Inner refuge : identity and the enduring quest for physical-spiritual unity

Abstract EN

This paper attempts to analyze the inner spiritual rebellion of Doris Betts's female characters in their struggle to discover their identities.

They use four strategies: going West in Heading West(1981) and The Sharp Teeth of Love(1998), imagining illusions in The Sharp Teeth of Love, resorting to religion in The Astronomer( 1973) and welcoming death in Souls Raised from the Dead(1994).

The study examines how Betts's female characters succeed in their heroic struggle to achieve the homogeneity of their physical-spiritual identity.

This reveals that Betts's women drip from the outer selfish physical world into an emotional mystical world as their final resort.

The study proposes Betts's use of the second wave feminism- that the American Southern women writers are famous for at that time- from the 1960s till the 1990.

The study traces the cultural inequalities, gender, and the role of women in the society as three aspects of the second wave feminism