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While among works by Dreiser, the works finished in the early-to-mid times mainly depicted the protagonists full of material desire and lust under the consumption society, such as Sister Carrie and Clyde, The Bulwark was the only novel focusing on traditional family. After the publication of The Bulwark, many critics criticized that The Bulwark described less details, and in terms of ideology, it is less progressive than the previous Sister Carrie and The American Tragedy. The writer is of the opinion that it is just Dreiser’s reflection on the different aspects of realistic society. The previous works focused on the individuals under the consumption society, while The Bulwark focused on family. It had detailed description on family, and reflected the social problems through family problems with the same profound thoughts. Moreover, among the works by Dreiser during the early-to-mid times, the totally tragic fate of the protagonists under the control of material desire can be seen. However, in The Bulwark, Dreiser for the first time completely shaped a heroine Solon who kept herself in society full of material desire. Although Solon as the fortress collapsed finally, we can see the praise and affirmation to Solon from Dreiser’s description. This is what Dreiser wants to alert common people by tragedy how to deal with family ethical relationship.

The reason why many writers are willing to explore the subject of family ethic is that, among all social relations established by human beings, “family” is the fundamental social unit to constitute the society, and the foundation of human civilization, is also the most basic organization form relied on by the individual survival and development, “family” also contains ethical and moral entities of people within their emotional life and family life. In the concrete form of social development conditions, all the social forces’ conflicts and battles mainly focus on the family, and the social nature is reflected by the ethical relations among the family members who are with closest relations in the human social relations. Therefore the writers are willing to describe their personal value judgments and ethics orientations in their works within the scope of the specific social and historical background, and thereby to reflect the nature of social problems.

Hegel explained the basic meaning of the concept of “family”. From his view, “family” is set up by the following three aspects: 1) marriage, that is, a form adopted in the direct phase under the concept of “family”; 2) property and land of family, namely external form, as well as the care of the property; 3) children’s education and family disintegration. From the above explanation, “family” is a community of marriage, property and children’s education.
1.1 Happy Marriage with Love
Hegel pointed that, marriage is an ethical love with the meaning of law, which therefore can eliminate all the fleeting, capricious and crude subjective factors in love. (177) That is to say, the essence of marriage is ethical relationship. In the family ethics, the basic ethical relationship is couple ethics. Equality, respect, love, tolerance, etc. between husband and wife will bring in the happiness, satisfactory, harmonious of the family. If husband and wife stick to ethics to each other, the family life is with