英语论文芦俊草觉醒的生态女性主义解读.doc

学号 1005114053 觉醒觉醒 的生态女性主义解读的生态女性主义解读 学 院 名 称 河南师范大学外国语学院 专 业 名 称 英语教育 年 级 班 别 2010 级 4 班 姓 名 芦俊草 指 导 教 师 刘丽娟 2014 年 3 月 河南师范大学 本科毕业论文 The Eco Feminist Approach to The Awakening A Thesis Submitted to Faculty of International Studies of Henan Normal University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Lu Juncao Supervisor Liu Lijuan March 2014 河南师范大学本科毕业论文 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank all those who have given me during the writing of this thesis My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to professor Liu Lijuan who has offered me valuable suggestions in the academic studies In the preparation of the thesis she has spent much time reading through each draft and provided me with inspiring advice Without her patient instruction insightful criticism and expert guidance the completion of this thesis would not have been possible I also owe a special debt of gratitude to all the professors in Foreign Languages Institute from whose devoted teaching and enlightening lectures I have benefited a lot and academically prepared for the thesis Finally I also express my gratitude to my beloved friends and classmates who have always been helping me out of difficulties and supporting without a word of complaint 河南师范大学本科毕业论文 4 摘要摘要 凯特 肖邦是第一代从事妇女文学创作的美国南方女作家 肖邦生活在 19 世纪的美国社会 当时的社会不允许妇女拥有独立的人格和意志 妇女只是丈夫 和家庭的附属品 肖邦在她的作品中对妇女的社会地位 婚姻家庭 爱情和自 由进行了思考 从女性的视角呼唤属于女性自己的声音 女性的自我实现是肖 邦所有作品的主题 凯特 肖邦的 觉醒 一直以来都被誉为 19 世纪末美国女 作家的经典作品之一 这部小说讲述了一位富商的妻子 艾德娜艰难寻求 精神解放和性解放的心历路程 小说揭示了女性与大自然之间的紧密关系 女 性比男性更接近大自然 更具有天赋与自然进行交流 并在精神上达到与自然 的统一 本文试图从生态女性主义的视角出发 通过大海 小鸟这两个多次出 现的自然里的意象来解读在男权社会里生活的艾德娜慢慢觉醒并在大自然的启 迪下最终实现精神重生 关键词关键词 凯特 肖邦 觉醒 生态女性主义 河南师范大学本科毕业论文 5 Abstract Kate Chopin is the first generation female writer who engages in creation of literature in the south of America Kate Chopin lived in the nineteenth Century in USA The society does not allow women to have the independent personality and volition and women are just male accessories and they belong to their husband and home In her works Kate pays attention to the females social status marriage and family love and freedom and calls the females voice from the feminism perspective Kate Chopin s novel The Awakening has been regarded as one of the classic works by female writer in nineteenth Century in America The novel tells the story of a rich merchant s wife Edna and her struggles to aspire the spiritual liberation and the liberation of her own personality The novel reveals the close relationship between women and nature women are closer to nature than men and are more gifted for communicating with nature and then achieve the unity with nature in the spirit This article explains the novel from the Eco feminism perspective With the aid of two images in nature that s the bird and sea to express Edna s gradually awakening in the patriarchal society and her rebirth of soul in the inspiration of the sea Key words Kate Chopin The Awakening Eco feminism 河南师范大学本科毕业论文 6 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II 摘要 III ABSTRACT V TABLE OF CONTENTS VIII INTRODUCTION 1 PART ONE THE THE INTRODUCTION OF THE AUTHOR AND THE NOVEL 2 1 1 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 2 1 2 ABOUT THE NOVEL 5 PART TWO THE REFLECTION OF THE ECO FEMINISM 9 2 1 THE DEFINITION OF ECO FEMINISM 9 2 2 THE NATURAL IMAGES IN THE AWAKENING 10 2 2 1 The Birds 10 2 2 2 The Sea 12 PART THREE CONCLUSION 14 WORKS CITED 16 Introduction The Awakening is a novel written by Kate Chopin an America writer and first published in 1899 Once published The novel was widely attacked and vilified because of the description of heroine Edna s departure from the traditional role and the pursuit of individual liberation especially sexual liberation Finally it is taken from the bookstore and the author was also forced to terminate her writing career Until 50 years later with the rise of western feminist movement this book got the praise and Chopin also rose to fame Meanwhile chopin is regarded as an outstanding representative of feminism The Awakening mainly tells the story of Edna from a typical as an understanding wife and loving mother into the avant garde with the conscious pursuit of the liberation of personality It is not difficult for the careful readers to find that the heroine s awakening of personality is achieved by the aid of sea in the sea Edna learns to swim and finds her own potential and understands herself much better At the end of the story Edna find that it is hopeless for herself to pursuit freedom so she chose to bury herself naked in the sea It finally realized the final fusion of women and nature The sea is regarded as an extension of the subconscious activities platform giving Edna the motive power to pursuit the liberation of self consciousness and this give Edna extraordinary courage against patriarchy The novel s depiction on the close relationship between women and nature really reflects the author s Eco feminist consciousness 1 Part One The Introduction of the Author and the Novel 1 1 About the Author Kate Chopin born Katherine O Flaherty February 8 1850 August 22 1904 is an American author of short stories and novels She is now considered by some to have been a forerunner of feminist authors of the 20th century From 1892 to 1895 she wrote short stories for both children and adults which were published in such magazines as Atlantic Monthly Vogue The Century Magazine and The Youth s Companion Her major works were two short story collections Bayou Folk 1894 and A Night in Acadie 1897 Her important short stories included Desiree s Baby a tale of miscegenation in antebellum Louisiana published in 1893 The Story of an Hour 1894 and The Storm 1898 The Storm is a sequel to The Cadian Ball which appeared in her first collection of short stories Bayou Folk Chopin also wrote two novels At Fault 1890 and The Awakening 1899 which are set in New Orleans and Grand Isle respectively The people in her stories are usually inhabitants of Louisiana Many of her works are set in Natchitoches in north central Louisiana Within a decade of her death Chopin was widely recognized as one of the leading writers of her time In 1915 Fred Lewis Pattee wrote some of Chopin s work is equal to the best that has been produced in France or even in America She displayed what may be described as a native aptitude for narration amounting almost to genius In 1869 Kate was twenty and she married Oscar Chopin and settled in New Orleans In 1879 Oscar s cotton industry failed and his family had to move to Wenatchee in south Natchitoches Parish to manage several small plantations and a general store They became active in the community and Kate had absorbed many writing materials in the future especially regarding the Creole culture of the area In 1882 Oscar died of malaria leaving 12000 debt to Kate approximately 250 000 in 2009 money Kate tried to run the farming and grocery stores all by herself but it was hard for her Her mother begged her to move back to St Louis so Kate with her children settled down in St Louis and her family circumstances was slightly improved The following year her mother 2 died Chopin now found herself in a state of depression after the loss of both her husband and her mother When Kate was suffering from psychorrhexis the doctor advised her to write and keep quiet She accepted the proposal and soon her talent for telling the story was come back By the early 1890s she wrote short stories essays and engaged in translations which appeared in periodicals including the St Louis Post Dispatch She had been recognized as the regional local color writer but her literary talent was overlooked In 1899 her second novel the awakening was published but it was criticized in literature and moral This is Kate s most famous work and the content is about a woman trapped in the confines of an oppressive society Out of print for decades it is now widely available and critically acclaimed for its writing quality and importance as an early feminist work Some of her writings such as The Awakening were too far ahead of their time and therefore not socially embraced After almost 12 years in the public eye of the literary world and shattered by the lack of acceptance Chopin deeply discouraged by the criticism turned to short story writing In 1900 she wrote The Gentleman from New Orleans and that same year she was listed in the first edition of Marquis Who s Who However she never made much money from her writing and depended on her investments in Louisiana and St Louis to sustain her In August 20 1904 Kate visited the St Louis World s Fair During this period Kate suffered a brain hemorrhage and died after two days at the age of fifty four She was buried in Calvary Cemetery in St Louis Kate Chopin s narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalism Chopin s novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant s style a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures This demonstrates Chopin s admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth century literary realism However Chopin s style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literature 3 Mixed into Chopin s overarching nineteenth century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper class pretension reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde Henry James Edith Wharton and George Bernard Shaw Also evident in The Awakening is the future of the Southern novel as a distinct genre not only in setting and subject matter but in narrative style Chopin s lyrical portrayal of her protagonist s shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand upon in novels like Absalom Absalom and The Sound and the Fury Chopin portrays her experiences of the creole lifestyle in which women were under strict rules and limited to the role of wife and mother which influenced her local color fiction and focus on the creole culture Chopin adopted this style in her early short stories and her first novel At Fault which also deals with some of the issues of creole lifestyle By using characters of French descent she was able to get away with publishing these stories because the characters were viewed as foreign without her readers being as shocked as they were when Edna Pontellier a white Protestant strays from the expectations of society The plot looks forward to the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O Connor and the plays of William Inge while Edna Pontellier s emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams s plays Chopin s own life particularly in terms of having her own sense of identity aside from men and her children inspired The Awakening Her upbringing also shaped her views as she lived with her widowed mother grandmother and great grandmother all of whom were intellectual independent women After her father was killed on All Saints Day and her brother died from typhoid on Mardi Gras Day Chopin became skeptical of religion which she presents through Edna who finds church suffocating Being widowed and left with six children to look after influenced Chopin s writing which she began at this time Emily Toth argues against the view that Chopin was ostracized from St Louis after the publication of The Awakening stating that many St Louis women praised her male critics condemned her novel Aspects of Chopin s style also prefigure the intensely lyrical and experimental style of novelists such as Virginia Woolf and the unsentimental focus on female intellectual and emotional growth in the novels of Sigrid Undset and Doris Lessing Chopin s most important stylistic legacy 4 is the detachment of the narrator 1 2 About the Novel The Awakening originally titled A Solitary Soul is a novel by Kate Chopin first published in 1899 The novel is set in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century the plot around Edna Pontellier telling her anti traditional struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn of the century South The novel is the first one to concern about women s issues without arrogant words It is considered as the milepost of early feminist and continues to have a different effect on the readers and critics The novel s blend of realistic narrative incisive social commentary and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern masterpieces of Faulkner Flannery O Connor Eudora Welty Katherine Anne Porter and Tennessee Williams The novel begins the Pontellier family vacationing on Grand Isle at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico managed by Madame Lebrun and her two sons Robert and Victor Leonce Pontellier is a merchant of Louisiana Creole he and his wife Edna had two sons Etienne and Raoul Most of the time Edna was together with her best friend Adele Ratignoller Adele is a boisterous and cheerful person she continues to prompt Edna to do her duty as a wife and mother In Grand Isle Edna and Robert Lebrun became friends and the latter is a charming energetic young man who actively seeks attention from Edna When they fall in love Robert senses the doomed nature of such a relationship and flees to Mexico under the guise of pursuing a nameless business venture After The summer vacation the Pontelliers return to New Orleans Edna begins to re examine her own life and pay more attention to her own happiness She grows to get out of the social circle and gives up some traditional maternal duties Leonce is worried about her mental 5 abnormality and asks for the doctor to help her The doctor advises Leonce to let her be and assures him that things will return to normal When Leonce starts to do business in New York he sends the boys to his mother and leaves Edna alone at home for an extended period It gives her enough physical and mental space to think over her life When her husband stays out she moves out of her house and into a small bungalow nearby She starts flirting with Alcee Arobin who is a playboy In the novel Edna shows her sexuality for the first time But the relationship has been proved to be clumsy and ominous Mrs Edna goes to visit Miss Reisz a gifted and famous pianist in New Orleans but who maintains a generally hermetic existence Earlier in the novel at a party Miss Reisz s playing deeply moves Edna Miss Reisz s life represents what Edna always want to live independent What she focuses on is not the social expectation but herself and the music In contrast to Adele Ratignolle the latter always try to persuade Edna to observe the conventional standards Miss Reisz has contact with Robert in Mexico and gets letters from him Edna prays for reading the contents of the letter and Miss Reisz consents which proves that Robert misses Edna Finally Robert returns to New Orleans At first Robert puts on his superior look looking for an excuse to avoid Edna but eventually he admits to loving Edna He admits that he went to Mexico on business was just an excuse to avoid Edna Edna is called to help Adele with difficult labour Adele begs Edna to reflect on herself and consider the consequences If she repents she will be saved When she returns home she finds a message from Robert saying that he has left forever Despairingly Edna rushes back to Grand Isle where she had first met Robert In the end Edna commits suicide and ultimately escapes by drowning herself in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico Kate Chopin s narrative style in The Awakening can be categorized as naturalism Chopin s novel bears the hallmarks of Maupassant s style a perceptive focus on human behavior and the complexities of social structures This demonstrates Chopin s admiration for the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant yet another example of the enormous influence Maupassant exercised on nineteenth century literary realism 6 However Chopin s style could more accurately be described as a hybrid that captures contemporary narrative currents and looks forward to various trends in Southern and European literature Mixed into Chopin s overarching nineteenth century realism is an incisive and often humorous skewering of upper class pretension reminiscent of direct contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde Henry James Edith Wharton and George Bernard Shaw Also evident in The Awakening is the future of the Southern novel as a distinct genre not only in setting and subject matter but in narrative style Chopin s lyrical portrayal of her protagonist s shifting emotions is a narrative technique that Faulkner would expand upon in novels like Absalom Absalom and The Sound and the Fury Chopin portrays her experiences of the creole lifestyle in which women were under strict rules and limited to the role of wife and mother which influenced her local color fiction and focus on the creole culture Chopin adopted this style in her early short stories and her first novel At Fault which also deals with some of the issues of creole lifestyle By using characters of French descent she was able to get away with publishing these stories because the characters were viewed as foreign without her readers being as shocked as they were when Edna Pontellier a white Protestant strays from the expectations of society The plot looks forward to the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O Connor and the plays of William Inge while Edna Pontellier s emotional crises and her eventual tragic fall look ahead to the complex female characters of Tennessee Williams s plays Chopin s own life particularly i