[Abstract] This paper attempts to explore the novel The Thor(2)

2. Women’s faith in love in The Thorn Birds
“If love is the everlasting theme of literature, then female is also an unfailing topic, for love story can’t lie in the world without women.”[3] The Thorn Birds tells a penetrative love story between Meggie and Ralph. It also shows the particular love story about the Clearys’ three female generations, from which the writer portrays four characteristic women who are brave to fight against their fate and social custom for their faith.
2.1 Meggie’s love story
The story begins with the day of Meggie’s four-year birthday, on which she receives an unexpected present─a pretty doll, from her mother. She, born poor, is an attractive and lovely girl with vivid hair, but she also has a strong personality. When her dear doll is spoilt by her elder brothers, it does not occur to her to seek help; when she is strictly but unequally punished by Sister Agatha in the school, she does not surrender; when her dear brother Frank leaves her, she doesn’t weep, for “Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed”[4]. Her self-control is phenomenal and her pride formidable. Besides, she is a quaint mixture of ignorance and morality. She is worth more, but she is not born to be more. Nobody knows what will happen to her, what kind of life she will have, and what sort of fate she will encounter.
When she is nine years old, she moves to the vast Australian sheep station─Drogheda from New Zealand with her family, which really changes her fate and brings her a new life. The first time Ralph meets her, she begins to tug at his nonexistent heart, though she is only nine years old while he is already twenty-eight years old. Maybe at the beginning, Meggie just views him as a cherished elder brother, for he is glad to do everything that her mother, her father and her brothers can’t do for her, and she depends on him so much. As she grows up, her adoration of Father Ralph has turned into an ardent, very girlish crush. But after Mary’s death, he chooses to obey Mary’s arrangement to realize his dream and give up Meggie by marrying to the Church. She knows it is forbidden to have a priest as husband or lover, and Ralph can’t love her as a husband and will never abandon his job as a priest, but she still dreams of him, yearns for him and wants him. However, besides love, she thinks she also needs a husband and babies, and she considers that though she means little to Ralph, there is still some man who loves her before all else. She believes that not all men love some inanimate thing more than they can love a woman. Therefore, she marries Luke, mostly because Luke looks like Ralph so much, which can remind her of Ralph, and will give her children similar in type to those she may have had with Ralph. But she does not love Luke at all, and she is not able to fall in love with him, as she never weakens her deep love for Ralph. Because of the celibacy of priests, she has to go away from Ralph, make her home and her life with another man, and have someone else’s baby. So she becomes to hate the Church’s implication that her loving Ralph or his loving her is wrong. What is worse, to her disappointment, Luke does not need her, either. He never respects her feelings. However, after having the daughter of Luke─Justine, she wants to give her daughter a real family. Assuming that the love to Ralph can’t occur, she will have to love her children, and the love she receives will have to come from those children, so she tries forgetting Ralph and persuading herself that Ralph is the past. （科教范文网 Lw.nsEAc.com编辑整理）
But when she decides not to waste time dreaming of the man and children she can never have, Ralph comes to find her on Matlock Island, which kindles her hope again, and makes her decide to challenge God for her faith. She can never have Ralph, but there she does get the part of Ralph the Church can never have─she has Ralph’s son Dane, who is as perfect as Ralph. Then she chooses to leave Luke to go back to Drogheda, in order to guard her son. She thinks that she has beaten God. But to her sadness, she has to admit that there is never a woman born who can beat God. That day when Dane tells her that he is going to be a priest, which is as if her death sentence, she has to compromise, crying to her son,
“ ‘To the Church thou belongest, to the Church thou shalt be given. Oh, it’s beautiful, beautiful. God rot God, I say! God the sod! The utmost Enemy of women, that’s what God is! Everything we seek to do, He seeks to undo!’ ”[5]
She sends her son to Ralph, but she doesn’t tell him that Dane is his son until Dane’s death. As Anne, Meggie’s good friend and former master, worries, the gods have not done with her yet. After he is ordained without her mother’s presence in Rome, Dane decides to come down to the Peloponnese, getting up his courage to meet his mother. Yet before seeing his mother for the last time, he is drowned in Crete, rescuing some women from the sea. Meggie does her best to love Ralph’s son with the purity of the Blessed Mother herself, but she doesn’t realize that “The object of her love was struck down in the very fullness of His flower”[6]. After Dane’s funeral, Ralph consequently dies in her arms. They steal what he has vowed to God, and they have to pay, which is a fatal attack to Meggie. She suffers so much, and it seems that she fails and is unhappy, yet she is really a great and successful woman. In her eyes, the tragedies are a comfort, once the pain dies down, “I did it all to myself, I have no one else to blame. And I cannot regret one single moment of it.” [7] She knows what she wants and tries her best to pursue it, in spite of high expense, and her inimitable voice is so plaintive and sacred.