《卖弄风情的女人》的秩序想象与文学表述

Imagination of Order and Literary Representation in The Coquette

18世纪末,把自由纳入秩序,是新兴美国最为重要的政治工程和党争议题,也深刻影响着早期美国小说《卖弄风情的女人》的文学表述。该小说的诱惑和反诱惑叙事,再造了节制自由和诉求秩序的党争政治生态,也透视出建序话语的修辞本质及由其诱发而出的社会焦虑。但是,通过婚姻和择偶主旨,作者福斯特又把有节制的自由原则化为个人生存策略和小说美学形态。她在再建社会背景时所呈现出来的既声援又不完全信任政治建序话语的矛盾态度,或者说认同与自由的矛盾、介入与想象的矛盾,都化解在生存策略和美学形式中。这本小说的文学策略演绎了第一批美国本土小说适应共和肌体的生发机制。

Toward the end of the 18th century,imposing order on freedom is one of the greatest political concerns and issues of partisan disputes in the newly-founded USA and has profound impact on the literary representation of the early American novel The Coquette.Through its narrative of seduction and resisting seduction,the novel imagines the factional politics for order and moderate freedom while revealing the rhetorical nature of the discourse for order and the social psychology of anxiety caused by this discourse.However,through its motif of courtship and marriage,H.W.Foster also transforms the principle of moderate freedom into personal survival strategy and fictional form,both of which resolve Foster's conflict between her supportive and skeptical attitudes toward the discourse for order,namely,the conflict between identification and freedom and between social participation and imagination.The fictional strategies of the novel dramatize the way America's first group of novels developed to fit into its republican framework.