清教徒的想象力与1692年塞勒姆巫术恐慌——霍桑的《小布朗先生》

Puritan Imagination and the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Hysteria:Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown”

本文突出“莽林”对塞勒姆清教徒移民后代的宗教想象力的影响,并探讨“莽林”何以在第一代清教徒移民那里等同于“荒野”。“荒野”是他者、匮乏、危险、考验的象征,也是“山巅之城”选定的基址,但在移民后代那里,“荒野”的表达让位于“莽林”,这说明清教徒的宗教想象力发生了变化,即把神秘的他者变成了自我的一个部分,由此巫术的因素就进入了清教徒的宗教想象力。本文分析想象力的性质在塞勒姆清教徒移民后代身上的转化,探讨它与1692年塞勒姆巫术恐慌和巫术审判之间的关系,并把霍桑的小说《小布朗先生》当作塞勒姆清教徒移民后代的巫术化的想象力的一个案例进行文本分析。

Dense forest, or “wilderness”, means different things to the Puritan imagination or sensibility of the early English Puritan immigrants to Salem and their posterity who were born in Salem. To the former, it is “the other”, scarcity, hardship, test, and the right site of “a city upon a hill”, and to the latter, symbol of evils, part of the Puritan self, and dwelling place of devils. It is strange that the early Puritan immigrants use the word “wilderness” to depict this densely forested land. In their imagination, “wilderness” equals to both nothingness and otherness, and their vocation is to overcome the otherness of this land so as to bring something new to its nothingness. The Puritan imagination takes a different road in the second and third generations whose birthplace is this densely forested land. They are not immigrants who bear vivid memories of the city life in the mother land, but children or grandchildren of the immigrants, whose experience is exclusively limited to the medieval village life of Salem. In their eyes, the wilderness is neither nothingness nor otherness, but density, crowdedness, and self ─ they see devils or specters of devils everywhere both in the outer and inner worlds. The Puritan imagination begins to coincide with the voodooistic imagination, as witnesses of the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Hysteria, which is a symbolic accident of the failure of Massachusetts' Calvinist Puritanism, followed by a series of harsh trials and persecutions, acts of purifying the misled Puritan imagination to lead it back to normal or “common sense”.