（英语语言文学专业论文）艾米莉·狄金森诗歌的原型解读.pdf

iii 摘 要 摘 要 艾米莉 狄金森是十九世纪著名的美国诗人，她的诗歌风格独特。艾米莉狄 金森打破了传统规范，她的诗歌充满了意象并可以分成生命，死亡，自然，爱情 和哲学这几个方面。在美国诗歌历史上，狄金森的诗歌以其独特的风格和丰富的 意象影响了几代的美国诗人，在美国文学历史上是一个伟大的里程碑。 本文主要运用了荣格和弗莱的原型理论来分析在狄金森的诗歌， 诗人将原 型意象和其诗歌中的意向系统结合起来抒发她的情感。 原型是体现在个人身上的 来自人类集体的经验和情感，荣格认为原型的主要内容是集体无意识，而原型也 是集体无意识的外部显现。狄金森诗歌中出现的原型事件是一种追求原型的过 程，其本身也是一种原型。 狄金森不自主地运用她的集体无意识创作诗歌，并 真正表达出她对生死的态度，呐喊出她对人生哲学的感悟和对爱情的向往。 本文共分为四个章节，第一章主要讲述狄金森的创作背景和原型批评理论； 第二章讨论了在狄金森诗歌中出现的原型意象； 第三章集中在狄金森诗歌中的原 型仪式事件等，最后一章则是对狄金森诗歌分析所得出来的结论。狄金森诗歌的 主题主要集中在死亡和再生上， 狄金森试图通过创作诗歌来找寻死亡的意义以 及如何达到生命的不朽。 许多论文都曾研究过狄金森诗歌中出现的意象和生死主 题，但是很少有人用原型批评来解读狄金森，本文的目的在于用原型理论来发掘 狄金森诗歌中的生死主题， 其创新点是是发掘出诗人的潜意识并试着解读其内心 世界。 关键字关键字：原型；原型事件；死亡；永生 i abstract emily dickinson (18301886) is well known as one of the most famous american poets in the 19th century. she broke the traditional criterion to write poems and her poems are full of images covering the themes of life, death, nature, love and philosophy. her poetry is a great milestone in the circle of american literature and has influenced american poets throughout the generation with the unique style and rich images. as one of the greatest poets in american literature, emily dickinson has aroused great interest of study. the major theory in this thesis is jung and fryes archetypal criticism; the poet expressed the major ideas of her poetry in combining the archetypal images and the system of images. archetype is collective unconscious and it is the representation of collective unconscious that inherited from human beings experience and emotions. archetypal event is a procedure pursuing archetype and itself is also archetype, and dickinson wrote poems involuntarily with her collective unconscious and spoke out her desire of life and death, and her interpretation of life philosophy and her longing for love. this thesis is divided into four chapters, the first chapter deals with the life background of emily dickinson and the theory of archetypal criticism; the second chapter will discuss the archetypal images embodied in dickinsons poems; the third chapter will focus on the concrete archetypal events appeared in dickinsons poems and the last chapter draws to a conclusion of this thesis. the overall theme of her ii poems is death and rebirth, dickinson tried to find the meaning of death throughout her poems and reach the immortality. many essays have studied the images and life and death themes in her poems, but few study them in an archetypal perspective, my thesis aims to explain her major life and death themes by using the theory of archetypal criticism. the originality is to find the inner world of emily dickinson and to explore her unconscious throughout her poems. this thesis attempts to find as many archetypes and archetypal events as possible in her poetry and to explain why do her poems have them. this thesis will use the method of textual analysis to find answers to those questions. key words: archetype, archetypal events, death, immortality 学位论文独创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的硕士学位论文，是本人在指导教师的指 导下，独立进行研究工作所取得的成果。除文中已经注明引用的内容 外，本论文不包含任何其他个人或集体已经发表或撰写过的作品成 果。对本文的研究做出重要贡献的个人和集体，均已在文中以明确的 方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律结果由本人承担。 作者签名： 日期： 学位论文使用授权声明 本人授权沈阳师范大学研究生处， 将本人硕士学位论文的全部或 部分内容编入有关数据库进行检索； 有权保留学位论文并向国家主管 部门或其指定机构送交论文的电子版和纸质版， 允许论文被查阅和借 阅； 有权可以采用影印、 缩印或扫描等复制手段保存、 汇编学位论文。 保密的学位论文在解密后适用本规定。 作者签名： 日期： acknowledgments i would like to express my thanks and gratitude to a number of people who have supported me during the writing of my thesis. first of all, all my greatest thanks go to my supervisor fan gexin for his invaluable suggestions and i do appreciate his professional instructions, encouragement and insightful comments which helped me a lot in the academic studies. i also owe a special debt of gratitude to all the teachers who have helped me in those three years study of literature, from whom i have benefited a lot in their enlightening lectures. at last, i would like to say “thank you” to my family and my friends, who provided me with precious love and support. 1 chapter i introduction a. a brief introduction to emily dickinson and her poems emily dickinson (18301886) is one of the most outstanding poets in the nineteenth century in america, whose fame was rising during the world war i, and she became the forerunner of contemporary poetry as walt whitman. dickinson was born into a family of pious puritans in amherst, massachusetts. her father and grandfather were successful lawyers and politicians, and her mother was a peaceful and reliable woman who was also active in amherst social affairs. the whole family which was full of wisdom and religious air deeply affected dickinsons personality and vision of the world. emily dickinson was especially influenced by his seriously disciplined father. due to the prominence of her familys social status, dickinson got a normal education. during the period of 1840 and 1847, dickinson studied in amherst academy, massachusetts, and then she spent more than one year in the mount holyoke female seminary, where the religious ambience was rich while dickinson was suspicious with religion, and she studied there only for 7 months. after she returned to her hometown, she read shakespeare, the bible and keats, and was deeply influenced, which tells us why her poems always appeared in hymns. the early educational background of dickinson became a cradle for her creating poems, and her characteristic formed in the situation of her living alone in the same house for almost all her life. she was always dressed in white and she wanted to lead a simple 2 life as an independent person. in the 1860s, she suffered from serious trouble on one of her eyes and she received two operations on her eye in boston, she retreated from social affairs and that caused the limitation of her contact with the other people. she spent all her life writing poems and all her passions were put on her poems which could express her desire for life and love, and that is why her poems focused on death. in the cambridge companion to emily dickinson, the author holds the opinion that: dickinsons stark style, her ambiguous punctuation and capitalization, her variant word choices and multiple versions of poems, and her practice of expunging clearly historical references from her poetry, all contribute to creating poems that are extraordinarily open to varying, sometimes even contradictory, interpretations that perplex, startle, and amaze readers. at times, her poems seem to embody multiple voices that perform various personae. many of the contributors to this volume suggest that such contradiction lies at the very center of dickinsons poems and her conception of herself as poet. although we can identify many cohesive trends and persistent topics in dickinson studies, dickinson scholarship can be characterized by similar dialogue and movement, by its fervently debated interpretations and its groundbreaking and startling new readings, all of which demonstrate the brilliant possibilities of dickinsons poetry and the importance of her work and her life in american culture. (martin 3 3) dickinson didnt lead an easy life, however, she wrote about 1775 poems covering the theme of life, death, nature, love and philosophy all her life, but only seven of them were published when she was still alive anonymously. she showed her love and loneliness in her poetry which was an obvious illustration of her philosophy towards life and her inner world could be revealed in her poems. emily dickinsons tone in writing poems was tragic for the influence of her childhood and her feeling of loneliness. the major themes of her poetry and the content were complicated and sometimes ambivalent. the largest portion of dickinsons poetry was about death, she wrote about death in the perspective of a woman in many aspects. dickinson tried to break out the conventional characters of poetry and her language was plain but classical. she used metaphor and her imagination and illusion to construct concrete and touchable images to show her feelings in the form of poetry, and death theme under her works was complicated and profound. emily dickinsons poems are full of archetypal images and themes. as we know, images are the soul of poetry and they are the most active elements in expressing the substance of poetry. dickinson used many attractive images to make her poems livelier in telling her feelings about death. the symbolic meaning of death was important to the whole life of dickinson and her reclusive life. in her early times, she felt the influence of death because she saw the passing away of her friends which brought great sorrow to her and she began to think about the significance of death. in 4 american literature, chang yaoxin says that: dickinsons poetry is a clear illustration of her religious-ethical and political-social ideas. calvinism with its doctrine of predestination and its pessimism pressures her during her childhood and adolescence and colored her work so that her basic tone was tragic. she expressed a passionate yearning for religious certitude, gods help, and the good life. (chang 97) dickinson is a woman of great personality, the critic higginson in boston advised her using more traditional grammar but she refused, she did not revise them and she had no interest in publishing them. dickinson loved nature and she used many images in nature with the theme of death, which was relative to her life experience and there was a pessimistic tone in her poems. b. a brief introduction to archetypal criticism archetypal criticism is not only a kind of literary criticism but also it is a way to see the physical and spiritual world. archetypal criticism has a great impact on human beings while it has a close relationship with anthropology and psychology. it is believed that plato and his “eidos” (idea) about the universal idea is the root of archetype, “eidos” is like the idea shared by all, plato didnt give a clear definition of it, they believed it is by god and it is the beginning of archetype. levy bruhl and his 5 how natives think is talking about primitive mentality and collective representations which shared by primitive man. sir james frazer studies rite in different tribes and his found that when people tried to ask for help from god, they would burn something. carl jungs main idea about archetype is collective unconscious, and he explains it in human evolution. another representative is northrop frye; he said that an archetype is a literary symbol, which can connect a literary work with another one, so that all the literary works of the world can be integrated as one. all these are the stages of the development of archetypal criticism. 1. jungs archetype and his collective unconscious in order to get a better understanding of jungs archetype, wed better analyze it from the aspect of collective unconscious. collective unconscious is the most important and basic hypothesis, which runs through his theory. his collective unconscious is based on criticizing freuds unconscious, and puts forward collective unconscious in a creative way. as we know, according to jung, archetype is the content of collective unconscious, its existence is not decided by the human experience, and it could be never realized in humans life. throughout heredity, everyone could get archetypes from his ancestors, but it does not mean that everyone could feel those archetypes consciously or possess the same archetypes with their ancestors. archetype is potential which has a chance to emerge. in jungian literary criticism, 1920-1980: an annotated, critical bibliography of works in english (with a selection of titles after 1980), the author says that: 6 jungian literary criticism studies the psychological aspects of the characters and their relations, as well as the mythical and archetypal symbols of literary works in themselves and as expressions of the authors “inclusive” psyche . . .the great stimulus for the more wide-spread study of jung and for the literary application of his ideas came in the 1960s with the counterculture of the younger generation that, for a variety of reasons, started a radical questioning of the effects and the foundations of our rational, scientific thinking and our technological society. (jos van meurs 23) the origin of archetype is the repeated physical experiences over millions of years and which turned into a human psychic pattern. according to jung, “the concept of the archetype, which is an indispensible correlate of the ideal of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere.”(jung, the archetypes and the collective unconscious, 42) in a glossary of literary terms, the author gives the definition of archetype, carl g. jung, who applied the term “archetype” to what he called “primordial images,” the “psychic residue” of repeated patterns of common human experience in the lives of our very ancient ancestors which, he maintained, survive in the “collective unconscious” of the 7 human race and are expressed in myths, religion, dreams, and private fantasies, as well as in works of literature. (abrams 13) in the archetypes and the collective unconscious, jung believes that “the collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latte, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition.” (jung 42) jung also points out the difference between collective unconscious and personal unconscious: while the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. (jung 42) the distinction that jung makes here is to tell about the psyche construction and to reveal the deeper level of human psyche. from jungs idea, we can know that archetype is the vital content of collective unconscious, and it is not individual but 8 shared by all the people. according to carl jung, in the human migration out of africa and throughout the human physical experience collected over millions of years, our collective unconscious and individual unconscious in terms of forms, numbers, shapes, colors and events then become the archetypes universally accepted which controls what we are doing and what we should do. in the book of psychology and religion: classical theorists and contemporary developments written by andrew r fuller, the author points out the idea of jung: collective unconscious is a natural phenomenon. it contains everything to be found in human life: god and evil, the profound and the silly, the light and the dark, and the beautiful and the ugly. archetypal images are those imagesprimordial imagespossessed of a dynamism that cannot be attributed to the individual. we dont control archetypal power, jung insists, but are “possessed” by it. an archetype manifests or expresses itself in consciousness as a symbol. jung thus sees a symbol as an archetype making its appearance in consciousness. a symbol is an emotionally charged image possessed of an essentially mythologicaluniversal and transhumancharacter. symbols imply something vague and hidden. symbols function to express unconscious contents that were never conscious and that have no other way of reaching consciousness. archetypes have a psychic life of their own, then, in jungs view, producing changes in consciousness with purpose and 9 spontaneity. unconscious processes are indeed said to have an intelligence and subtlety superior to the insights of the conscious mind. archetypes are, all in all, psychic patterns dating from time immemorial, nature in its pure form. (fuller 6572) according to jung, the function of literary works is to lead the way to feel and know the collective unconscious and archetypes. the creation of literature is a process with unconscious and representing archetypes. the talent of writers makes them get deeper into the psychology, and they can connect the conscious and unconscious. jung has broken a new path in literary field, he has a few literary works and his thought of literary psychology enlightens the readers. the major influence of jung in literary fields is that he put his theory of archetype into literary field thus forming archetypal criticism. archetypal criticism could be traced from anthropology, myth and religion, and to analyze the process of writing in a special view and to draw the readers attention. 2. northrop frye and his archetypal criticism another representative of archetypal criticism is northrop frye; he says that an archetype is a literary symbol, which can connect a literary work with another one, so that all the literary works of the world can be integrated as one. as we know, northrop frye is the father of archetypal criticism and jung is the father of archetype and collective unconscious. frye is regarded as one of the most eminent scholars and thinkers in canadian history. the major work of fryes dealing with archetypes is 10 anatomy of criticism which is different from both frazer and jung while it is distinct from its anthropological and psychoanalytical precursors. for frye, the death-rebirth myth that that frazer sees ma