An Interpretation Of The Ethical Relationships In In Darkling Wood From The Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism

As a contemporary British female writer,Emma Carroll graduated with honor of Bath Spa University's master's degree in Writing for Young People.She became an English teacher in a middle school after graduation.Her job made her take an interest in studying the literary works which the children were fond of.Now Emma has given up her career as a teacher to become a professional writer.Till now,she has created six books and they were well received.In Darkling Wood is her third book,which tells how Alice and her friend save Nell's family crisis and protect the darkling wood from being cut down.In this novel,Emma expressed her yearning for a loving and caring family relationship,the accusation of the cruelty of war and wish for a harmonious relationship between human and nature.Based on the theory of ethical literary criticism,this paper will interpret the work and try to explore the author's ethical inclination and proposition.Based on the ethical literary criticism,this paper mainly analyzes the three kinds of ethical relationships in the novel.They are respectively the relationships between human and human,human and the society,human and nature.In analyzing the relationship between human and human,this thesis takes Alice's and Nell's families as examples.Through the analysis of their family ethical conflicts,this paper reveals the pursuit of a harmonious family relationship of the novel.Concerning the analysis of the relationship between human and the society,the paper mainly interprets the relationships between the war and the society,women and the society,and the personal initiation and the society.This paper thinks the novel In Darkling Wood,reveals Emma's great hatred to the cruelty of war,her concern for the female group and her great concern about the children initiation and education.As for the relationship between human and nature,the paper firstly analyzes the Sphinx Factor deep hidden in the nature of human beings.It contains both the human factors as well as the beast factors.Human factors are controlled by reason while the beast factors are controlled by animal instinct.What we should do is to learn to harness our primitive desire and regulate ourselves with ethical standards to act rationally.Besides,the development of technology is a double-edged sword: on the one hand,it has greatly improved our living standards,but on the other hand,it also has brought great traumas to nature.The relationship of human beings and nature shares the double feature of unity and opposites,how to control our animal instinct and preserve our nature is a main issue.This paper analyzes the ethical relationships in the novel,through analyzing the human – human relationship,the human – society relationship and the human – nature relationship,the author of the paper believes that good relationships are important to everyone,by analyzing the human – human relationship,the human – society relationship and the human – nature relationship,we can have a better understanding about ourselves and make ourselves more accustomed to the interpersonal relationships,the society and effective in preserving our nature.