Opposition And Transcendence

This thesis focuses on the intense love and hatred in Wharton's short novel Summer. Most critics tend to take it as a bildungsroman about female sexual initiation; some point out the Naturalistic color in the novel, holding it to be a tragedy about woman's vain resistance against fate. What I expect to do in this thesis is to challenge those opinions by looking into Wharton's rendering of the heroine's emotional journey, to demonstrate her maturation by analyzing the opposition and transcendence of her intense love and hatred.The main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter I first makes a clarification that the term"opposition"employed in this thesis is not the theoretical term"binary opposition"in Western literary criticism; it refers to a habitual mind of people from of old. Then, aiming to illustrate the extremity of Charity's emotions, the chapter studies two categories of oppositions that represent her intense love and hatred. Chapter II attempts to dig out the scourge of the girl's extremely intense emotion. Social and psychological factors are explored to explain this emotional intensity and imbalance. The last one is devoted to her transcendence of the intense love and hatred. We will be able to find that stepping out of the self-centered consciousness and into expected motherhood allows Charity a better self-awareness and a transcendence of the extreme emotion. It is the awakening of the sense of responsibility and the reception of others that contribute to Charity's change and maturation. There is a reasonable prospect of the final balance of her intense emotions as the novel closes by the coming of autumn—a season of mellowness and harvest.