The Doctor's Wife: between Two Worlds: The Crises of Reconciliation and Adjustment in Exile

Abstract

The Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore (1921 –1999) places women at the center of his novels.  His principal aim in choosing to write about women is to avoid becoming a writer of autobiographical fiction. The manner of Moore's writing about women also reveals his paramount sympathy with them as individuals doomed to a greater and perhaps more complicated suffering than their male counterparts did in this existence. This paper focuses  on Moore’s  eleventh novel  The Doctor’s Wife (1976).It illustrates the heroine’s  role in  delineating the important alterations in the author’s life from the moment of choosing self - exile from Northern Ireland until his  warm reconciliation with it . The central character’s dilemma highlights the fact that it is not the environment alone but personal reasons are also responsible for the individual’s dramatic choice of escaping to an alien culture. Sheila’s crises of frustration and disappointment in her marriage to a famous but an unimaginative doctor prefigures women's likewise sufferings everywhere in this universe.

Keywords: Self-exile, Reconciliation, Feminism, Bliss Resurrection, Stream -of- Consciousness, Modern Concept of Tragic Hero.