Resumo de The Women Characters In Anita Brookner's Novels With Special Reference To Hotel Du Lac

An interesting feature in the field of post-war British fiction was the advent of more and more women writers into the field. Feminist writing was one of the most interesting divisions in fiction. Women writers like Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner and P. D. James were some of the well-known novelists of the post-war modern Britain. Humour, politics and experimentation were found in the works of these women writers. Though the themes and styles differed most of the women writers emphasised the importance of the subconscious and its mysterious workings. Anita Brookner, the Booker Prize winning novelist has portrayed the lives of women in relation to their careers and relationships. Though she was a renowned author on art history she started writing novels only much later in life. Most of her novels portray the lives of intelligent and affluent women, who are in search of bonds or in the process of freeing themselves from bonds, which have become bondages. Betrayal, disillusion, disappointment, the attrition of time, the contradictions in marriage and romantic love are themes in her novels. The typical Brookner heroine yearns for the romantic and the impossible. She is most of the time single, intellectual, middle-aged, financially independent but quixotic woman who ?will never get rid of just waiting for the right man? (Kenyon, page 15). The women are inhibited and alienated by the intellectual and social traditions in the society. They are either orphans or exiles. The central women characters in Brookner?s novels are intellectual or academic women who are unrealistically Romantic. Literature especially Romantic literature has an inseparable relation to their lives. Most of the time, their idealistic and romantic illusions are encouraged by art and literature. They become disillusioned when their sincerity and virtue clash with the ways of the world. Brookner?s novel Hotel Du Lac won her the prestigious Booker Prize and established her reputation as a writer. The story deals with the predicaments of a Romance novelist Edith Hope who is temporarily banished by friends to a Swiss hotel. Brookner?s heroines are women ?who feel not in control of their lives? (Schlueter, page 63). Persons and events outside their control interrupt their quiet and solitary existence. They are thrown into an emotional crisis and isolation, which brings about the realization of the need for greater realism in their lives. The realization or the enlightenment does not inspire them to change their lives but to revive the status quo before the love affair. The novels have a circular nature- the end where they begin ? but the heroines are round characters because they attain change the hard way. Thus the central figure in Brookner is the quixotically romantic intellectual woman who feels inhibited in the society. Though her books deal with the romantic disappointments of young women as well with the emotional losses of ageing women and their feeling of isolation, they also contain highly amusing social satire and debunking of romantic pretensions. Thus the women characters are independent women who search for their ideals and find them only to get disappointed and disillusioned. The enlightenment of the quixotic women characters as to the nature of their predicament, the futility of any form of escape from the situations in life and return to the ordinary earlier life with relief, form the heart of Brookner?s fiction. She has given the pivotal position to a woman in her novel mainly because of her concern for the state of women in the world. Therefore the fiction of Anita Brookner, the post-war British writer shows modern women in a struggle between idealism and reality.

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