| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 102 === This thesis aims to analyze the working of pleasure in the popular romantic suspense Rebecca through the “double pleasure theory” that is mainly based on Barthes’s pleasure theory of “plasir” and “jouissance.” Chapter One introduces the novel Rebecca and the pleasure issue involved within, a widely discussed topic raised by theorists in the field of cultural studies. Chapter Two seeks for the definition of pleasure by providing a general review of how the remarkable theorists, including Freud, Lacan, and Barthes, have discussed and analyzed the meaning of pleasure. From their observations, it can be deduced that pleasure are mainly divided into two kinds: the pleasure of the “Plasir” (the release of excitation) and the pleasure of the “Jouissance” (the intensification of excitation). The double pleasure theory inherits this basic structure, while adding a new point that the greatest pleasure cannot appear alone in either kind of single pleasure, but can only exist in the shifting process between these two. The theory can also be brought to the cultural layer of discussion about female pleasure, suggesting that women’s greatest pleasure occurs exactly between patriarchal ideologies and feminist values. Chapter Three focuses on textual analysis of the novel, revealing that the most important characters of the novel, Rebecca and the narrator/protagonist, have both proven the successful working of double pleasure throughout the whole story. Chapter Four discusses how the readers can also receive this double pleasure by identifying themselves with the female characters in the novel, and how the novel’s circular narrative structure can also help readers to retain that double pleasure. Much emphasis is put in Chapter Five to show that the novel’s special narrative structure also highlights the very phenomena in the romance genre—that the process of romance is far more significant than the ending—which presents as well a fact that romance reader’s repetitive reading/buying tendency is originated from the wish to regain double pleasure.
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