The Dark Side Of Utopia

British contemporary novelist A.S.Byatt pays great attention to the social reality,for she has mentioned concerns on social problems in interviews for several times.Byatt directly proclaims the utopian society is doomed to fail,and her works often involve “the dark side of utopia.” It is clearly represented in the masterpiece,Possession: A Romance,which has won the Booker Prize,the highest literary award in British culture in 1990.In this work typical of realistic and postmodern style,Byatt manifests the contemporary British dystopian society by displaying social interactions and manners of characters in the novel,connoting her profound reflection on the alienation of British society and alert to the whole human beings.With the auxiliary of the dystopian theory of British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman,this thesis is intended to conduct a comparative study from three dimensions of the social class nature of figures in the novel,ethics of material consumption and decline of spiritual culture,exploring the social mechanism that leads efforts of people at bottom to come to nothing and spiritual civilization of which members in the middle-upper class is devoid in the condition of highly developed material civilization,so as to reveal Byatt's dystopian thought.The main body of the thesis is composed of three chapters.According to the viewpoint of social hierarchical order from “gardeners' utopia,” the first chapter expounds the rigidification of British social strata,analyzing social contradictions reflected in aspects of the family origin,education background,habits and manners of figures,implying lowly people are still impossible to get rid of the latent hierarchical solidification in the contemporary society.Then,the second chapter focuses on the consuming activity of characters in the novel.From the perspective of“hunters' utopia,” the chapter dwells on identities of consumers and the “new poor”corresponding to different social strata,as well as the gap between them,demonstrating that people from the lower class are not only confronted with the social oppression,but caught in the struggle with their rapacious desires.The last chapter expounds different strategies intellectuals from different social classes draw upon when confronted with the culture decline and struggle on the attribution of power of discourse,according to the prevailing illness of “nostalgia” in “retrotopia” in the contemporary society.Conclusion extrapolates lowly people at the bottom is difficult to shake off the bondage of social stratum and identity labels of individuals under strictly social hierarchy mechanism,while members from the middle-upper class not only oppress those in the lowly class in realms of material consumption and spiritual culture,but trap themselves into the desperate situation of carnival.Through the in-depth discussion and reflection on the state of existence and value of human beings,consumptive ethics and morality,pursuit and belief of the spiritual culture etc.,the novel reveals the consumption supremacy and the decline of spiritual culture in the contemporary British society,elucidating Byatt's sympathy for people at the bottom and her criticism to the dystopian society,and providing a warning to the trend of material and spiritual civilization for the future Britain.