A Naturalistic Study Of Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth And Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton is one of the towering figures in the American literary world at the beginning of the 20th century. In her long career, which stretched about sixty years, Wharton had published seventeen novels, seven novelettes, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous miscellaneous works in which she portrayed a fascinating picture of the American life. As the author of numerous best-selling award-winning works, Wharton has inspired many other authors in terms of novels, short stories, poems, bibliography and traveling and nonfiction essays. Her creation is still of importance for what it reveals about a particular time and place in American culture.Though not generally regarded as a naturalistic novelist, Wharton frequently explores the collision between love and authority, the confrontation between forbidden conventions and personal fulfillment, as well as the doomed struggles under a restrictive and isolated environment in her works. In fact, the central motif of entrapped and isolated individuals and emotions is so remarkably intermingled with the course of Wharton's literary career that she often devotes her own life experience into her novels.This thesis tries to make a rudimentary study on the naturalism reflected in the protagonists of The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome, two of Wharton's highly acclaimed masterpieces. Neither Lily in The House of Mirth nor Ethan in Ethan Frome could pull themselves out of the realm of the ruthless natural and social environment, hereditary and uncontrolled force of fate and chance. This thesis analyzes the factors of naturalism in the two representing novels and by doing so, it means to get a better knowledge of Wharton's understanding of the relationship between the universe and the individual, thus making some contribution to the study of Wharton in China.