Abstract

    In Lord of the Flies, William Golding provides an ideal situation for only boys but not girls to free themselves from cultural constraints and return to the natural behavior, resulting in a tragedy. Through analysis of the novel’s background, this paper intends to demonstrate the theme of this novel--human is evil, so as to explain the rationality and importance of the absence of female in Lord of the Flies: a society, with the absence of female and the subsequent distorted humanity, is incomplete and deformative and will die out as time goes on.

Key words: the boys, the absence of female, absence, humanity

摘    要

    在《蝇王》中，威廉•戈尔丁精心挑选了一群男孩作为主角并为他们提供了一个理想的环境使他们能够远离文化的制约，回归天性。本文旨在通过分析小说的创作背景来阐明该小说的“人性本恶”这一主题，以此来解释《蝇王》中女性缺席的合理性及重要性，即女性缺席及随之产生的人性扭曲，使社会不完整，产生混乱，甚至消亡。

关键词：男孩们；女性缺失；缺失；人性

1. Introduction
William Golding is one of the most popular and influential writers of Britain in the 20th century. His first book Lord of the Flies is his most excellent work, which has had a profound impact on the development of both the British and the world literature. Since the European literary circles had set off a boom of studying William Golding in the middle of the 20th century, the concern for Lord of the Flies in the academic circles at home and abroad continued warming. When it entered 1990s, many scholars not only explored the creation principles of this classic but also analyzed its themes. What’s more, during this period, there were many articles focusing on the application of symbolism in Lord of the Flies.Such as Wang Qiaoshan’ s “On the Transformation of the Symbolic Meaning of Fire Imagery in The Lord of the Fly”, which interprets the different meanings of the symbol of fire imagery in different contextual situations to explore the process that the human nature transform from rational state to irrational state. And Shi Weixuan and Su Bo’ s “On the Symbolic Paint in Lord of the Flies” discusses the symbolic meaning of an important image--- Paint/ mask, which symbolizes the general evil in human nature. Scholars take a different approach, such as the humanity theme, the narrative structure and the image of fairy tale, from a different perspective to analyze William Golding’ s Lord of the Flies, reflecting the diversification trend of studying this novel.