Abstract] This paper attempts to explore the novel The Thorn Birds, which shows the different values of love between women and men around the Clearys. The goal of exploring it is not only to state that women’s faith is love, while men’s faith is anything but love, but also to set off the heroine—Meggie, who longs for love and strives perseveringly for love in all her life. Although Meggie suffers a lot when searching for her faith, she always keeps loyal to love. What’s more, in order to create the beautiful and moving voice of her love, she would rather offer her life as the greatest sacrifice. The paper also aims at tracing back to Western women’s faith by describing the heroines’ love stories in some great works written by some famous women novelists. Compared with other heroines’ attitudes and behaviors to their faith, Meggie is stronger, braver, purer and nobler to her faith, for she enriches love with endless vivid vigor and color. She is a perfect woman. However, although Meggie dedicates her life to love, what she gains is just a tragedy; although the Western women go all out for their faith, they are always deeply hurt by the cost of great pain. Therefore, this topic subtly delineates the fact that the women’s voice for love is still too faint. No matter how wonderful voice they create, they are still incapable of changing men’s non-love faith and overcoming the unequal values of traditional society. This is an unavoidable tragedy not only to Meggie and the Western women, but also to all women in the world from ancient times. They get temporary happiness from love, but with infinite misery. Their voice is too faint to resist tragedy in love. However, women’s lofty faith brings them a meaningful and significant life, just like the voice of the thorn birds.
[Key Words] women; love; faith; voice; The Thorn Birds
【摘 要】 本文通过对长篇小说荆棘鸟的略论，分别描述了以克利里家族为中心的女性与男性不同的爱情价值观,体现了女性视爱情为终生信仰，而男性却常常选择非爱情的信仰，从而衬托出女主人公梅吉对爱情执着的高贵情操。梅吉始终忠诚于她的爱情，甘愿像荆棘鸟那样成为信仰的献祭，谱写了一曲凄婉动人而又崇高、悲壮的爱情主旋律。本文从荆棘鸟追溯到其西方女性信仰的源头，法语论文范文，通过略论早期西方杰出女作家主要著作中女主人公追寻荆棘的历程，展示了西方女性对爱情的信仰，同时更加突出了梅吉集勇气、高洁、坚强、博爱于一身的完美形象。但是，法语毕业论文，纵然梅吉为了爱而奉献一生，纵然西方女性为了爱而殚精竭虑，她们最终得到的总是悲剧性的爱情结局；即使最终能够如愿以偿，可在追寻的过程中也付出了沉重的代价。从中揭示了一个道理：即使女性对信仰的呼喊动听而绝美，她们的声音始终是微弱的：她们改变不了男性的爱情观，也战胜不了社会的传统观念。她们得到了短暂的幸福，却承受了一生的痛苦。这不仅仅是梅吉和西方女性的悲剧，也是从古到今全人类女性所无法阻挡的悲剧。但是不管怎样，梅吉她们这种崇高的信仰让她们作为女性的一生熠熠生辉，就像荆棘鸟的歌声永远震撼人心。
【关键词】女性；爱情；信仰；呼喊；荆棘鸟 1. Introduction
There is a saying that literature somehow aims at studying human, which gives a faithful representation of the life and the thought of mankind. What’s more, each works of literature has its own theme，emblem and fascination, which brings the readers endless aftertaste and consideration, including the The Thorn Birds, written by Colleen Mccullough. The enchantment of this book first lies in its subject─love and destiny, and its symbol—the thorn bird.
There is a legend about a bird, which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the earth.
“From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain….”
The bird, called the thorn bird, follows an immutable law, namely love, filled with solemn and stirring voice.
The book tells readers a story, beginning in 1915 and ending more than half a century later, “of a singular family, the Clearys, who leave New Zealand to live on vast Australian sheep station, where their triumphs and tragedies are interwoven with the wonder and terror of a land ravaged by cycles of drought, fire and torrential flood. But most of all, it is the story of Meggie, who falls madly in love with a man she can never marry, and of Ralph, a truly beautiful man, whose ambition takes him from outback parish priest to the inner circles of the Vatican—but whose love for Meggie Cleary will lead to a passion he cannot control.”
It is considered that the writer, Colleen Mccullough, condenses every aspect of life into a brilliant book. By describing the Clearys’ frustrations of emotional experiences, she tries to show a truth that it’s necessary to pay an unimaginable cost for the true love and any other magnificent things. Undoubtedly, in the story, Meggie is the most conspicuous thorn bird, whose longest, sharpest spine is Ralph. No matter how difficult and mournful the experience is, and how slim the hope is, she never gives up her faith—being loyal to love and making her love significant. She knows she has chosen a tortuous road, but she would rather devote all her effort to searching for her thorn tree—Ralph, and having her faith glitter.
2. Women’s faith in love in The Thorn Birds
“If love is the everlasting theme of literature, then female is also an unfailing topic, for love story can’t lie in the world without women.” The Thorn Birds tells a penetrative love story between Meggie and Ralph. It also shows the particular love story about the Clearys’ three female generations, from which the writer portrays four characteristic women who are brave to fight against their fate and social custom for their faith.
2.1 Meggie’s love story
The story begins with the day of Meggie’s four-year birthday, on which she receives an unexpected present─a pretty doll, from her mother. She, born poor, is an attractive and lovely girl with vivid hair, but she also has a strong personality. When her dear doll is spoilt by her elder brothers, it does not occur to her to seek help; when she is strictly but unequally punished by Sister Agatha in the school, she does not surrender; when her dear brother Frank leaves her, she doesn’t weep, for “Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed”. Her self-control is phenomenal and her pride formidable. Besides, she is a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. She is worth more, but she is not born to be more. Nobody knows what will happen to her, what kind of life she will have, and what sort of fate she will encounter.
When she is nine years old, she moves to the vast Australian sheep station─Drogheda from New Zealand with her family, which really changes her fate and brings her a new life. The first time Ralph meets her, she begins to tug at his nonexistent heart, though she is only nine years old while he is already twenty-eight years old. Maybe at the beginning, Meggie just views him as a cherished elder brother, for he is glad to do everything that her mother, her father and her brothers can’t do for her, and she depends on him so much. As she grows up, her adoration of Father Ralph has turned into an ardent, very girlish crush. But after Mary’s death, he chooses to obey Mary’s arrangement to realize his dream and give up Meggie by marrying to the Church. She knows it is forbidden to have a priest as husband or lover, and Ralph can’t love her as a husband and will never abandon his job as a priest, but she still dreams of him, yearns for him and wants him. However, besides love, she thinks she also needs a husband and babies, and she considers that though she means little to Ralph, there is still some man who loves her before all else. She believes that not all men love some inanimate thing more than they can love a woman. Therefore, she marries Luke, mostly because Luke looks like Ralph so much, which can remind her of Ralph, and will give her children similar in type to those she may have had with Ralph. But she does not love Luke at all, and she is not able to fall in love with him, as she never weakens her deep love for Ralph. Because of the celibacy of priests, she has to go away from Ralph, make her home and her life with another man, and have someone else’s baby. So she becomes to hate the Church’s implication that her loving Ralph or his loving her is wrong. What is worse, to her disappointment, Luke does not need her, either. He never respects her feelings. However, after having the daughter of Luke─Justine, she wants to give her daughter a real family. Assuming that the love to Ralph can’t occur, she will have to love her children, and the love she receives will have to come from those children, so she tries forgetting Ralph and persuading herself that Ralph is the past.
But when she decides not to waste time dreaming of the man and children she can never have, Ralph comes to find her on Matlock Island, which kindles her hope again, and makes her decide to challenge God for her faith. She can never have Ralph, but there she does get the part of Ralph the Church can never have─she has Ralph’s son Dane, who is as perfect as Ralph. Then she chooses to leave Luke to go back to Drogheda, in order to guard her son. She thinks that she has beaten God. But to her sadness, she has to admit that there is never a woman born who can beat God. That day when Dane tells her that he is going to be a priest, which is as if her death sentence, she has to compromise, crying to her son,
“ ‘To the Church thou belongest, to the Church thou shalt be given. Oh, it’s beautiful, beautiful. God rot God, I say! God the sod! The utmost Enemy of women, that’s what God is! Everything we seek to do, He seeks to undo!’ ”
She sends her son to Ralph, but she doesn’t tell him that Dane is his son until Dane’s death. As Anne, Meggie’s good friend and former master, worries, the gods have not done with her yet. After he is ordained without her mother’s presence in Rome, Dane decides to come down to the Peloponnese, getting up his courage to meet his mother. Yet before seeing his mother for the last time, he is drowned in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea. Meggie does her best to love Ralph’s son wit |
