爱的扭曲和缺失——评亨利·詹姆斯《华盛顿广场》中的家庭关系.pdfVIP

English Abstract Abstract Henry James (1843-1916) is one of the three realist masters in the late nineteenth century and most of his works have aroused the domestic and foreign critics’ attention. They often discuss the moral theme in James’s works. However, the moral and ethical themes in the early works of James’s are relatively ignored in these discussions. The thesis attempts to criticize James’s early excellent novella Washington Square from the ethical point of view, exploring the family relationships in the novel and James’s ethical thinking in his early works. Family relationship, as an important part of ethical criticism, is the interpersonal interaction or contact among family members, belonging to a kind of social relations. Family relationships, based on the subject as standard, are divided into the parents–children relationship, the husband–wife relationship and relationships among other family members. Love is the core principle of dealing with family relationship and the link to maintain marriage and family. German ethicist Erich Fromm maintains that in the family life love registers as parental love, connubial love and sibling love and contains the basic elements, such as, understanding, respect, sense of responsibility and the care. The concept of love reflects its ethical value. Washington Square tells an upper-middle-class family tragedy in New York in the middle of the 19th century. The thesis analyzes the family relation and tragedy in the novel in the light of Erich Fromm’s theory of love and tries to expose the underlying reason why there exists the distortion and alienation of the human nature, decay and landslide of the morality in