An Analysis Of Morpho Eugenia From The Perspective Of Posthumanism

The posthumanism has a strong anti-anthropocentrism tendency to re-examine the place of human in the world,to deconstruct human privilege,and especially to blur the boundaries between man and animal,man and machine.The traditional humanism has closed the exploration of human nature on the ontology of consciousness and rationality,and regards human as " the paragon of animals ".Jacques Derrida's theory of animals and posthumanists such as Donna Haraway formed a new discourse on the relationship between man and animal,reinterpreted the humanism's view of animals,broke the binary opposition between the human and animal,and attached imprtance to the key role of the nonhuman in the construction of human subjectivity.A.S.Byatt,the contemporary British writer,whose novella,Morpho Eugenia,fully exemplifies the posthumanism of human-animal integration.The idea that nonhuman species contributes to the construction of human subjectivity described by Byatt in the text coincides with the view of posthumanists.When we reevaluate the novella Morpho Eugenia,which reproduces and criticizes the social life of the 19 th century Victorian era,from the perspective of the posthumanism,we will find it both reproduces and criticizes the concept of anthropocentrism.While revealing the superiority and centrality of human beings towards people in the Victorian era,it also describes the phenomenon that human and animal are not in a binary position.In this "rough gothic fable",Byatt presents us a world in which the boundary between human beings and animals is blurred.In the novel,Human beings and animals are a complete complex.Through analogy and affect,human beings and animals become inseparable.The study of the text that embedded in the novel reveals that the text inherits the metamorphosis myths from ancient Greece and Rome,and the human and animal characters in the story are in a state of free metamorphosis;and the humanity and animality of the characters in the novel can not be separated.Byatt distinguished two positions on how to view the relationship between humans and animals.One is that human is seen as the dominator of all things by means of personification and naming,the other is that human beings have full subjectivity by establishing contact with animals,accepting their own animality,thinking about the meaning of the other.Under the concept of humanism,human beings overwhelm their own interests over other species to construct human rational discourse and to legalize human violence.However,this article holds the view that only by recognizing the animal nature of human beings,and no longer regarding human beings as the center of the universe,can human beings better establish subjectivity.The posthumanism is not a complete subversion of the humanism,but a contemporary enlightenment.From the perspective of posthumanism,the novella Morpho Eugenia presents us not the total negation of the concept of human,but a union of human and non-human.It rewrites the Victorian concept of human,while also provides a real sense of the other for contemporary human beings.Posthumanism forces us to rethink the patterns of human experience that we take for granted,and reintroduce them into the ecological relationships of other organisms,Morpho Eugenia provides us with a way of thinking and a new paradigm for life and thinking for mankind.