The Individual on Trial: Female Identity in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac

This paper undertakes to examine how Anita Brookner reveals her female character’s crisis in her quest for identity in her novel, Hotel du Lac. Portraying women in a post-war British society who has lost the balance between self and the world, Brookner attempts to expose patriarchal forms of power as the underlying cause of unequal and subordinate status of women and their inevitable internalization of enduring limiting aspects of patriarchal ideology. Focusing on the protagonist of the novel, Edith Hope, and several minor female characters, the novelist has recorded their ordinary experiences in a calculated style to portray their spiritual world and inner reality. Regarding the constructive feminists claim of the culturally-constructed female identity, this paper attempts to reveal how female characters internalize patriarchal values and norms—that is, these values and norms become integrated in the cognitive, emotional, and structure of the self. Likewise, contrasting images of “the angel in the house” and “the ideal woman” it seeks to examine how while some female characters adapt themselves to the authority, Edith undergoes the process of self-recognition instead of resorting to the "safe" and accepted conventions of a patriarchal society and how she finally succeeds to accept her existential loneliness, which is the only way towards freedom.

کلیدواژه ها:

Feminism ، Gender ، Ideology ، l’ecriture feminine ، Patriarchy