On Anomie Of Social Role In Wells’s Tono-bungay

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) is one of the most outstanding realistic novelists inEdwardian period. Tono-Bungay, published in1909, is generally regarded as his best socialnovel. The novel has narrated the rise and fall of a fake medicine “Tono-Bungay”, whichdepicts the luxury material and empty spiritual life of the emerging bourgeois in latenineteenth century, embodying the materialistic feature of England under the influence ofcapitalistic commodity economy. In recent years, Tono-Bungay has gotten more and moreattention from domestic critics, but few of them have studied the characters of the novel fromthe perspective of social role.Structural role theory, one of the genres of role theory, holds the view that “role” meanshuman society’s expectation and rule to the pattern of role behavior, namely the roleexpectation and the role norm. Owing to the constant development and change of society,people experience all kinds of obstacles and problems in the process of their role playing,which lead to the “anomie” of social role. Anomie is a term proposed by French sociologistDurkheim to describe the social phenomenon that is inconsistent with social ethic. In thecourse of social transformation, the ethic used to restrain individual behavior is no longervalid just because of the broken social value system. Therefore, people’s behavior isincompatible with the role expectation and the role norm when they play their rolesrespectively. All these result in the anomie of social role eventually. With the combination ofrole theory and the concept of anomie to interpret literary work Tono-Bungay, we can analyzethe interactions between characters’ behaviors in the novel and historical context of the novelin transition more thoroughly.By using anomie as a key word, this thesis aims to explore the anomic behaviors ofthree different characters. They represent different social roles, the intellectual, the housewifeand the businessperson of the transitional England. So the social condition of that time canfurther be sketched out. In the introduction, a literature review of Wells and Tono-Bungay aswell as the background of applied theory are given. The thesis firstly probes into theintellectual’s betrayal of social responsibility. George was once an intellectual with definiteideal and aspiration, but later gave in to the money-oriented society. His knowledge evolves into the means for his private gain instead of being an advantage to change himself andsociety. Secondly, the housewife’s distortion of marriage value is illustrated. The snobbishwoman, Marion, considers the material condition as her only standard of choosing a spouse.When she becomes a housewife, she is immersed in the endless material enjoyment broughtby the marriage but lacks the sense of family responsibility. Undoubtedly, as for Marion,family is more a place to satisfy her vanity than a harbor to provide reciprocal care. Thirdly,the businessperson’s disregard of commercial morality is elaborated. Edward, a pharmacist, isblinded by money so that he ignores the norms of commercial morality which should beabided by businessperson. He achieves his business empire through cheating and speculation.And the commercial morality embodied in him reflects the condition of entire social moralityin the capitalistic commodity economy society. At last, this thesis believes that there is anethical and material relation between the anomie of various social roles represented bycharacters in Tono-Bungay and English social reality then. Through analyzing such kind ofrelation, the novel not only expresses Wells’s deep reflection to spiritual dilemma and moralcrisis of the lower middle class with specific roles in the transitional period, but also revealsthe profound influence of ethic on the development of individual and society.