On The Ethical Thought Of Mrs. Gaskell's Novels

All her life Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) produced a great amount of works including 6 long novels, 1 biography and more than 30 short stories, which varies in all kinds of themes. The preface mainly discusses present studies about Elizabeth Gaskell in China and other countries. In China there is nothing but several essays and two theses for Master degree about Mrs Gaskell .To the contrary, it is in the foreign country especially in British that the research about Mrs Gaskell gradually has become hot since 1960. Hence, many monographs about the themes of her works have been produced. Her novels range over a wide field, so it is difficult to comment on them comprehensively. From a new point of view, this paper believes that goodness is the core of the ethical thought of her novels and the theme about "love" goes through all the novels, analyzing the relationship between the necessary goodness and the fortuitous moral evil and the reason why the authoress wrote in this way. The paper also criticizes some ethical thought from the novels, hoping to bring something new to the Mrs Gaskell studies.The first chapter mainly talks about charity and love in Mrs Gaskell's novels. The authoress shows us an ethic picture about love from the love of wives and husbands, of parents and children, of the lovers, of the extended family members to the humanity of all the people are sisters and brothers. Love is the ethical theme of her novels. Observing the harm to the human nature from egocentric morality of the capitalism, the authoress tried to find a solution from the Bible to oppose the pecuniary relationship in the capitalistic society through the love among the people. At the same time it is believed that it is unrealizable ideal that using humanism advocated by the Christian to solve the class conflict.The second chapter talks about the dialectic relationship between the goodness and moral evil. Mrs Gaskell didn't believe the theory of Christian original sin, but...