康德道德律与美国都市文学《灯夫》的互文解读

美国都市到19世纪中叶已经基本成型。在都市里,经济和社会地位处于弱势的群体的生存状况以及各种社会罪恶、道德滑坡现象引起女性作家的普遍关注,但是不同于当时流行的城市暴露小说,女作家的作品多从家庭和女性视角出发,描绘弱势群体的互助精神,颂扬他们的道德力量,倡导构建和维护都市道德共同体。玛丽亚·卡明斯的《灯夫》通过各种生活情境描写和正面人物的道德抉择,解答并阐释了以康德为代表的启蒙思想家提出的同情心、道德教化、幸福与德性等道德情操命题。

American metropolises reached their modern scales in the 1850s. The existence of the economically and socially underprivileged, all kinds of social evils and moral degeneration in metropolises aroused the concern of the women writers, but unlike the city exposing fiction, the domestic novels of the women writers portrayed the mutual aid among the underprivileged, extolled their moral power and advocated constructing and sustaining a moral community. Maria Cummins＇s The Lamplighter answered and elaborated the moral propositions of sympathy, moral education, and happiness and virtue raised by Kant and other philosophers of Enlightenment by depicting various situations and the moral choices of the heroes.