| Literature is the study of human being, which develops in step with human's understanding of themselves. From its birth, literature has never stopped thinking about human being's emotional predicament. As important manifestation of sexual relations, love and marriage play an important role in both Chinese and foreign literature, and are two windows through which the authors express and study human nature.Love is one kind of fine emotion between the both sexes since the ancient times, while marriage is the historical product of human society, which is correlated with personal emotion, social responsibility and ethics. Sexual relations are very complex and individual social relationship and they are the point where various values merge in a certain social system. Extramarital affairs are a theme reflecting the"moral ambiguity in life",and as the companion of human marriage system, their existence is connected with certain cultural and realistic factors, raising query about and rebellion against traditional marital ethics and reflecting the complexity of human nature.Human is the combination of natural, social and spiritual attributes. These three aspects relate with each other, forming the systematic organization of human nature. Literary works that explore the human nature can not deviate from the three cardinal principles. Under the influence of traditional Chinese culture and marital ethics, the literary works show little care for human nature in the understanding of extramarital affairs. In the ancient times, fictions about love and marriage, constrained by the time background, were unlikely to break through feudal fence of the clan and male domination ethics. During May Fourth Movement period, fictions about love and extramarital affairs affirmed human's freedom value, opposed the feudal arranged marriage, and manifested the pursuit of human nature, but seen from the general point of view, they are radical in the understanding of human nature. After having experienced a long-term thought imprisonment, the new period fictions follow the call of human nature liberation. As the breakthrough point of thought imprisonment and the growing point of literary cultivation, the fictions about extramarital affairs become the important breach for the exploration of human nature among the contemporary fictions.When we review the fictions of extramarital affairs in the past 20 years, we can find its clear changing path. At the beginning of the new period, the influential fictions in the literary arena such as"Love, Cannot be Forgotten","Eastern Female", chose"extramarital affairs"their theme, which moved a brave step in the exploration of this special human emotion. But for writers just stepped off the dense shadow being suffused with political consciousness and cultural unification, their works were confined to spiritual emotion and ethics, so obviously the fictions bear the characteristics of idealism and the moral sermon. What they cared most is human's social attribute, so they hid human's instinctive desires, this was factually still a kind of fetters of human nature, and the later other works were still more of the human moral self-discipline,but they began to study human nature from the perspective of extramarital affairs. Along the deepening of reform and opening-up, the economic tide has intensely shaken the root of traditional moral values; in the mid and late 1980's the idealistic color in love fictions has been taken away. Zhangjie's"Painful Idealism"had been replaced by Chili's realistic attitude of "No talking about love", marital spirit began to give way to material consideration. Spiritual pursuit had yielded to material consideration; in such a cultural background,"White vortex","Fuxi Fuxi"as the representative of the extramarital affairs novels, concerned and reflected on the form of extra-marital love and value, highlighted and enlarged the natural attributes, and to boldly exposed hidden depths of the dark side of human nature, which had taken a giant step in the understanding of human nature from a multi-dimension perspective. In this process, the writers were not lack of ethics but they begin to avoid subjective query about extramarital affairs from the moral and social perspective. The 1990s is a times with multiple values, impetuosity and strong desires becoming the conspicuous prospect in the present cultural background. In The Young Generation Writers'writing, love and marriage tend to be regarded as entertainment; loyalty in love and marriage become outdated while disloyalty is a common phenomenon in marriage. The writers'narration exhibit moral nihilism and values opposing ethics, flying its own colors in the understanding of human nature; it is also a literary reality in need of dialectical analysis in the complex social and cultural background since the 1990s. When the complexity and depths of human nature were re-examined and explored, the author's writing position was also vanishing gradually, the early ethic standards tend to yield and in the later period even moral nihilism appeared. From some works of excellence we could feel the writers'deep understanding of human nature and the common tendency in their process of writing—the transformation from the early superficial ethic level to the deep psychological level in the understanding of human nature. This transformation was attributed to the change of cultural background and it also reflected the fact that the writers'understanding of human nature is deepening. There was less subjective values evaluation and more objective humanity care in their cognition of extramarital affairs, as for human's natural instinct for being new and different, the writers showed more understanding and tolerance."Love in Jinxiu Valley"by Wang anyi and Fang fang's"Hint"extended the writing to human's in-depth inner world and revealed the loneliness in the depth of human nature through the stories about extramarital affairs;"Love on the Barren Hill"witnessed the human's psychological demand for self-value realization. The Young Generation Writers'fictions about extramarital affairs led the readers to feel puzzlement and helplessness when human spiritual home is lost. The writers in the new times had explored human's in-depth emotion in nature and the spiritual prospect, developed the writing about human nature from a multiple perspective , and also expressed their serious pondering over the social presentation of love and marriage. |
