'"I Must Learn to Grow Old before I Die": Women, Ageing and Travels to Italy'
'"I Must Learn to Grow Old before I Die": Women, Ageing and Travels to Italy'
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““我必须在死前学会变老”：女性、衰老和意大利旅行”
DOI：
10.1080/09574042.2014.944413
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发表时间：
2014
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Sarah Falcus and Katsura Sako
前往意大利寻找自我是西方文学中常见的叙事方式，意大利被描述为一个充满爱、梦想、腐朽和死亡的地方。本文探讨了意大利多方面的想象空间如何在三部当代小说中被用来探索女性晚年生活的可能性：米歇尔·罗伯茨的《读者，我嫁给了他》（2005年）、莎莉·维克斯的《加内特小姐的天使》（2000年）和玛格丽特·德拉布尔的《七姐妹》（2002年）。这些文本都有相同的情节：一位中年或老年英国妇女前往意大利，希望逃脱和冒险，在此过程中挑战女性晚年生活的限制性故事。老年女性的文化脚本一般分为两种类型。悲观的叙述将衰老描述为衰退，其特点是身体和精神功能的下降，对于女性来说，生殖功能和文化资本的丧失以性和审美欲望的形式出现。相比之下，乐观的叙述将晚年描述为一个进步的时期，有探索、发现和成熟的机会，但这有逃避身体衰老和不可避免的死亡的风险。这三部小说自觉地探讨了意大利丰富的图像传统，以挑战这些关于衰老的有限话语，并为老年女性创造另类叙事，在不同程度上与老年身体和死亡相关。
Travelling to Italy to find oneself is a common narrative in Western literature, and Italy is represented variously as a place of love, dreams, decay and death. This paper considers how the multifaceted imaginative space of Italy has been used to explore the possibilities of later life for women in three contemporary novels: Michèle Roberts’ Reader, I Married Him (2005), Sally Vickers’ Miss Garnet's Angel (2000) and Margaret Drabble's The Seven Sisters (2002). These texts all share the same plot: a middle-aged or older British woman travels to Italy in the hope of both escape and adventure, in the process challenging the restrictive stories of later life for women. Cultural scripts for older women are generally divided into two types. A pessimistic narrative represents ageing as decline, marked by reduced physical and mental functions, and, for women, loss of reproductive function and of cultural capital in the form of sexual and aesthetic desirability. By contrast, an optimistic narrative represents later life as a time of progress with opportunities for exploration, discovery and maturity, but this risks evading the ageing body and the inevitability of death. These three novels self-consciously negotiate the rich tradition of images of Italy in order to challenge these limited discourses of ageing and produce alternative narratives for older women, engaging, to different degrees, with the older body and death.