《大卫·科波菲尔与一双蓝眼睛》中女童形象的困境

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
Junjie Qi
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引用次数: 0

摘要

尽管查尔斯·狄更斯(Charles Dickens)和托马斯·哈迪(Thomas Hardy。考虑到维多利亚时代的小说中似乎充斥着儿童女性,也就是说,拥有通常被认为是儿童独有的生理和心理特征的成年女性,这两部小说之间的这种亲密关系在各种不亲密关系中显得不那么令人惊讶。维多利亚时代小说中无处不在的童女形象是维多利亚时代对童年和少女时代迷恋的文学必然结果。女孩的宝贵财富——天真、依赖、天真魅力、温柔——都符合维多利亚时代的女性理想。这种理想化的女孩观不可避免地导致了以牺牲成熟女性气质为代价的少女时代的延长,从而造就了大量成年女孩。在过去的四十年里,维多利亚时代的少女时代和童女作为年龄倒置的一个类别受到了相当大的批评关注。虽然《一双蓝眼睛》中的异性恋关系中的性别倒置和阶级倒置问题受到了很多批评,但很少有评论家研究小说中的年龄倒置问题。尽管狄更斯的《朵拉》是对这些问题进行批判性研究的一个常见例子,但对埃尔弗里德作为一名童女与小说中所质疑的性别和社会阶级问题的研究在很大程度上仍然是一个被忽视的领域。当相互串联阅读时,每一篇文章都会对另一篇文章中对童女的虚构处理提供额外的解释。本文认为,这两部小说为比较分析提供了一个令人信服的案例,这将为正在进行的关于童女形象的学术对话提供新的见解,并提供对哈迪文本的解读,特别是填补哈迪学术界的一个空白。选择这两部小说进行比较并不是随机的。在这两本书中,童女形象的表现都受到维多利亚时代性别和社会阶层观念的影响。这两个文本都表明了儿童妇女获胜特征中固有的模糊性,这些特征最初增强了她们的可取性,但最终证明是有害的,甚至是致命的。这两位女性的困境与男性成年和男性气质的不稳定密切相关。这两部小说的自传体维度使我们超越了
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
The plight of the figure of the child-woman in David Copperfield and A Pair of Blue Eyes
Despite the dis-affinities of Charles Dickens’s and Thomas Hardy’s literary genius, and the dissimilarities in generic form and fictional style between David Copperfield (1850) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), each text features a child-woman, Dora Spenlow and Elfride Swancourt respectively. This affinity amid sundry dis-affinities between these two novels looks less surprising when considering the fact that the Victorian novel seems to be populated by child-women, that is, grown-up women who possess physical and mental features normally assumed to be unique to children. The ubiquity of the figure of the child-woman in the Victorian novel is a literary corollary of the Victorian fascination with childhood and girlhood. The cherished assets of girls – innocence, dependence, naïve charm, tenderness – all conform to the Victorian feminine ideal. This idealised conception of girls inevitably leads to the prolongation of girlhood at the expense of mature femininity, thereby bringing forth a multitude of grown-up girls. Victorian girlhood and the child-woman as a category of age inversion have received considerable critical attention over the past four decades. While much critical attention has been devoted to issues of gender inversion and class inversion in the heterosexual relationships in A Pair of Blue Eyes, few critics have examined the issue of age inversion in the novel. Whereas Dickens’s Dora is a familiar example in critical inquiry into these issues, the study of Elfride as a child-woman in relation to issues of gender and social class interrogated in the novel remains largely a neglected quarry. When read in tandem with each other, each text sheds extra exegetical light upon the fictional treatment of the child-woman in the other. This essay argues that the two novels offer a compelling case for comparative analysis, which will contribute new insights to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the figure of the child-woman and provide a reading of Hardy’s text, in particular, that fills a hole in Hardy scholarship. The selection of these two novels for comparison is not random. In both texts, the representation of the figure of the child-woman is considerably inflected by Victorian conceptions of gender and social class. Both texts demonstrate the ambiguity inherent in the winning characteristics of child-women which initially enhance their desirability but eventually turn out to be detrimental and even death-dealing. The plight of both childwomen is intimately bound up with the instability of male adulthood and masculinity. The autobiographical dimension of both novels invites us to move beyond the level of
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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