| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === This thesis attempts to investigate different characters’ voices and how each speaker’s discourse are influenced and controlled by religion, social class, family, gender and education in John Fowles’s A Maggot via M. M. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. Moreover, the thesis presents that how Fowles arranges an interrogator to practice legal interrogations ingeniously to make all speakers’ voices are listened totally and via the interrogations and their discourses to show the multi-problems and pressure that they have to confront in the 18th-century British society. At the end of the thesis, it expresses that multi-voices result in an open-ending.
This thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction explains the fundamental motifs of the thesis and its relation with Bakhtin’s theory—heteroglossia. Chapter Two deals with in the 18th-century British conventional society, how religion has impact on people’s daily lives, as well as how religious influence permeates people’s discourses. Chapter Three concentrates on the situation that people were deeply controlled by social-class system in the 18th-century British society. Under the oppression of high social class’ authority, Fowles gives his lower-working-class characters chances to speak for themselves and show their thoughts. Chapter Four investigates the topic of gender—Fowles presents that different genders have influence on the speakers’ speaking styles and contents. Male or female presents his/ her own speaking features via different genders. Although men occupy the authoritative position, it does not mean women are always under men’s control and the heroine of the novel is the best example. Both male and female can show his and her speaking styles. Female is no longer silent. Chapter Five will be the conclusion. After the speakers’ heteroglossia, what they left to the listeners are the speakers’ multi-discourses and multi-conclusions. However, there is no one can offer a definite truth for the enigma in the novel to the listeners. There is no single truth to the enigma of the novel even via the analyses of religion, social class and gender. In the end, heteroglossia brings us listeners an endless state—a mysterious state.
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