《米德尔马契》中的礼物、伦理与经济

Gifts, Ethics, and Economics in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

乔治·爱略特在《米德尔马契》中再现了维多利亚社会经济个人主义思想对"礼物"一词的改造。作为私有财产的一部分,礼物以个人利益最大化为目标,表现出"控制"和"联系"两个含混特征。小说通过施与受、买与卖之间的冲突,探讨了19世纪英国市场经济关系中礼物所体现的"回报"困境。礼物经济有时是一种债务经济,有时又无异于蒙上面纱的等价交换,以自利为基础的礼物经济附带着痛苦乃至死亡的高额成本。在此背景下,爱略特从伦理学角度重新挖掘"礼物"的内涵,将伦理经济中礼物的纽带功用引入小说,对经济个人主义思想进行反思,并力图借用乡村共同体文化以期对国家经济现实进行建构。

George Eliot represents a remolding of the word, gift, by Victorian economic individualism in Middlemarch. As a part of private property, gifts aim at maximizing personal interests, exemplifying two ambiguous characteristics of "control" and "connection". By unfolding the conflicts between giving and receiving, or selling and buying, the novel explores the dilemma of "reciprocity" caused by gift circulation among various relationships within the 19 th-century British market economy. The gift economy is, at times, a sort of debt economy, but sometimes it is nothing different from a veiled exchange at equal values. It is based on self-interest, and it comes with a high cost of pain, or even death. It is against this backdrop that Eliot redefines the implications of "gifts" from the ethical perspective and integrates the bonding function of gifts from the ethical economy into the novel, reflecting upon the ideas of economic individualism and making a serious attempt at building the national economy through a reliance on the culture of rural community.