A Comparative Study Of Medea And Wuthering Heights From The Perspective Of Structural Anthropology

Euripides’ play Medea and Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights are classic Western literary works,and both texts have been fully explained in Chinese and Western academic circles.Based on the previous research results,this paper uses the relevant theories of structural anthropology to interpret and compare.This paper is divided into three parts.The first part analyzes the identity of the two protagonists,and makes a witchcraft interpretation of revenge;the second part aggregates a common myth pattern,and compare the different writing of the two in different time and space backgrounds;The third part restores the binary opposition of "civilization-barbarism" and explores its relationship with gender,space,and power.The first chapter analyzes the text in detail,focusing on the protagonist’s identity and revenge.It can be found that the two revenge protagonists have the same "barbarian" identity,which is incompatible with the civilized society in which they live,and thus faces the dilemma of identity and suspension.Explore the deep-level revenge motives of the two,focusing on explaining the mechanism behind the revenge behavior of "killing" the son with Fraser’s witchcraft theory.The second chapter integrates Levi-Strauss’ mythology theory and Propp’s morphology,and extracts the common narrative mode of the two texts: "Barbarian" faces the crisis of personal emotional and social dual identity failure,and returns from exile.Then launched an action beyond homomorphic revenge.Although they share a common mythological model,they present different writing styles under different social and historical backgrounds.The former is greatly influenced by the ancient Greek patriarchal society and mythology,and more intuitively shows the struggle against civilization and patriarchy;the latter is in the stage of rapid development of capitalism and institutions,and discusses the future direction of civilization.The third chapter,combined with the text,discusses barbarism and civilization as a set of interconnected binary oppositions.Explore this set of binary relationships in relation to gender,space,and power.As far as gender is concerned,there is a clear metaphorical relationship between gender and barbarism and civilization in both texts,with barbarism as masculine and civilization as feminine.This contrasting relationship is closely related to the laws of development of nature and society.In terms of space,the "discipline" of the barbarians in the civilized society and the "anti-discipline" of the barbarian society against the civilized people all play their role through independent spaces.From the perspective of power discourse,the writing of "barbarians" in literary works reflects the "Gaze" of Euro-centrism,and it is the shaping of discourse by power and knowledge.Finally,drawing on the anthropological view of equality and symbiosis,civilizations can only make great progress by respecting differences and being inclusive.