| Abstract: | Through the depiction of the tragedy of cross-race marriage in South Street, William Gardner Smith reveals the conflicts between marital ethics and ethnic passing in American society, making invectives against the repression and destruction of humanity in racial discrimination and prejudice. The racial complex, negative acculturation and judicial injustice combined together greatly do harm to the legal rights of cross-race marriage and result in the loss of social marital ethics, widening the gap between whites and blacks. The racist situational field leads black and white people into a terrific trap of marital ethics. Any of white people's restriction on or deprivation of blacks' marital freedom is a violation of social ethics. Family members as well as friends' well-meaning interference in cross-race marriage is unfavorable to the people pursuing happy marriages. This novel expands the themes of African American urban naturalistic fiction, blaming the systematic power and situational power, which are caused by white racism and black internalization of racism, for the hindrance, repression and destruction of the marriage based upon true love, and thus highlighting the greatness and limitation of human nature. |
