《七个尖角阁的宅子》与塞勒姆巫术审判——兼谈作为文类的“罗曼司”

The House of the Seven Gables and the Salem Witch Trials——With Reflections on Romance as a Literary Form

《七个尖角阁的宅子》以塞勒姆巫术审判为历史素材。至霍桑的时代,塞勒姆巫术审判已定型为一套叙事话语,作家在再现这段历史时,有意挪用19世纪的阐释机制,其历史叙事折射出这一时代的观念世界。作家的塞勒姆小叙事内嵌于罗曼司的整体结构之中。作为一个文类,罗曼司结构较为松散,表现出多元、异质、杂语的文本特质,具有内在的不稳定性和消解力量。霍桑充分运用罗曼司的文类特质,挑战塞勒姆小叙事隐含的19世纪关于科学/迷信、启蒙/蒙昧和理性/癫狂的一系列预设,同时也以罗曼司对前现代他者的召唤,质疑改革时代的乌托邦主义,这些都体现了作家对时代问题的保守主义思辨。

In his representation of the Salem Witch Trials in The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne deliberately appropriates the popular 19^th century discourses of the 1692 episode,which by his time,have already stabilized into a historical narrative that endorses the dichotomy of a superstitious past and the enlightened present.Hawthorne’ s Salem story, a mini-narrative imbedded in a loosely structured romance form, bodies forth the conceptual world of the 19^th century America. Romance has become a potentially polyphonic and subversive literary form by the mid-18^th century,increasingly linked to the representation of cultural forces radically alien to a modern social order. Subsumed in the romance,the conceptual world presented by the Salem narrative is soon eroded while its presumed divisions of science/superstition,enlightenment/ignorance,rationality/irrationality subtly undermined.With its evocation of the pastoral,or the pre-modern other,the romance also questions the utopian thrust of the Age of the Reform.