Deconstruction of the Ethics of Blood Kinship from the Pespective of a New Ethic of Family Kinship in Wise Children

Abstract

Angela Carter’s masterpiece, Wise Children, highly controversial as it is, represents a strikingly new perspective on ethics, namely, the family ethic of non-blood kinship. This refers to abandoning the establishment of a family solely on the basis of legitimate blood kinship and constructing a new type of family kinship on the basis of Aristotle’s notion of “friendship”, rather than on the kinship of marriage and blood. It is through the connection between the characters and constructing the plot that Carter deconstructs the hegemony of blood kinship and rejects the blood-kinship family mode. It can be argued that this newly-constructed system of ethics proposes a new way out for modern people suffering from the predicament of loneliness.