摘 要

阿加莎·克里斯蒂是一位著名的英国女作家,其侦探小说一直以来很受欢迎，尤其侦探和犯罪细节引起人们广泛的关注，因此她被誉为“侦探小说女王”。在《尼罗河上的惨案》中，阿加莎·克里斯蒂不但呈现出了细致的侦探和犯罪细节，也凸显了矛盾的女性意识：女性意识和男权社会同时存在。二者的冲突是小说的一大特色。

本文以阿加莎·克里斯蒂的著名侦探小说之一的《尼罗河上的惨案》为例，旨在探讨阿加莎·克里斯蒂作品中矛盾的女性意识。第一部分主要介绍阿加莎·克里斯蒂及其作品、文献综述、以及本文的研究目的和意义。第二部分主要介绍19世纪至20世纪女权运动兴起和发展的历史背景。第三部分主要阐述阿加莎·克里斯蒂矛盾的女性意识，即女性意识和男权社会同时存在的冲突，并具体分析其在小说中的人物形象表现和语言表现。第四部分主要结合历史背景和家庭背景，分析矛盾女性意识存在的两个原因，即女权运动导致女性意识的存在，家庭背景导致男权社会的存在。最后总结本文的主要成果。

关键词：矛盾的；女权运动；女性意识；男权社会

Abstract

Agatha Christie is a famous British female writer. Her detective novels have always been very popular, especially the details of detectives and crimes have attracted widespread attention. Therefore Agatha Christie is honored as the “Queen of Detective Novels”. In Death on the Nile, Agatha Christie not only shows the delicate details of detectives and crimes, but also shows contradictory feminine consciousness: the coexistence of feminine consciousness and male-dominated society. The conflict between them is a major feature of the novel.

This paper aims to explore the contradictory feminine consciousness in Agatha Christie’s work with the example of Death on the Nile. The first part mainly introduces Agatha Christie and her work, literature review, the purpose and significance of this paper. The second part mainly introduces the historical background: the rise and development of the feminism movement from the 19th to the 20th century. The third part mainly elaborates Agatha Christie’s contradictory feminine consciousness, that is, the conflict between feminine consciousness and male-dominated society, and specifically analyzes the character images and language performance in the novel. The fourth part mainly analyzes two causes of contradictory feminine consciousness based on historical background and family background. That is, the feminism movement leads to the existence of feminine consciousness, and the family background leads to the existence of male-dominated society. Finally, the main finding of the paper is concluded.

Key Words: contradictory; feminism movement; feminine consciousness; male-dominated society

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 The introduction of Agatha Christie 1

1.2 The introduction of Death on the Nile 2

1.3 Literature review 3

1.4 Purpose and significance of the paper 4

2 Historical Background 6

2.1 The conditions for feminism movement 6

2.2 Three stages of feminism movement 7

3 The Conflict between Feminine Consciousness and Male-dominated Society 9

3.1 Feminine consciousness 9

3.2 Male-dominated society 12

4 Causes of Contradictory Feminine Consciousness 14

4.1 Cause of feminine consciousness 14

4.2 Cause of male-dominated society 15

5 Conclusion 16

References 17

Acknowledgments 18

Analysis on Contradictory Feminine Consciousness in Agatha Christie’s Works:

Taking Death on the Nile for Example

1 Introduction

1.1 The introduction of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is a famous British novelist, playwright and a master of detective fiction in the literary world. She was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in England on September 15th, 1890, and died in the home in England on January 12th, 1976.

Agatha Christie is a prolific writer. Her works are not limited to detective novels. All of her works include long mystery novels, selections of short novels or medium-length novels, scripts, emotional novels, collections of poems, and autobiography. Agatha Christie’s works are second only to Shakespeare in number. She pioneered the school of “village villa” in the detective fiction, that is, the homicide usually occurred in a specific closed environment, and the murderer was also one of several people who had specific relationships with the dead. This model is also used in many detective works in Europe, America and even Japan.

The culture which was attained by Agatha Christie was entirely derived from her mother’s education. Her mother was a woman with a unique personality and active thinking. She was inspired to think that the children’s vision and brain should be protect, so she left Agatha Christie with her and did not allow Agatha Christie to be educated before the age of eight. But Agatha Christie still learned to read at the age of five depending on her own cleverness and the limited help of a not highly educated mother. Due to the poor financial management of her father, family conditions began to deteriorate. In order to take shelter from the high consumption in the UK, her parents decided to rent their house and move their families to foreign country. In 1896, 6-year-old Agatha Christie lived with her family in the west of France for half a year. This was the beginning when Agatha Christie learned French and social activities. In 1901, her father died due to acute pneumonia. At this time Agatha Christie began to read some English and French classics such as Dickens and Dumas. Every time she visited auntie in London’s Ealing district, she had the opportunity to go to the theater and watch stage plays and musicals. This became her big hobby. In 1905, Agatha Christie followed her mother to pursue her studies in a boarding school in Paris. In 1909, because her sick mother needed to recuperate in Egypt, Agatha Christie, under the age of 20, began her social life in Cairo.

Her literary status in the UK greatly exceeded Conan Doyle. At the age of 66, she was awarded the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” and gained honorary doctorate in literature from the University of Exeter. French President Charles de Gaulle claimed that he was an “Agatha Christie’s fan”. The empress dowager of the United Kingdom also took Agatha Christie’s novel as a best enjoyment. The awards and encouragement from the upper class had greatly improved Agatha Christie’s popularity. Her detective drama The Mousetrap has been playing for 30 years. It has created a long-standing record in the history of drama. Her works were translated into 103 languages and published in 157 countries. She was the most widely published author in any language and of all time, outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. If Conan Doyle is considered as the pioneer of the first golden era of detective stories, Agatha Christie is the representative of the second golden age of detective stories in the world.

1.2 The introduction of Death on the Nile

Death on the Nile is a famous detective novel. It was published firstly in 1937. Its main content is that Miss Linnet Ridgeway, who held a wealth of wealth, married to Simon Doyle, a lover of her friend Jacqueline de Bellefort. They rode a luxury cruise ship from Britain to the Nile in Egypt on their honeymoon. This cruise ship carried magnates, celebrities, and declining aristocrats from all over the world. This should have been a charming, romantic and luxurious tour. However, the serial murders on the cruise ship had turned the entire cruise ship into a “death journey”.