| The Family depicts the life of an old feudal family with four generations living together during the changing period in history, the conflict between the demand coming from the historical development and the irrealizable of that demand in reality usually leads to tragic endings. An extremely important transitional period came around before and after the May Fourth Movement, the vehement anti-tradition movement also leads to the fierce opposition to filial piety. However, in real life, on the one hand, Feudalism filial duty had already come to a dead end with the uncompromisable contradiction between the individual emancipation and the awareness of the freedom and equality advocated during the May Fourth Movement and it, on the other hand, the existence of the filial duty was also of rationality as the natural being of the human relations and the natural affection concerned in the humanist aspect. Ba Jin made a demonstration of the cultural conflict widespread in Chinese society caused by the investigation of the western culture in the 1920s by using the historical and cultural image "family" as an epitome from the threatened family--Torrent, the family has become the deepest potential resource for the author's creativity. Both the spitted family -- The Garden of Repose and the shattering family--Cold Nights have a hidden family complex. Ba Jin promoted the contradiction and conflict of people to contradiction and conflict of culture. This contradiction and conflict cannot be mitigated by blood relationship, but they have already infiltrated into people's character, emotion and mind, and individuals have merged into human social and historical cultural tide. Rationally, Ba Jin broke up from feudal family for a long time, but mentally, he couldn't get rid of family bound. We can see, from the inner part of Ba Jin's heart, family emotion was the most sensitive complex, he was trying to get rid of this emotion, but failed. Just for this reason, he cursed it by over drastic words, which showed his anxiety. This complicated contradict emotion brought him pain, but also gave him work special charm.The novel The Family not only fully shows the mental domination of feudal parents towards the family members, but also reveals from a deeper level of at the aspect cultural sense of the cultural roots to maintain feudal filiality. The May Fourth Movement Writers try hard to overthrow the traditional view of human study that advocates'self-restraining',and further turn their criticize to feudal family culture. The fatal shortcoming of feudal family culture is parent autocracy which seemed to pay attention to natural affection on the surface but rather cruel and deceptive. Due to the needs of this cultural criticize, the May Fourth Movement Writers regarded father as the representative of feudal patriarchic ideologies and emphasized the conflict between autocratic father and daughter who dreamed freedom to reveal the coldness and imperiousness of the father. From then on, the New Culture Movement began a new writing tendency- to disparage father. Most of the new literature writers subverted patriarchy from the role of"son"and expressed negative value. They showed a totally new topic through the stories between father and son. In the novel, the description towards the father in Gaogongguan-Grandpa Gao was retroversion. There was no direct description of his experience when he was young. When the writer wrote about him, he was already the most important person in the family and a symbol of power. As a result, this role was naturally put into the position of being criticized. The writer tried hard to shape him as a obnoxious autocratic family tyrant who stood for the typical evil of the whole feudal class. The person who advocated Westernization Theory felt deeply that China fell behind the western countries and thus be hit. So they wanted to establish new and throw the old, and completely denied tradition. They summoned the Chinese to study hard and learn the advanced western knowledge. There is no doubt that this was a strong nationalistic emotion. But they used the standard of western civilization to evaluate Chinese civilization, and gave a over-lowering evaluation of the importance of Chinese culture. Because of restriction of language environment during that period, the word tradition was always regarded as the synonym of the words such as"deadweight"and"resistance". And the word became a superfluous that went out of style with the world. But in fact, this is not the truth of tradition."Tradition"is a complex and mixed value system that are composed of different aspects. There are not only easily changed and changeable components, but also components that need no change, especially the essence part of values and moral concepts. These ingredients had nearly formed ethnic collective unconsciousness through many times'precipitation, and even became a symbol of ethical character and ethos. Therefore, it could not completely break from feudal tradition ( the death of Mingfeng )although accepting new ideas, let alone old master Gao? So, the idea of feudal autocracy, which is ethical, traditional and unconscious, should only change gradually, but not suddenly, and can not.Grandpa Gao is always evaluated the behalf of feudalism defender, who is imperious and obsolete, fierce and cruel. In the novel, there are three spectacles directly descript Grandpa Gao. First is Blaming Juehui, Grandpa Gao blamed Juehui and let him stay at home, in the view of motivation theory, this matter showed Grandpa Gao's human instinctive behavior. The May Fourth Movement is one shaking off the old and reforming movement of people's consciousness. But Grandpa Gao didn't know the meaning of the movement, he just knew he couldn't do illegal things, so he thought that the government would use force towards the people who joined the movement, and if Juehui took part in it, he might be killed. So Grandpa Gao didn't let Juehui go outside, which showed his love to his son. Second, from Ethics view, the part Happy New Year Meal, showed the thought of Grandpa Gao that he just wanted to keep happy life of his big family for a long time, we can see it from his satisfy smile when he knew his dream come true in this part. He got the happiness of four generations living under one roof after hardships and painstaking, he did not permit anyone to destroy it. Third, in the aspect of artistic reality"last kind-hearted", as a representative man of feudatories governing class, old master Gao, we can get a conclusion that figures under Ba Jin'pen are from life instead of books. The reality of art should be in keeping with the life, there is no artistic reality without life. Germanic poet German poet Goethe had said that all declining generations are subjective, and all developing generations are objective. So we should push over all the non-correct words that are forced to old master Gao's work and give history its true facts. |
PDF Full Text Request