（英语语言文学专业论文）《宠儿》中男性权威的颠覆——一种精神分析女性主义诠释.pdf

摘要 诺贝尔文学奖得主托妮莫里森的代表作宠儿描述了黑人女性通过“重 塑记忆”克服奴隶制创伤的过程。本文从心理分析女性主义角度探讨了小说女主 人公在一个男权结构的语言体系中，通过构建女性话语获得完整人格，从而对男 性权威进行颠覆，完成自我解放的过程。论文分为五章，第一章简洁介绍了作者 生平和小说的主要情节；第二章大致总结了以往对宠儿的研究成果和心理分 析女性主义的发展； 第三章节运用心理分析女性主义详细剖析了三名女主人公分 别在前镜像阶段， 想象秩序， 象征秩序中的女性话语发展过程及其人格发展历程； 第四章节总结了莫里森通过女性话语的的运用对男权语言秩序即男权权威的颠 覆。第五章总结对文章进行了简略总结。 关键词： 宠儿 ；女性话语；颠覆 ii abstract beloved, a masterpiece of the nobel prize winner toni morrison, describes afro-american womens conquering of mental trauma inflicted by slavery through “re-memory”. morrison establishes female identity by means of feminine discourse under a phallus-centric language structure, which enables the subversion of patriarchy from the psychoanalytical feminist perspective. it comprises of five major chapters. the first chapter offers a brief account of the author，the novel and earlier critical comments. the second chapter presents french psychoanalytic feminist literary theories advocated by helene cixous and julia kristeva. the third chapter analyzes the heroines development of feminine discourse and female identity under real, imaginary，and symbolic order in terms of theories discussed in chapter two. the fourth chapter probes into the subversion of patriarchy. the fifth summarizes the significance and influence of the subversion in the womens pursuit of identity. keywords: beloved；feminine discourse；subversion iii 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 ： 李 倩 日期：2008 年 1 月 15 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：李倩 指导教师签名：沈炎 日期：2008 年 1 月 15 日 日期：2008 年 1 月 15 日 acknowledgements upon my fulfillment of this thesis, i would like to extend my gratitude for those who have generously offered me help and enthusiasm. first of all i would like thank professor shen yan for his supervision and help throughout the writing of this thesis. as a responsible supervisor, he has given me constructive suggestions from the selection of an appropriate topic to the arrangement of the framework during the course of my working on this thesis. due to his serious and earnest instructions, i had a clear thinking on the framework before i made a beginning of this thesis. i must also thank him for a very insightful and helpful review of the early draft and the subsequent revisions. in addition, i thank him for teaching me some basic and essential knowledge on critical theories in his daily lectures. and i want to express my acknowledgements to professor suo yuhuan who introduces me to black literature and teaches me much fundamental knowledge on it. then i want to show my earnest thanks to the following professors for their enlightening lectures and instructive teaching: professor he weiwen, professor zuo xiaolan, and professor shi min. i believe that all of those mentioned above contribute to an improved final manuscript, and none is, of course, responsible for the remaining weakness. i 1 chapter one introduction 1.1toni morrison toni morrison (1931-) is the first black woman to be awarded the nobel prize for literature for she in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of american reality.” (heinze 177) in her work toni morrison has explored the experiences and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. in the center of her complex and multi-layered narratives and the unique cultural inheritance of african-americans, morrison shows utmost concern for the identity of women. “tell us what is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. what moves at the margin. what it is to have no home in this place. what it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” (morrison,1997, 218) toni morrison was born chloe anthony wofford in lorain, ohio, where her parents had moved to escape the problems of southern racism. her family were migrants, sharecroppers on both sides. morrison grew up in the black community of lorain. she spent her childhood in the midwest and read voraciously, from jane austen to tolstoy. morrisons father, george wofford, was a welder, and told her folktales of the black community, transferring his african-american heritage to another generation. in 1949 she entered howard university in washington, d.c., americas most distinguished black college. there she changed her name from chloe to toni, explaining once that people found chloe too difficult to pronounce. she continued her studies at cornell university in ithaca, new york. morrison wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of william faulkner and virginiawoolf, receiving her m.a. in 1955. during 1955-57 morrison was an instructor in english at texas southern university, at houston, and taught in the english department at howard. in 1964 she moved to syracuse, new york, working as a textbook editor. after eighteen months she was transferred to the new york headquarters of random house. there she edited books by such black authors as toni cade 2 bambara and gayl jones. she also continued to teach at two branches of the state university of new york. in 1984 she was appointed to an albert schweitzer chair at the university of new york at albany, where she nurtured young writers through two-year fellowships. while teaching at harvard university and caring for her two children, morrison wrote her first novel, the bluest eye (1970). with its publication, morrison also established her new identity, which she later in 1992 rejected: i am really chloe anthony wofford. thats who i am. i have been writing under this other persons name. i write some things now as chloe wofford, private things. i regret having called myself toni morrison when i published my first novel, the bluest eye. thus she began her prolific career as a writer. sula (1973), song of solomon (1977), tar baby (1981), dreaming emmett (1986), beloved (1987), jazz (1992), paradise(1998), love (2003) together with a series of critical commentaries like playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (1992) and lectures and speech of acceptance upon the award of the noble prize for literature (1994) established her place in the literary cannon as a afro-american women writer. 1.2 beloved morrisons first four novels gained her success and popularity, but it is her fifth, beloved, that brought her nobel prize and established her as a worldly recognized author. in this tale set in reconstruction ohio, morrison paints a dark and powerful portrait of the dehumanizing effects of slavery. based on an actual historical incident, beloved tells the story of a woman haunted by the daughter whom she murdered in order to save her from the sufferings of slavery. an ex-slave sethe arrived in ohio in the year 1855. there was an elaborate plan of escape that included all of the garners slaves and a slave from another plantation, but sethe was the only one of the sweet home slaves who successfully emancipated herself. after sending three of her children ahead of her, sethe reached the ohio river with her newly born baby, and a freed slave named stamp paid ferried her across the way. after this, an underground railroad operator named ella brought sethe to baby suggs house. after a few weeks, there is a celebratory feast but sethes happiness is cut short after 28 days of freedom-the day that stamp paid refers to as the misery. the fugitive slave bill then gives the owners of runaway slaves the right to track the slaves into northern states and return them into captivity. twenty-eight days after arriving at baby suggs 3 house, sethe sees her former master, schoolteacher, coming down bluestone road. sethe determines to prevent her children from living the life of slaves. she gathers her four children into the shed and takes a handsaw to kill them. by the time she is restrained, sethe has only managed to kill one child, beloved, by slitting her neck in spite of her wish to kill all. schoolteacher has no interest in returning any one of them to sweet home as they are irremediable and sethe spends some time in jail. the incident shocked the neighborhood and 124 hence remained isolated from the community. beloved opens in the black neighborhood of cincinnati, ohio in the year 1873. sethe and her daughter, denver, live in a house at 124 bluestone road. after baby suggs (sethes mother-in-law) died and sethes boys fled, the house remains haunted by the spirit of sethes murdered daughter. sethe is haunted herself by memories of sweet home, a kentucky plantation, where she raised three children with her husband, halle - she has never seen him since she ran away. one day paul d-one of the sweet home slavesarrives to see baby suggs and his presence becomes a blessedness for sethe. paul d listens to her stories and settles down there. he drives the ghost out of the house. later the three of them go to a carnival, returning to find an oddly-dressed twenty-year-old woman sitting on the porch. immediately, sethes water breaks and she runs to the outhouse, puzzled and reminded of the pregnancy of her daughter denver. sethe was eight months pregnant with denver when she ran away from sweet home, and she would have died had it not been for a young white girl named amy denver. amy was an indentured servant who had the compassion to attend to sethes wounds; she was on the way to boston in search of carmine velvet. sethe returns to the house to find the young woman sitting at the table, drinking an endless quantity of water. the young woman is disoriented and she barely remembers anything except that she has arrived by way of a bridge and her name is beloved-the same name with the baby sethe murdered. both sethe and denver show welcome for the arrival of the girl. sethe takes it an opportunity to make up for the death of her baby. and denver receives comfort since the arrival of paul d has taken the ghost and her mother out of her own reach. beloved wages war on paul d and eventually drives him out of the house into the shed where she seduces him in a chilly night. sethe becomes beloveds sole desire and denver quickly realizes that beloved is the baby ghost returning in flesh. beloved intends to get rid of paul d so that she might have sethe for herself, and a series of events bring sethe, beloved and denver closer while paul d 4 lingers on the margins of the family, desiring desperately to join. later stamp paid gives paul d a news-clipping and tells the story of sethes infanticide. then when paul d confronts sethe he insults her and tells her that her love is too thick. (beloved 164) paul d soon leaves the house. it does not take long for sethe and denver to discover beloveds genuine identity as the killed baby. sethe is overjoyed because she thinks she can now explain the misery” and the magnitude of her love. but beloved, greedy for sethes love, intends to punish sethe with guilt and humiliation. both are constantly engaged in furious war and beloved increasingly consumes sethe. beloved grows happier and plumper while sethe weakens by day. soon sethe gets fired, leaving the family with no livelihood. the completely ignored denver goes to lady jones house where she and other children in the community were taught to read and write, but quitted for once being questioned about her mothers murder. lady jones continues to teach denver and the community offers help to the family. denver later gets a job from the bodwin family as a second maid and when she relates her story to their current maid, an older black woman named janey wagon, janey wagon perceives that this third woman in the house is the murdered child coming back from the dead. janey and ella organize an exorcism and in the afternoon when thirty black women march to 124 bluestone road, their path converges with mr. bodwin, who is collecting denver for her work. the scene overwhelms sethe who thinks that mr. bodwin is schoolteacher and ella narrowly prevents sethe from killing mr. bodwin. in the chaos, beloveds fat and glistening naked body is on display on the porch, but the exorcism works and she disappears. the town considers it wisest to leave the past in the past and embraces the once-isolated family. denver continues working and paul d returns to the house, offering sethe hope for the future. 1.3 critical comments as morrison grows in eminence and beloved in popularity, critics and scholars begin to focus critical attention on the novel. among them susan bowers, david lawrence and ann-janie morey are considered most well-known for their challenging and innovative work. susan bowers in “beloved and the new apocalypse” uses literary history and mythology to assess the value of apocalyptic writing as a context within which to interpret the book. she tries to 5 prove that re-memory process in beloved is a reverse of traditional apocalypse and takes beloved as an apocalypse for afro-americans. although the novel is “apocalyptic” in the traditional sense of being “unveiling”, (bowers 211) bowers says, african americans share a culturally shifted sense of the meaning of the word. for white readers, the term points forward, and, by generating in them positive anticipation, excites the belief that the coming end will realize humankinds great hope. for black readers whose history makes them feel excluded from this kind of millennial anticipation, however, the sense of glorious expectation resides in recovering what has been lost to them as a result of the diaspora that overwhelmed them. any notion of apocalyptic struggle, then, involves a battle in the afro-american psyche, where racial memory has been taken hostage. thus the battle for characters in beloved is over “re-memory”,1 and hence recovery of their human dignity. violence is the mode of the novel, as of course it is of the apocalyptic genre, yet acceptance of and release from psychological trauma are its transforming results. for david lawrence, another critic engaged in studying the motif of memory that pervades in beloved, psychic and cultural considerations predominate just as they do in bowers analysis. “fleshly ghosts and ghostly flesh: the word and the body in beloved” presents lawrences decoding of beloveds identity as the signified in sausures terms that denotes multiple implications. lawrence works closely and carefully with the text to untangle the several significations of beloved both as fleshly, physical character, and as world/thought/deed returning as a symbol of unspeakable miserable past. her reborn makes the unspeakable spoken, thus directly leads to the authority one has over discourse, the life-affirming ritual every afro-americans must undergo before freeing themselves and maintaining self-identity. ann-janie morey in “margaret atwood and toni morrison: reflections on postmodernism and the study of religion and literature” also uses beloved as a platform to interrogate language. the traditional language of religion is for morey a primary target, but in addition she interrogates all concepts of absolute authority and the egocentricity of man. morey wants her readers to recognize morrisons importance for a renewed study of the relation between religion and 1re-memory: carole boyce davies defines rememory as the re-membering or the bringing back together of the disparate members of the family in painful recall, involving crossing the boundaries of space, time, history, place, language, corporeality and restricted consciousness in order to make reconnections and mark or name gaps and absences. (davies 245) 6 literature. because writing by women typically questions traditional religious ideas and challenges conventional canonical universes, it has been systematically marginalized. now a book such as beloved can be linked to margret atwoods “surfacing” and together they are capable of promoting creative revisions of fundamental notions of boundary and authority. beloved employs a narrative couched expressly in feminist concepts of bodily life, of sexual love, or time and memory, and each of these concepts is imaged in the work in terms of water. thus what bowers contextualizes in apocalyptic terms and lawrence in structural ones, morey treats along gender lines. for her, postmodern feminism intentionally threatens the whole concept of a phallocentric literary canon, in particular by challenging traditional language and ontological structures. so one of the main issues of beloved is the way in which morrison shows readers that the so-called “master tongue” is very much subverted because of its potential for domination and degradation. both susan bowers and david lawrence are innovative in interpreting the re-memory process in the novel. “beloved and the new apocalypse” decodes the novel as an apocalyptic one and analyzes afro-americans successful release from psychological trauma by means of accepting painful memories as analogous with white apocalyptic maturation. “fleshly ghosts and ghostly flesh: the word and the body in beloved” takes efforts in analyzing the multiple signification of beloved as the key for afro-americans to conquer the past, face the present and embrace the future, in order to fulfill the re-memory process. ann-janie morey, however, directs her research into the revisional function of the novel. she targets the challenging description of bodily life, sexual love as w