A Study On Theme Of Morbid Personalities In Point Counter Point

Aldous Huxley(1894-1963)was a well-known British realistic writer in the 20th century.As one of Huxley’s critical masterpieces,Point Counter Point1 was created on the basis of Huxley’s own life experiences in Britain,and reflected people’s living environment and spiritual outlook during the transition of the two world wars.After the First World War,British society fell into the midst of multiple social crises,including its economic depression,political turmoil and uncontrollable colonies.At the same time,the theme of morbid personality appeared in many literature works.Chinese and foreign scholars have mainly studied Point Counter Point from the perspective of creating technique,while few scholars have laid emphasis on its theme of personality crisis.Personality mainly refers to the unique and stable way of thinking and behavior..Ultimate threats towards individual safety leads to morbid personality.Fritz Riemann2,a German psychoanalyst,had divided morbid personalities into different types,including depressive personality3,disintegrated personality4 and obsessive-coFpulsive personality5,aud had deeply explored the social and cultural factors of these personalities.Based on Riemann’s theories of morbid personality and the deepening historical background of London’s political and economic crisis during the transition of the two world wars,this paper focused on the morbid personalities of three groups of characters,including Elinor and other people in Point Counter Point,and it was designed to explore the relationship among these characters’morbid personalities,Huxley’s creative psychology and the social context of the time.This paper mainly focused on three kinds of characters represented as Elinor,Edward,Lucy and other people.It analyzed their corresponding depressive personality,disintegrated personality and obsessive-compulsive personality mainly from the perspective of social psychology.Based on those analyses,this thesis was developed with the three following specific questions.What were the specific manifestations of the morbid personalities of these characters?What were the connections between their morbid personalities and the social realities at that time?What did the author want to express by designing tragic stories of these characters?The first chapter discussed the depressive personalities of Elinor and Marjorie.Such people pursued love blindly.They had the fear of being themselves and expressing their inside feelings.Complete cowardice and undue obedience were their characteristics.Elinor,a housewife,was too coward.She was eager for her husband’s understanding and caring,but what she did was just letting him indulge in his negative escape.Eventually,she betrayed the marriage.Marjorie,a saleswoman,was too obedient to her lover,Walter who was always absent from home.She betrayed her husband,Carling,chose to elope with Walter and regarded him as her whole life.In the end,she lost herself.The second chapter focused on the disintegrated personalities of Edward and Philippe.Such people were self-closed.They feared of being disturbed and avoided responsibility.Edward,a scientist,avoided any social interactions.Instead of sharing family obligations with his wife,he indulged himself in his hobbies.P.hilippe,a writer,was blindly immersed in the reverie of composing fictions while showed indifference to his wife’s emotional hunger.The third chapter laid its attention to the obsessive-compulsive personalities of Lucy and Illidge.These people held the fear of making a change.In order to suppress their fears,they were paranoid and even unscrupulous.Lucy,an aristocrat,did not hesitate to trifle with her pursuers’ affections to maintain her dominance.Illidge,a civilian,was extremely resentful of social reformers.He even tried to keep the long lost social peace by murdering a political leader.The conclusion part concluded this article.On the one hand,the morbid aspects of British modernization were closely related to belief absences and moral decays.On the other hand,Elinor and those characters’ imbalances between their material life and mental world,and divisions between their sensibilities and senses had a lot to do with the social reality after the First World War.Their dislocation of values and lack of securities had prompted them to become victims of morbid personalities.Huxley expressed his criticism of the British society with his depiction of Elinor’s and other characters’ morbid personality.These people’s tragic endings not only reflected Huxley’s pessimism influenced by his frustrated life experiences,but his concern about the prospects of the people in London at that time.