The Subversion And Reconstruction Of English Middle-class Family Novel In The Accidental

The family as a motif has long been present in the literary tradition.As the family is seen as the society in microcosm,the family novel,a subgenre of the novel depicting the everyday life of families,often reflects writers’ deep concern of reality.Ali Smith,one of the most important and promising writers of Great Britain,also addresses social issues through the portrayal of family life.Mostly set in middle-class families,her novels are preoccupied with individual living conditions in the postmodern milieu of life,often with a strong experimental nature.Her most well-known novel,The Accidental,is a case in point.On the one hand,The Accidental subverts the ideal of “Home,Sweet Home”,the prime theme of middle-class family novels represented by the Victorian family novel.The Smarts family in The Accidental appears to depart from the Victorian middle-class family which is characterized by male dominance,the caring “Angel in the House”,and convivial domesticity.The differences mainly reflect in the weakening of male authority,the transformation of the female role from the “Angel in the House” to a destructive yet redemptive family invader,and the divergent conjugal relationship and domesticity under strain.On the other hand,through experimental wordplays such as “democracy of voices”,the metalepsis narration,fragmented language,allusions and narrative red herrings,Smith also deconstructs the narrative paradigm of the English middle-class family novel which is characterized by realistic depiction,linear narrative structure,and logical endings.In this sense,Smith lays bare the fictionality of the story,and the metafictional nature of the novel is also made clear.By exploring factors accounting for the evolution of middle-class family ethics and examining the sociological significance of The Accidental,the present author concludes that compared with the Victorian middle-class family,the postmodern family is confronted with a greater number of external threats along more permeable frontiers.Through the plot of the intrusion of the stranger,the embodiment of indeterminacy,and experimental wordplays of metafiction,Ali Smith blurs the boundary between fictionality and reality,reveals the chaotic and fragmented status quo of the postmodern family,and also provides a new vision for solving the crisis of the postmodern family and society as a whole,that is the erasure of neat borderlines separating people from the other,and coexistence of simultaneous identities within the self.In combination with metafiction theories and historical records circling English middle-class family and society,this thesis aims to interpret the bicentenary evolution of interpersonal relationships in English middle-class families from the Victorian age to the twenty-first century,and Smith’s humanistic concerns about the family crisis in the postmodern context.