重讀華頓《純真年代》中之男性凝視與婚姻

Abstract

伊迪絲·華頓的《純真年代》是十九世紀末至二十世紀初舊紐約的典型三角愛情故事：探索愛情、婚姻和性別關係。本文仔細分析與比較相關的文本，從女權主義眼光的重新審視男性敘事的角度，批判維多利亞時代之被壓抑的女性困境，並探索女性人物的突破。本研究不僅僅關注男性角度的敘述觀點，更進一步地運用蘿拉·莫薇(Laura Mulvey)的男性凝視理論與傳統婚姻的概念，綜合探究舊紐約時代的女性角色的處境與掙扎。章節的安排由研究背景與研究目的而起。其次，運用蘿拉·莫薇(Laura Mulvey)的男性凝視理論來檢視《純真年代》中男權系統的男性凝視，瞭解系統如何導致男主角的盲目，男主角誤解女性如何在父權制度中促成其客觀化，以及女性角色如何利用男性凝視以達到自己的目標。接著，探討十九世紀歐美的婚姻主題和探討華頓如何在《純真年代》對待婚姻主題和女性自我實現問題。在女性解放運動中，當女性的自我實現與社會規範出現矛盾時，姊妹的力量起著至關重要的作用。最後本文發現，小說雖是使用第三人稱有限敘事—與男主角的觀點相關，但是華頓巧妙地顛覆了男性的目光，證實了女性尋求姐妹關係和女性的自我實現並贊同女性潛在的女性主體性。

Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is a typical triangle love story to explore love, marriage and gender relations in the Old New York during the period between the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century. The thesis aims to provide a rereading of the male narration from a feminist perspective to critique the compressed female dilemma and to explore the breakthrough of the female characters by detailed textual analysis. Not only focuses on the narration from a male perspective, this thesis also applies Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory and the concept of traditional marriage to explore the situation and the struggle of the female characters in the Old New York. I would firstly give an introduction to the research background and the research purpose of the thesis. Then, I would apply Laura Mulvey’s male gaze theory to examine how the male gaze used in the patriarchal system, how the system contributes to Archer’s blindness, how the male protagonist’s misreading women conduce to their objectification in the patriarchal system and how the female protagonists take advantage of the male gaze for their own goals in The Age of Innocence. Further, I would like to explore the issue of marriage in the nineteenth-century Europe and America and how Wharton treats the subject of marriage and the female self-fulfillment. The power of sisterhood acts as a vital role while the female self-fulfillment is conflicted to the social codes in the female liberation movement. Finally, it is concluded that although the novel is presented from the third-person limited narration—only relating Archer’s point of view, I find that in fact Wharton skillfully subverts the male gaze, confirms the women’s search for their sisterhood and their female self-fulfillments, and approves the female potential in searching their female subjectivity.