（英语语言文学专业论文）伊迪丝·华顿《欢乐之家》和《纯真年代》中自然主义的初探.pdf

ii 摘要摘要 伊迪丝华顿是十九世纪末二十世纪初美国杰出的女作家。尽管她严格意义上的创作 生涯在四十岁时才开始，却给我们留下了很多宝贵的作品，特别是创作于 1905 年的欢 乐之家和 1920 年的纯真年代 。这两部作品不仅深受广大读者的喜爱，也吸引了众多 文学评论家的注意，他们对其作品进行了多角度多侧面的阐释。 本论文试图从人物性格命运的角度分析欢乐之家和纯真年代中所体现的自然 主义倾向。自然主义代表人物左拉的文学理论和文学创作对自然主义的基本理论和原则作 了最好的阐释：自然主义强调对事实的细致科学的观察和描述，反对对现实进行道德说教 和刻意美化。它把现实看成拥有强大的不可测力量的外部世界，人则是这个世界中的渺小 的没有任何个人意志可言的被动的受害者。受制于遗传因素和不利的环境因素，决定论成 了自然主义的内核。 本论文从华顿的生平出发，探究了她自然主义创作的内因和外因。无论是华顿生长的 环境还是她所经历的剧烈的社会变动都从各个方面影响着她的文学创作：无论是欢乐之 家中的丽丽巴特还是纯真年代中的纽兰德亚瑟，埃伦奥兰斯卡和梅维兰德， 无不以各自的方式阐述着主人公的悲剧性命运。自然主义所关注的社会环境、经济环境、 遗传因素和不可控制的命运巧合无不渗透到主人公的悲剧性命运中。丽丽巴特的聪明与 坚强换来了最后的死亡；亚瑟对现实的不满使他经历了短暂的反抗，但也终以失败告终； 埃伦的反叛精神导致了她被亲人的放逐和孤独的一生。自由意志的努力都没有抵得过命运 的捉弄，表面上得到了一切的梅也不过是个没有自己思想的纯粹的社会的产物。 以往对华顿文学作品的研究多以爱情，婚姻或纽约上流社会的矛盾和冲突为主题，本 论文则选取华顿的两部最具代表性的作品欢乐之家和纯真年代 ，从自然主义的角 度，着手分析作品中的四个典型人物形象的悲剧性命运。鉴于有限的文章篇幅和自己能力 的不足，我在论文最后则提出了一些有关进一步研究的建议。 关键词：关键词：伊迪丝华顿； 欢乐之家 ； 纯真年代 ；自然主义 iii abstract edith wharton was one of the most famous american female writers living and writing at the turn of the twentieth century. though her serious literary creation began when she was almost forty years old, wharton yielded us quite a few excellent works among which there are the house of mirth created in 1905 and the age of innocence created in1920. highly acclaimed as two classical novels by numerous public readers, the house of mirth and the age of innocence also deeply attracted the attention of numerous literary critics who engaged in interpreting her works from various perspectives. this thesis, beginning with whartons life story and literary creation background which offers the inner and outer reasons for the naturalistic characteristics, explores the naturalism demonstrated in the main characters of the house of mirth and the age of innocence. no matter it is lily bart in the house of mirth or newland archer, ellen olenska and may welland in the age of innocence, they all respectively illustrate their tragic fate in their own way. social and economic environment, hereditary factors and uncontrollable force of fate and chance combine to cause lilys dissatisfactory and incomplete life despite her smartness and persistence. newland archers consciousness of his stifling environment and attempting rebel turns out to be a failure. ellens rebellious character and strong desire for freedom doesnt bring her the life she dreams of. in a word, individual will never succeed in finding an expression. most people can only live like may welland who is completely the product of environment without any thought of her own. the already existent researches on whartons works mainly focus on the themes of “love and marriage，social manners and the conflicts existing in new york upper class society”. in addition, critical attention is mainly given to the house of mirth. however, this thesis, adding the age of innocence in the study scope, means to provide a more comprehensive perspective in its exploration of the naturalism demonstrated through the analysis of whartons four main and typical characters. since there is still a broad space for improvement in this naturalism exploration of iv whartons creation, at the end of this thesis, i offer some suggestions concerning the possibilities of further study. key words: edith wharton, the house of mirth, the age of innocence, naturalism 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文原创性声明学位论文原创性声明 本人郑重声明：所呈交的学位论文，是本人在导师的指导下，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，均已在文中以明确方式标明。本人完全意识到本声明的法律 结果由本人承担。 学位论文作者签名：刘玲刘玲 日期： 年 月 日 上海交通大学上海交通大学 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解学校有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，同意学 校保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和电子版，允许论文被查 阅和借阅。本人授权上海交通大学可以将本学位论文的全部或部分内容编入 有关数据库进行检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存和汇编本 学位论文。 保密保密，在 年解密后适用本授权书。 本学位论文属于 不保密 不保密。 （请在以上方框内打“” ） 学位论文作者签名：刘玲刘玲 指导教师签名：施旻施旻 日期： 年 月 日 日期： 年 月 日 i acknowledgements first of all, i would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, professor shi min, for her instructive and enlightening guidance in the past two and half years of my study in shanghai jiao tong university. her serious study attitude and constant strictness are not only conductive to my study but also of great significance to my future life. had it not been for her insightful advice and her painstaking revision of my every draft of this thesis, it would never have taken the present form. at the same time, i am also grateful to all the professors at sjtu who have given me lectures in the two and half years. their instructions will ever be remembered. finally, my thanks also go to my parents and boyfriend for their constant encouragement and support during the preparation of my thesis. 1 chapter 1 introduction 1.1 a brief account of edith wharton edith newbold jones wharton was born on january 24, 1862 into the wealthy “old new york” society of the late nineteenth century. her parents, george jones and lucretia rhinelander, belonged to the old new york families which had been settled in america for nearly three centuries and had been prominent in public life. wharton herself in 1933 described the wealthy social elite as “a little aristocratic nucleus” (qtd. in introduction to the age of innocence, hereafter innocence). in the society where she was born, customs hardly ever changed and there were certain unbending rules. “the crude fact of money making was regarded as derogatory” (innocence 81). only inherited money was respected while newly rich was looked down upon. the gentlemen were men of leisure; as for their wives, child-bearing was their task, fine needlework their recreation, being respected their privilege. edith wharton demonstrated early a formidable intellect and a great love for books. she was privately educated by a series of governess and the education was intended only to provide her the social graces necessary for a society wife. wharton read widely in the great literature of western culture and formed the habit of writing which was viewed by her family as unsuitable for a woman of her social status. a solitary child (her two brothers were much older), wharton spent a great deal of time in her fathers library reading and making up stories. between the ages of four and ten she toured europe with her parents and learned to speak fluent french, italian and german. she was always grateful for having had this kind of travelling experience. edith wharton was a shy girl, already regarded as too intellectual for her environment. her mother was cold and unsympathetic. at her time, it was taken for granted that any woman who did not marry was a failure. pushed out on to the marriage market, wharton suffered two wounding blows. her first engagement was broken off, probably by the young mans mother. 2 then she became friendly with a young lawyer called walter berry, who was expected to propose, but did not. these experiences didnt give her much confidence in men. in 1885, after a broken engagement to harry stevens, wharton married with no great enthusiasm edward wharton, who was twelve years her senior. the couple had little in common. it is quite obvious to infer that wharton was not happy in her marriage with a husband not her equal mentally and emotionally. a few years into her marriage, in 1894, wharton had a nervous breakdown. partly to release the energies confined by the rigid social structure and anti-intellectualism of her aristocratic world and later to relieve the unhappiness of her marriage, wharton turned to writing. while working on ethan frome (1911), she fell in love with an american journalist living in paris, morton fullerton. however, she felt terribly guilty for breaking her marriage vows, which she took seriously, “i had as yet no real personality of my own”, she wrote later. childless, and with no strong emotional or intellectual bond with her husband, she seems to have been thrashing around in search of something to do. the affair between wharton and fullerton was intense and brief, but one of the happiest time of her life. her husband and her divorced in 1913. as a matter of fact, wharton herself was a woman trapped by convention and her own social status. she had to learn, throughout her life, how to balance her own desires and interests with the morals she internalized as a child. after divorce, wharton had her most time spent in france. at her paris apartment and her garden home, she became a literary hostess to young writers. finally settling down near paris, she kept close touch with american expatriate writers as well as english and french artists. among her friends were henry james, walter berry and bernard berenson. when the first world- war broke out, she engaged herself in charitable work and was also active in fund-raising activities for which she was awarded the legion of honor in 1916. these of her late works especially showed her compassion and concern towards the pathetic and the poor. edith wharton died in 1937 in france after suffering a stroke. 3 1.1.1 literary creation background and accomplishment edith wharton (1862-1937) lived and wrote in a time in america when enormous social, political and economical changes happened. the end of the civil war in 1865 marked the beginning of great changes in the united states. the agricultural society had become increasingly industrialized. the subsequent material wealth challenged peoples spiritual believes. acquisition of material wealth became the sole purpose of existence, especially for the members of the nouveau riche. the young america at that time had no tradition of its own yet, no settled civilization and culture, and was still trying to find itself. in other words, the old order was dying and the new order was still not established. crude money possession and lack of spiritual belief led to a secular america. new york was the epitome of what america had become “a city absorbed in making money and a society bent on enjoying it” (wharton: twilight sleep, chapter 2). by 1905, the genteel milieu of whartons childhood was rapidly disappearing. old new york society was forced to recognize the power of new money and even to accept the newly rich, with their tremendous wealth earned in a suspect marketplace, into their circle. it was a concession that would not only corrode their sense of style and decorum, but allow them to sacrifice the members of the old society who could not keep pace. exposed to the turbulent social transformation, wharton transferred her inner sensibility into her writing and created more than forty works. even at the age of 14, wharton wrote her first novel, fast and loose, under the pseudonym david olivieri. she had started to compose poems in her teens and one of her poems was published in the atlantic monthly. the great inclination (1899) is whartons first collection of short stories which included some of her most authologized pieces, the muses tragedy, souls belated and the pelican. whartons first book is the decoration of houses (1897), coauthored by an architect ogden codman. in the 1890s wharton started to contribute to scribners magazine. the valley of decision(1902), is a historical romance set in eighteenth century italy. from this novel on, wharton produced more than forty volumes of short stories, novels, autobiography, travel writing and criticism, among which the house of mirth (1905), 4 ethan frome(1911), the custom of the country (1913) and the age of innocence (1920) are her representatives. in 1930, the american national institute of arts and letters gave wharton a gold medal. she was the first woman to be so honored. four years later she wrote the story of her life, a backward glance. in her long career, which stretched about sixty years, wharton had published seventeen novels, seven novelettes, eleven volumes of short stories, and numerous miscellaneous works in which she portrayed a fascinating picture of the american life. she was a born storyteller, whose novels are justly celebrated for their vivid settings, satiric wit, ironic style, and moral seriousness. as the author of numerous best-selling award-winning works, wharton has inspired many other authors in terms of novels, short stories, poems, bibliography and travelling and nonfiction essays. her creation is still of importance for students of history for what it reveals about a particular time and place in american culture and about the expatriates who fled to live in europe. it is valuable too for its revelation of the tragic aspects of human nature. as the new york times said in her obituary, “there can be no reading of human character without ethics, no tragedy without conflict between things that matter. this edith wharton knew and never forgot and by that token we know her for the artist she was.” some of her works have been adapted to the stage and film and many are still in print today. 1.1.2 critical reception of edith wharton to some extent, the popularity of a writer is largely dependent on the critical reaction evoked by his or her creation. in literary history, edith whartons popularity is not only evoked by her works but also the heated critical response towards them. diverse critical theories determine the diversity of perspectives while understanding a literary work. this is also true of wharton who is called “a puzzling genius” (killoran, 2001: 1). wharton was most popular from 1905 when she published the house of mirth to 1921 when she was awarded the pulitzer prize for the age of innocence. for three decades after her death in 1937, her fiction mainly received negative critical views. in the late 1930s and 1940s, major critics were very critical about edith whartons fiction in terms of her importance as a writer, the social scope of her subject matter, 5 the criticism of the stifling social convention, the inferiority of her later novels and her imitation of henry james. as a female writer living at the turn of 19th century, she was seldom done justice by critics at that time. even though praising her craftsmanship, her superb gift of narrative and her faultless building of plot, the early reviewers just “smilingly dismissed her work as something to be put in a drawer with a lavender sachet, to be removed some long time later and read with signs and sentiment”(killoran, 2001: 3). their responses to her and her works derived from their prejudice against whartons gender as a female and her inherited upper-class status. on the one hand, women at that time were considered inferior both in mind and body. and their writing was never taken seriously, because feminine qualities such as sentiment were incompatible with literary seriousness. whartons talent in writing was grudgingly accepted on the assumption that she owned some “masculine qualities” or there was a man behind the scenes to help her. on the other hand, whartons wealth evoked criticism of her being too rich to “develop a social conscience” (killoran, 2001: 1). alfred kazin (1942) criticized wharton for her excessive concern with her old society while ignoring the poor class or the parvenu (bloom, 1988: 4217). robert morss lovett claimed that “mrs. wharton is not only cold, defensive, and snobbish, but a novelist of her classand her conception of her class is limited. the background of the human mass is barely perceptible through her high windows” (killoran, 2001: 75). the critics represented by lovett were equally saying that whartons works lack depth and couldnt endure the test of time. with these criticisms, wharton was forced to defend the leisure-class subjects she knew best as being just “as human as the man with the dinner pail in a 1922 essay entitled the great american novel” (killoran, 2001: 1). after she moved and resided in paris, wharton was criticized as “not american enough,” in terms of her apparent lack of knowledge about her native country and her failure to “discover” it. her reprimand of the corrupt upper-class society was regarded as untrue. she was accused of “exposing upper-class splendors merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the authentic inner circles” (killoran, 2001: 4). in france, wharton met henry james and they two formed life-long friendship. james 6 helped instruct whartons writing which made critics suspicious of whartons originality. whartons books suffered a period of critical neglect because of their similarity to the works of henry james, the writing of fiction (1925) explains that their similarities lie in the common interest in social conventions, which encroach upon the freedom of individuals from every social stratum, in particular the wealthy and the american abroad. wharton never could shake off the shadow of henry james in the eyes of critics and the public. percy lubbocks portrait of edith wharton (1947) was essentially a tribute to henry james. however, whartons works are still significantly different from the works of james. in edith wharton, auchincloss observed, “in contrast to the gradual accumulation of subtle effects for which james is known, whartons vivid depictions of people and objects led readers through a series of impacts. it is those half-elusive but exquisitely effective strokes that reveal in an instant a whole mental attitude or the hidden meaning of a profound emotion. the ability to affect impacts upon characters inner psyches in a moment is whartons talent, which makes her distinct from james.” blake nevius, in edith wharton: a study of her fiction (1953) offers three reasons why wharton should have a permanent claim on critical attention: “she successfully chronicled the twilight of old new york, she was second only to henry james as a