The Crisis And Rethink Of Contemporary Family Ethics In Shepard's Family Trilogy

Sam Shepard is one of the most influential playwrights in the United States.He became famous in the "Off-Off-Broadway" in the 1960 s and broke the long tradition of family drama's in the United States with the "family trilogy." For Sam,the ideal family relationship should be warm,and the relationship between family members should be loved by each other,but he felt from his own growth and marital experience that the real family presents a kind of confusion and division,family ethics have been severely damaged,and family members often have misplaced and lost or even exchanged their identities.Thus,he tried to reflect on the current family ethics through the “family trilogy” and expected that family life could bring warmth and happiness to every family member.Shepard put to use a new writing method to try to peel off the shells and expose the essence of things.In the “family trilogy”,the characters pursue their own illusions and return to where they first fled,while facing the loneliness and dissoluteness of the family.Shepard spared no effort to criticize the American society,including the aversion to the social ethos of vanity and the condemnation of the authority to control people's spirit.In such a social environment,there are many internal crisis in the family.In the family trilogy,The Curse of the Starving Class has shown us the loss of parenthood,which has led to the children's inability to shake off the inheritance of the family and continue to struggle in the pit of pain;the father and son in Buried Child the misplaced family relationship gradually deteriorated;the division of the identity of the True West brothers demonstrated the division and irreconcilability of dreams and reality.The conflict between the complex emotions and identities of these characters is a perspective of Shepard's examination of the entire contemporary family in the United States,thus reflecting the continuous elimination of traditional ethics in American society and the crisis of popular belief.Further,Marcuse's one-dimensional human critical theory and Baudrillard's consumer society theory and Christopher Lasch's narcissism theory are used to interpret the causes of crisis in family ethics.In the advanced developed capitalist society,the great prosperity of the material economy has also caused one-dimensional human and people's spiritual life to be suppressed.The popularization of consumerism makes it possible for people to indulge in the material and to extricate themselves,further extinguishing the good character of the human body.Individualism has long played a positive role in personal development.However,it began to developed into narcissism,with the advocacy of personal supremacy,more and more families are beginning to split.These have been attracted the attention of Sam Shepard.The playwright is showing us a picture of family ethics life,meanwhile,calling for the reconstruction of family ethics,and expecting a harmonious family life.