Identity Differences And Ethical Tragedies

William Somerset Maugham(1874-1965),who had written quite a lot of works in his life,is a famous novelist and playwright in Britain.He has many masterpieces,including novels such as The Moon and Six Pence,The Razor's Edge;short story collections such as The Trembling of A Leaf and Ah King;dramatic scripts such as The Circle,Our Betters and so on.In general,the research of Maugham and his works at home and abroad mainly focuses on his novels,especially the full-length novels,and among which the most concerned are The Moon and Six Pence,The Razor's Edge,Of Human Bondage and The Painted Veil.In fact,however,Maugham has composed ten novels in his entire life,and apart from the novels mentioned above,little critic attention has been paid to the rest.The novel this thesis intends to discuss,Mrs.Craddock,is one of them.It is noted that maybe it is the attention paid to his important works that causes the neglect of his other works.Mrs.Craddock is one of Maugham's earliest works,and when it's published,the literary modernism was at its sunrise.On the setting of this times,Maugham still persisted on his own view of creation.Inheriting the tradition of realism,Maugham applied the realistic technique to the creation of Mrs.Craddock,so as to making it a"social custom painting" of a corner of the British in the end of the 19th century.In addition,the two themes,"love and marriage" and "spiritual exploration",have already appeared in this work,which becomes the key themes of Maugham's whole creative career.This novel is set in England in the late 19th century and tells the tragedy of love and marriage between the two young people,Bertha Lay and Edward Craddock,who were from different social classes.This thesis studies the novel mainly from the viewpoint of marriage ethics,and comprehensively applies various critical methods such as ethical literary criticism,close reading,gender criticism,social-historical criticism,etc.After analyzing the text carefully,the author of this thesis finds out that Bertha's ethical status is different from Edward's before and after their marriage,and their self-identifications and social acceptance are totally different.More importantly,the gap between their identities puts them in three ethical dilemmas:firstly,their class origins and thoughts as well as behaviors are radically multifarious;secondly,their lack of self-identity often leads to conflicts between them,and their lack of social identity leads to various contradictions.To solve these ethical dilemmas.Bertha and Edward both made corresponding ethical choices:Edward chose love between love and class and social ambition between social ambition and family responsibility;on the meanwhile,Bertha chose love between love and social conventions,and carried out three escapes and regressions,which,as a whole,is the storyline of this novel.Ultimately,different choices of the two main characters lead directly or indirectly to the tragedy in the novel.Their ethical tragedies are not only reflected at the marriage level,but also embodied in the level of personal spiritual pursuit.Afterwards,the novel's ethical value can be summarized into two points:love and responsibility are equally important in a marriage relationship,and women should step out of their families and embrace life.Moreover,the ethical thoughts of the writer Maugham hidden behind the work can also be extracted as follows:in his opinion,external reality is equal to the inner spirit;on the other hand,his sexual orientation leads to his prejudice against women.In the end,this paper puts the novel Mrs.Craddock into the Maugham whole creation process and finds out that the problem of female departure is the key issue in the intersection of "marriage and love"and "spiritual exploration".It is not only the core problem of this novel,but also one of the most important themes in the Maugham series.Maugham's entire writing career is inseparable from the thinking and discussion of this issue.Therefore,the discussion of the novel is also an indispensable part of the research on Maugham's whole literary creation.