从《她们自己的文学》看肖瓦特对传统美学观的挑战与颠覆

Showalter’s Challenge and Subversion to the Traditional Aesthetic View in A Literature of Their Own

在其著作《她们自己的文学》中,肖瓦特以书写女性特质、女性情感和女性经验的审美主张挑战、甚至颠覆了西方传统美学重理性轻情感、重崇高轻优美、重灵魂轻肉体以及将女性视为审美客体的性别偏见。然而,对女性经验的过分强调使肖瓦特在重评爱略特、施赖纳、理查森、伍尔夫和莱辛等女作家时略显偏激,既有另立一种隐含性别投射之美学标准的嫌疑,又忽视了真正的伟大作家及普世作品不应受性别、种族、文化、历史、阶级等种种因素之限制。

In her work A Literature of Their Own:British Women Novelists from Bront3 to Lessing, Showalter challenges and even subverts the traditional western aesthetic bias of valuing rationality over emotion, sublime over beauty, soul over body, and women as aesthetic objects with her aesthetic ideas of writing female qualities, female emotions and female experiences. However, an over-emphasis on female experience makes Showalter go to extremes when she re-evaluates women writers like Eliot, Schreiner, Richardson, Woolf and Lessing. That is to say, she runs the risk of establishing another aesthetic standard, which implies a gender project and ignores the fact that a real great writer or a real great work should open to various factors such as gender, race, culture, history and class.