A Study On Toni Morrison's God Help The Child From The Perspective Of Ethical Literary Criticism

God Help the Child is the last novel written by Toni Morrison,an African American woman writer who has won Nobel Prize for literature as well as worldwide reputation.The novel revolves around the black girl Bride's experiences and also portrays many characters with different generations,genders,and social classes.Morrison narrates the predicaments encountered by different communities of people in contemporary American society,and then explores solutions to these predicaments.Morrison and her works have attracted the attention of the scholars at home and abroad.However,there are only a small number of academic articles on God Help the Child,and these articles are mainly from perspectives of trauma theory,narrative techniques,and the image of a black woman.This thesis applies theories of ethical literary criticism to analyze the novel from the characters' ethical predicaments,ethical selections,and ethical redemption.Based on it,the thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One studies ethical predicaments encountered by different communities.First,this chapter takes several child sexual abuse events as examples,revealing that children are under the predicament of child abuse.Second,it points out that colorism impacts black people of different generations,and states that colorism is a form of racial discrimination.Thirdly,this chapter analyzes the impact of materialism on urbanites,and points out that they are trapped in ethical predicaments of spiritual emptiness and distorted interpersonal relationships.Chapter Two analyzes the characters' growth in ethical selections.By making contradictory ethical selections,the characters have different consequences.Some of the abused children choose to evade anything that might remind them of traumatic memories.The others recover from communication,which can help both listeners and speakers.Facing colorism,some black people regard skin color as the sole criterion to assess a person,while the others ignore skin color and yearn for self-fulfillment.Deluded by materialism,urbanites linger between irrational enjoyments and rational self-restraint.Those who preserve rationality return to moral principles and get rid of predicaments successfully.Chapter Three probes into the hero and the heroine's ways of ethical redemption.The hero Booker ascertains the truth of racial problems by learning and thinking,and hisexperiences show that pursuing wisdom is an important way to achieve sublimation of self.Through the construction and reconstruction of self,the heroine Bride realizes career success and rebuilds dignity and moral excellence.Conclusion focuses on the ethical and moral values of the novel.The novel guides its readers and researchers to pay attention to social problems in reality,stresses the importance of moral principles,and points out ways of redemption for people in predicaments.