《卖花女》的文学伦理学解读

An Interpretation of Literary Ethics of Pygmalion

萧伯纳的戏剧《卖花女》讲述了卖花女伊莉莎意图通过语音矫正和文法学习成为上层社会优雅小姐的故事,生动地展现了伊莉莎在人生重大变化过程中所经历的人际困境和自我身份的迷失。以文学伦理学批评理论为基础,通过主人公伊莉莎做出身份选择的伦理环境,探讨伊莉莎改变自我的动机以及此后所面临的伦理身份困惑,揭示导致其伦理困境的根本原因。萧伯纳通过讲述伊莉莎的故事,集中展现了当时英国社会个体阶级身份与伦理诉求之间难以调和的矛盾,并对该社会中个体寻求自我实现的可能性寄予关注,从而传递出深刻的伦理意蕴。

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmaliontold a story about Eliza Doolittle,a flower girl who managed to turn herself into an upper - class lady by learning good pronunciation and proper gram-mar,and vividly displayed how she got trapped in ethical predicament and identity crisis in that process. By adopting a theoretical framework of ethical literary criticism,this paper analyzed the ethi-cal environment in which Eliza made her choice of ethical identity,explored Eliza’s motivation to es-tablish a new identity and the ethical identity confusion hereafter faced by her,and revealed the basic reason for her ethical predicament. Through this story,Bernard Shaw revealed the contradictions be-tween individual class identity and ethical complaints in British society at that time which was diffi-cult to reconcile,and paid attention to the possibilities of individual seeking self realization in the so-ciety,thus conveying the profound ethical implications.