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战斗力 鹅
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注册时间 2003-9-24
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看了LZ的签名，碰巧最近写了篇小文章，关于Wilde的:-)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and “Woman”
Wilde’s sexual identities is an interesting topic, especially for the young girls nowadays. Since I have few historical documents related, and only read several works of CW English version), here I’d like to talk about Wilde’s ambivalent attitude towards Victorian Women, only through his greatest work——The picture of Dorian Gray.
Like many people of that time, Dorian Gray made a comment as follows:
“Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century……There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon.”( CW p49)
In my opinion, the Victorian “gentleman” should at least be partially to responsible for the consequence, since it may just man’s taste and so called “aesthetic standards” are the main influence in shaping the women into such a tedious image. Dorian described the majority of women’s smile as “stereotyped”, but didn’t observe who made them slip into such a ready-made form.
Man like conquer and force, but if women——“the other” were so feeble and brittle for domestication, it would have been very boring to man, just like a boxer’s reluctance to knock down a little boy.
Therefore, the theatre and comedies met the gentleman’s need of imagination, they can figure a chaste princess, a mysterious girl, or a seductress as Lilith, as we can see Dorian places emphasis on the “glamour” and “mystery” of an actress. Take the sound of Sibyl Vane( the heroine in the story) for instance, when Dorian explained to Lord Henry Wotton:
“ In the garden scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. There were moments, later one, when it had the wild passion of violets.”
The “Power” of the actress, as Dorian calls it, makes Sibyl “the one thing worth loving”, but actually what is the deep-seated power let the actress different from the “ordinary women”? The answer may be like this:“One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen……”(CW p49)
On the other side, “mystery” can be negative-dimension. “within the charmed space of a theatre, the speech of actresses beguiled men into a passivity that seemed akin to the effects of witchcraft or narcotics.”( Kerry Powell, 1997) In the real world, Wilde once threw lilies at the feet of Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest French actress, when she first arrived in England, nevertheless, in his sonnet Wilde regarded her as a Phedre——a vampire from the hell.
Therefore, it’s not hard for us to imagine Sibyl’s fatal death in the novel.“ The girl never really lived”, as Lord Henry explains, and even in taking her own life “ she never really died”.( CW p82) Maybe she is still living in our modern society. |
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发表于 2007-12-25 20:14
发表于 2007-12-26 12:41