Stigmatized Illness In Ian Mcewan’s Saturday And Enduring Love

Ian McEwan(1948—)is a productive and versatile writer.As one of Britain’s most successful living authors,he shows particular concerns for the marginalized in his later literary creation.In two of his novels Enduring Love(1997),Saturday(2005),there is a strong emphasis on social problems,setting characters in deliberately conceived situations where they are compelled to struggle their way through the social bias,dealing with the stigma of illness.Modern medical science continues to decipher the body code,but the public still hold the deep-rooted bias against the diseased.In human culture,the concept of illness has never been a simple physiological phenomenon,but deeply impinged with metaphoric meanings,with patients eventually been affected by stigmatized illness.Illness implies more than physical or mental weakness,trouble and failure.For the patients who live in the shadow of incurable disease or mental disorder,whenever their behaviors show signs of deviation from social norms,they would be viewed in the light of discredit,disgrace,and even taint.Wrapping illness in metaphors leads to stigmatization,adds to the torture of patients and prohibits them from seeking proper treatment,which further leads to the problem of social exclusion.The main purpose of this thesis is to probe the root causes of the social exclusion against the diseased,namely Baxter in Saturday,and Jed Parry in Enduring Love,the former suffering from the Huntington’s disease and the latter affected by de Clerambault’s syndrome,hoping to reveal the negative metaphors embedded in the cultural implications of illness and the impact of stigmatized illness on their lives.The three chapters of the main body will proceed from the aspects of socio-psychology,aesthetics and morality.The analysis of each chapter is carried out through three perspectives: doctors,common people and the diseased.The first chapter reveals the socio-psychological perception of illness.The two patients Baxter and Parry become “others” because they do not meet the “social norms”,and the bonds between them and the society are broken by the stigma of illness,resulting in stronger senses of isolation and helplessness.The second chapter focuses on the aesthetic interpretation of illness.The stigma of illness poses a question about the value of the patients’ existence,which leads to injustice for them.The third chapter elucidates the moral judgment of illness,analyzing the causes of Perowne and Joe’s exclusion of Baxter and Parry from the perspective of morality.Based on the exploration of what leads to stigmatized illness,each chapter concludes with possible countermeasures to tackle social exclusion.The last part brings the whole thesis to the conclusion,summarizing the root causes of metaphorization,stigmatization and moralization of illness,highlighting the existence of social exclusion.In this way,readers can get a better understanding of McEwan’s novels and the difficult situations of the diseased so as to promote social inclusion.