形象所赋予作品的永恒的魅力，继而挖掘作品关于爱的内涵：爱是人类永恒的话题,但寻爱的道路布满了荆棘,而历经苦难的人们经过爱与荆棘的洗礼生命却有了更完整的意义。

关键词：荆棘鸟；梅吉；命运

Abstract

Australian writer Colleen McCullough's legendary family novel The Thorn Birds is known as the Australian "Gone with the Wind”. The novel takes a love story of rancher's beautiful daughter Meggie and Roman Archbishop Ralph as a master line, describing the Cleary’s life experiences and the emotional course. Hundreds of millions of readers are deeply affected by the aesthetic and moving love story and the rich characters it portrayed. In the famous saga novel, Meggie is the most successful one who is full of passion and courage, which scholars make a lot of research on it and this article is to analyze the character and fate of Meggie from several aspects: the first one is the exterior and internal reasons for the shaping of her character; the second one is her attitude toward her love and marriage; then, the next is her influence on her children, the last one is influence of Meggie’s children on Meggie. The analysis aims at showing the eternal charm of the image, Meggie. In the story, it is to excavate work on the meaning of love. Love is the eternal topic of human beings; however, the road to love is strewn with thorns. Thus, only if suffered through the baptism of love and thorns can people’s life be more completely significant.

Key words: The Thorn Birds; Meggie; fate

1 Introduction
1.1 Background
The Thorn Birds, with its intricate plot, vivid character depiction and thoughtful theme, claims to be a fascinating novel. Since its publication, it has set records for sales and popularity. Published in 1977, over a half million hardback copies of the book had been sold in 1979. After it was translated into several other languages, it gained even more widespread popularity, particularly among female readers, and was crowned as “the Australian Answer to Gone with the Wind” by The Guardian. The novel won its overwhelming popularity not only because of its fine style of writing, but also its thought-provoking theme and ambiguous connotations, which have been interpreted from different perspectives. This is a rare opportunity to collect the information and try to figure out what the characters suffer from, and the typical image Meggie’s life with the thorn. What’s more, it is believed that the future life and work will benefit from it.