Distortion And Loss Of Love

Henry James (1843-1916) is one of the three realist masters in the late nineteenth centuryand most of his works have aroused the domestic and foreign critics’ attention. They oftendiscuss the moral theme in James’s works. However, the moral and ethical themes in the earlyworks of James’s are relatively ignored in these discussions. The thesis attempts to criticizeJames’s early excellent novella Washington Square from the ethical point of view, exploringthe family relationships in the novel and James’s ethical thinking in his early works.Family relationship, as an important part of ethical criticism, is the interpersonalinteraction or contact among family members, belonging to a kind of social relations. Familyrelationships, based on the subject as standard, are divided into the parents–childrenrelationship, the husband–wife relationship and relationships among other family members.Love is the core principle of dealing with family relationship and the link to maintainmarriage and family. German ethicist Erich Fromm maintains that in the family life loveregisters as parental love, connubial love and sibling love and contains the basic elements,such as, understanding, respect, sense of responsibility and the care. The concept of lovereflects its ethical value.Washington Square tells an upper-middle-class family tragedy in New York in themiddle of the19th century. The thesis analyzes the family relation and tragedy in the novel inthe light of Erich Fromm’s theory of love and tries to expose the underlying reason why thereexists the distortion and alienation of the human nature, decay and landslide of the morality inthe American society of19th century. The thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter one,with the father-daughter relationship and mother-daughter relationship as the starting point,concerns distorted fatherly love through analyzing father’s suppression over the daughter andmisguided motherly love in surrogate mother’s marriage guidance for the daughter, showingthe deviation of parental love. This kind of parental love violates the principle of love andbeloved. Chapter two mainly explores materialized love and deceitful love between loversdue to fiance’s greed as well as his hypocrisy, demonstrating the lack of connubial love. Suchtwo kinds of love deviate from the principle of reciprocal love. Chapter three focuses onselfish love showed by the young brother’s egotism and contradictory love interpreted by sibling’s attitudes toward marriage, pointing out the loss of sibling love, which has deviatedfrom the principle of mutual understanding and support.Through the above analysis, the thesis points out that the distortion and loss of loveresults from the change of the economic structure of the capitalist society as well as varioussocial and cultural factors in the transition period of American society of the19thcentury.James expresses his criticism on the alienation of family relationships in his early workWashington Square around the theme of love and calls for the return of the society with truelove.