伊迪丝·华顿哥特小说中女性自我意识根源探究

On the Origin of Edith Wharton's Female Self⁃awareness in Her Gothic Stories

哥特小说创作贯穿了华顿40多年的创作生涯,它们蕴含了华顿思想上最深刻、情感上最强烈的女性自我认知。哥特小说这一19世纪的边缘文类让华顿得以借助鬼怪幽灵的魔幻力量突破理性的极限,说出关于愤怒、死亡、恐惧,尤其是女性和男性的本质等难以言说的东西。华顿在哥特小说创作中通过巧妙的构思将现实与神话传说相结合,使读者在熟悉又不乏新奇的阅读过程中获得崇高与诡异的美学体验。同时,她将现实生活中女性对自由的向往寄托在飘忽灵动的年轻女性幽灵身上,借助超自然的力量谱出了一支支悠扬的乐曲,对母亲严苛的监管吹响了战斗的号角。在克里斯蒂娃贱斥理论的观照下,华顿的哥特小说代表作《被蛊惑》里作为父权捍卫者的年长女性和长期潜抑自我的年轻女性之间的殊死搏斗与现实生活中华顿与母亲之间的矛盾具有明显的互文性。《被蛊惑》既折射出20世纪初美国社会的“真女性”与“新女性”两种女性气质之间的矛盾,也揭示了华顿女性自我意识的根源。

Edith Wharton had been writing Gothic stories throughout her 40 years'writing career.Her Gothic stories reveal the deepest and strongest self⁃awareness of the writer.As a marginal genre ignored by the rigid western literature censorship in the 19th century,Gothic allows Wharton to explore areas of experience beyond the realistically expected and accepted,to press the limits of rationality,to utter the unutterable about sexuality,rage,death,fear,and particularly the nature of women and men.In the creation of her Gothic stories,Wharton combined reality with myth tactfully through ingenious conception,from which readers can obtain sublime and strange aesthetic experience in the familiar and novel reading process.Meanwhile,she placed women's yearning for freedom in the real life on the spirit of young women.With the help of supernatural forces,Wharton composed a haunting melody and blew the horn of battle against her mother's strict supervision.On the basis of Kristeva's theory of abjection,the fight between women of different generations in her Gothic masterpiece Bewitched obviously creates the intertextuality of the conflict between Wharton and her mother in real life.The story not only reflects the contradictions between“True Women”and“New Women”in America in the early 20th century,but also reveals the origin of Wharton's ego.