A Feminist Ethical Interpretation Of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist

Anne Tyler is one of the best woman novelists in contemporary America, and early in the year 1994, she was nominated as "greatest living American novelist in English" in Sunday Times. The Accidental Tourist is one of Tyler’s most important novels and her first bestselling book, which is considered as her best novel by many critics. It is a literary work writing and reflecting on marriage, love, and male-female relationship. Taylor puts her own female experience in the work to show her concern for women’s survival and mental state in the contemporary ethical environment and the fate of women.The theory of feminist ethics intends to point out the inequity for women in traditional ethics and tries to expose and criticize the gender bias in traditional ethics and then puts forwards a new trend of ethical research. This thesis is an attempt to discuss the feminist ethical appeals of gender equality, ethical free will of self-reliance for their own rights and women’s unique ethical theory that is ethical care of feminism from various sides in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist by applying the theory of feminist ethics, so as to be able to fully understand the author’s deep understanding of women’s ethical demands and living state, and it also expresses the writer’s woman ethical consciousness of pursuing independence and equality as well as the theory of caring ethics of women.By detailed text analysis of The Accidental Tourist from the perspective of feminist ethics and in presentation of the life stories of three main female characters, this thesis first points out the plights as ethical environmental restrict and women’s lacking of ethical identity suffering in the traditional male-centered ethical environment. And then it narrates how the women characters cross the misfortune and pursue happiness through their ethical appeals of pursuing independence and equality. At the end of this thesis, it also emphatically discusses the feminist ethical care, which emphasizes the interpersonal responsibility, emotion, relationship and mutual care, and advocates the harmony between both genders and in family. By applying the feminist ethical theory in Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, this paper further reveals the American women’s life reality and their various appeals in contemporary society, as well as writer’s feminist ethical ideas.