Ethical Criticism On British Victorian Female Novels

The emergence of British Victorian female novelists promoted the developmentof British literature in Victorian Age, and became a miracle in world literature. Manyfemale novelists appeared in literary field which used to belong to men. The Bront s,George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell were in this group and became representative femalewriters in the history of British literature. Victorian Age of Britain is an ageemphasizing moral standard, and focusing on ethical and moral problems becomes abasic feature of novels in this age. Novelists focused on problems faced in socialdevelopment. In their novels, they discussed the social problems, punishing the eviland praising the good. Female novelists were no exception. Reading Victorian femalenovels in the perspective of ethical approach means to discuss the essence of femalenovels in this period.In Victorian Age of Britain, novel became the most popular literary form because,comparatively speaking, it could reflect comprehensive characteristics of afast-developing society. The Victorian Age became a golden age of novel. Victorianfemale novels flourished together with female movement. The unfair situationbetween men and women came to extreme with the accomplishment of IndustrialRevolution in early Victorian Age. From the second half of19th century, or middleVictorian Age, women of insight began their endeavor for equal rights, and literaturewas the way to express their opinion. The literary accomplishment of The Bront s,George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell and some other outstanding female novelists appearedin this period. From the perspective of female literary criticism, American feministliterary theorist Elaine Showalter once divided the development of British femaleliterature into three stages as “feminine”,“feminist” and “female” in her A Literatureof Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront to Lessing. Victorian female novelists were just in the “feminine” stage. Female novelists in this stage discussedlife and point of view of women, but they regarded male mainstream literary form asmodel, and tried to meet their works with the standard of male culture, which wasreflected not only in the content of their works, but also in their narrative style.Reading literary works from ethical perspective has a long history in the west.Plato and Aristotle once emphasized the moral function of literary works.Representative of western modern ethical criticism, American ethical critic Wayne C.Booth once analyzed the development history of European novels by using ethic asthe principle line in his The Rhetoric of Fiction in1961. He believed that authorsshould choose their rhetoric according to their moral position. American scholarAdam Zachary Newton is the first one to use the term “narrative ethics” in literaryfield. He proposed the term and used it to study the ethical result of narration andfictional characters in literary works. But in western world, there is no completesystem of ethical criticism theory, ethical criticism of literature is only a term in broadsense, and not a literary criticism methodology divided from traditional ethics.Therefore, ethical criticism of literature always suffers from prejudice in westernworld.In China, Prof. Nie Zhenzhao of Huazhong Normal University first definedethical criticism as a new literary criticism methodology in2004. After that, manyChinese scholars in their publications discussed the source, method, connotation,thinking basis, range of adaptation, practical value and meaning of ethical criticism;proving the possibility of combining ethical criticism and other critical methods;distinguishing the differences between ethical criticism and traditional moral criticism;defining ethical criticism as an open dialogic criticism; and predicting the possibledirection of its development. Liu Xiaofeng is the first Chinese scholar who uses“narrative ethics”. He divided ethics into rational ethics and narrative ethics. WuMaoguo defined “narrative ethics” from theoretical perspective. Narrative ethics inliterary field includes story ethics and narration ethics. Story ethics means on onehand narrative presentation of rational ethics, such as narrative presentation of ethicalthemes corresponding to different eras, on the other hand exploration of ethical possibility that does not exist in reality, or construction of ethical Utopia.“Narrationethics refers to how narrative process, narrative skill, and narrative form worktogether to display ethical meaning, and the relationship between ethicalconsciousness and narrative display, author and reader, author and narrator innarration of novels.”①It is with the common efforts of many scholars, that thetheoretical frame of ethical criticism was constructed, and ethical criticism became acommonly accepted method of literary criticism. If critics want to use ethical criticismcorrectly, they should not only know its development clearly, but also define the termsused in literary criticism definitely.It is very important to distinguish the difference between traditional moralcriticism and ethical criticism. In traditional moral criticism, literary works arecriticized according to the moral principles of the criticizer’s age; while in ethicalcriticism literary works should be put in the ethical environment of the author’s age.Based on this difference, ethical criticism on Victorian female novels follows such apattern, first discussing ethical environment which influenced representative femalewriters, then explaining ethical features of their literary works, finally analyzing theinfluence of ethical environment on female writers’ narrative styles.Emily Bront was a female writer with forward looking thought. In her age,ecological problems didn’t attract people’s attention. But Emily’s traumaticexperience endowed her love to nature, and the influence from Romantic poets alsodeepened her understanding of nature. In Wuthering Heights, Emily expressed herthought on ecological problems. In her novel, the relationship between human andnature is neither the relationship between dominator and subordinator, nor therelationship between master and slave. On the contrary, nature is a powerful mother,which provides strength to the weaker to fight against the exploiter. Therefore, in hernovel, nature and civilization achieve harmonization after conflict, and people lost incivilization return to their true self. That is to say, Emily’s potential ecological ethicconsciousness included natural ecology on relationship between human and nature,social ecology on relationship between human beings, and spiritual ecology on relationship between human and self. In her novel, she discussed how to harmonizethe relationship between human and nature, human and self, and between humanbeings, when the development of civilization began to endanger nature. Framenarrative with a male as narrator on the first narrative level helped her realizeauthenticity of narration, and the novel’s mysterious form also emphasized the themeof ecological ethics. These helped her narration maximize male’s narrative authority.As a female in19th century, George Eliot had very untraditional experience. Herfamily, love, and career experience all influenced her ethics. Critics generally divideher creations into early and later periods. Her creations in the two periods differ notonly in content, but also in ethic purposes and narrative ethics. In her early creation,Eliot expressed her sentimental attachment to the ethics in passing pastoral period. Atthe same time of emphasizing rural “community” as source of sense of belonging, shealso praised the love among family members. While in her later creation, sheexpressed her ethical meditation on industrial society. In social ethics, she emphasizedresponsibility of individual for society. In family ethics, she regarded family as theproper field for female to exert her influence. She proposed female’s moral perfection,and advised female to pass her influence from family to society. In her later creation,her real female identity hided under a male pen name was revealed. Therefore herthird person omniscient narration changed from obvious author interference intoemploying of intertext, which facilitated her expression of ethical purpose.Mrs. Gaskell faced the readers with her real female identity, which means shewas a novelist with female characteristics. She had good educational background,sincere religious belief and happy marriage life, which enabled her acceptance of herfemale identity. Her novels could be divided into three types of social problem novels,county life novels, and historical novels. In these novels, Mrs. Gaskell expressed thesame ethic purpose, that is to say, different social classes could get rid of the influenceof their social position, and follow the principle of altruism, so that the whole societycould transform from following class ethics to following common ethics, and aharmonious society could be constructed. In her social problem novel Mary Barton,the assassination of young Carson becomes a turning point of the ethical reconciliation between the capitalist class and the working class. In her country lifenovel Cranford, Matty realizes her ethical transgression as a representative of thenoble class. And in her historical novel Sylvia’s Lovers, the moral virtue of love andtolerance becomes the common ethics because of their function of correcting theweakness in human nature. Representatives of the three types of novels in time orderjust reflected the maturation of her ethics. Mrs. Gaskell’s narrative ethics alsoreflected her female characteristics. In Cranford, she employed female Utopiannarration to express her real ethical purpose, which emphasized the meaning of femalemoral virtues of love and tolerance for construction of a society in which male andfemale in a harmonious relationship, so that her ethical purpose could be bestaccepted by the male-dominated society.After analyzing the characteristics of each representative Victorian femalenovelist, we can conclude the common feature of these female novelists from theperspective of ethical criticism. In content of their works, at the same time ofproviding solutions for social problems, they also paid attention to the subordinatingposition of female in the society. But they didn’t ask for rights which could not berealized in current society, such as equal political right. They didn’t regard male andfemale as opposite either. On the contrary, they tried to realize the harmonizationbetween male and female. In writing style, faced with the suppression of male culture,they tried to enable their ethical purpose best accepted in a male-dominated societyby employing proper narrative methods.