Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's Emma
Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's Emma
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超越浪漫的吉普赛人：奥斯汀《艾玛》中的叙事中断和讽刺
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发表时间：
2008
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通讯作者：
L. White
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作者：
L. White
我被吉普赛人偷走了。我父母把我偷走了。然后吉普赛人又偷走了我。这种情况持续了很长时间。--查尔斯·西米克，《我被吉普赛人偷走了》，正如西米克的这句警句所暗示的那样，关于吉普赛人的故事有着非常悠久而晦涩的历史。真正的吉普赛人的历史几乎同样鲜为人知。他们似乎是在15世纪初进入法国，在1492年被西班牙驱逐后，在16世纪逐渐进入英国。此后，在法国和英国文学中，吉普赛人被文学想象塑造成一种集体比喻(连接在一起的自由和逃避日常生活、放荡、偷窃、异国情调和预测未来的能力)和一种叙事手段(被吉普赛人偷走的孩子或与他们一起逃跑的成年人，如阿诺德的《学者-吉普赛人》[1853]或借用同年的《罗曼尼麦田》)。19世纪的吉普赛人是浪漫想象和哥特式故事的坚定原型，就像他们是在英国和法国乡村的小路上漫步的真人一样。正如大卫·梅尔所指出的，吉普赛人有[...]特别吸引艺术家、诗人、剧作家和小说家的放荡不羁的想象力[...]。在美术和“高雅”文学中，在不那么“体面”的便士恐怖文学和铁路文学中，在轻歌剧和严肃歌剧中，吉普赛人经常以人们熟悉的异国情调、黑皮肤、游牧和浪漫的乡村游牧民族的伪装出现。(139)正如我们所知，《简·爱》中有一段著名的吉普赛插曲，罗切斯特假扮吉普赛算命师审问简，而在《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》中，玛吉扮演一个小女孩，为了加入吉普赛人而短暂地逃跑了。(1)在整个十九世纪，小说家和诗人利用吉普赛人来代表一种复杂的意义。例如，巴尔扎克在他的11部小说中简短地提到吉普赛人是逃避、异国情调和算命的人物，路易莎·梅·奥尔科特在8部小说中将吉普赛人作为户外娱乐和性生活放荡的比喻，爱德华·布尔沃·利顿在无数卷中将吉普赛人作为可能危险人物的黑暗祖先。在19世纪的小说中，把一个人描绘成吉普赛人是一种负面的含义，从犯罪到通婚都有。埃斯特拉可怕的罪犯母亲在《远大前程》中有吉普赛血统，希刺克厉夫神秘的黑暗和危险源于呼啸山庄可能有吉普赛血统，威尔·拉迪斯瓦夫的波西米亚鲁莽被米德尔马契的居民解释为吉普赛血统的产物。在这一时期，真正的吉普赛人因同盟国的原因而遭到回避。正如西莉亚·埃斯普格拉斯所阐述的那样，这些原因背后是种族主义；18世纪和19世纪的欧洲故事强调了吉普赛人绝对的种族隔离以及他们作为人类中的一个“堕落”物种的地位。(2)吉普赛人也不受欢迎，因为他们拒绝融入当前的经济体系，转而依靠“算命、叫卖二手商品和清理废弃废物”来赚钱(Espuglas 148)。例如，Grellmann在1783年对吉普赛人的描述集中在吉普赛人的懒惰上；Leo Lucassen指出，即使当他们作为音乐家或小贩工作时，这种活动也往往是一种间接恐吓和盗窃(75)。(3)此外，吉普赛人的卫生和清洁标准远没有典型的英国公民严格--吉普赛人经常在营地附近的开阔战壕里丢弃身体排泄物，并以肮脏和厌恶洗澡而闻名。吉普赛人也以肆无忌惮的放荡和卖淫而闻名，在某种程度上可能是当之无愧的；当然，女性吉普赛人的形象是一个诱人的外星人(她从克利奥帕特拉的后裔是传奇人物)，标记了乔治·克拉布的描述：在他的《情人的旅程》中，克拉布描述了一个吉普赛女人，她“轻快的笑声和流氓的窥视表达了/她年轻的乳房里植入的邪恶”(158-59)。…
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for a long time. --Charles Simic, "I Was Stolen by the Gypsies" As this epigraph from Simic suggests, stories about gypsies have a very long and murky history. The history of the actual Romany people is almost as obscure. It seems that they entered France in the early fifteenth century and Great Britain gradually in the sixteenth century following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Thereafter, in both French and British literature, the gypsies, as they became known, became transfigured by the literary imagination into a collective trope (conjoining freedom and escape from the everyday, licentiousness, thievery, exoticness, foreignness, and the ability to read the future) and a narrative device (the child stolen by gypsies or the adult who runs away with them, as in Arnold's "The Scholar-Gypsy" [1853] or Borrow's The Romany Rye of the same year). Gypsies by the nineteenth century were firmly established archetypes of the romantic imagination and the Gothic tale as much as they were actual people roaming the byways of the English and French countryside. As David Mayall notes, the Gypsies have [...] held especial appeal for the bohemian imagination of artists, poets, dramatists and fiction writers [...]. In fine art and "high-brow" literature, in the less "respectable" penny dreadfuls and railway literature, and in both light and serious operas, the Gypsies regularly appear in the familiar guise of exotic, dark-skinned, nomadic and romantically alluring rural nomads. (139) As we know, Jane Eyre has a famous gypsy interlude when Rochester assumes the guise of a gypsy fortuneteller to interrogate Jane, and in The Mill on the Floss, Maggie as a little girl runs away briefly to join the gypsies. (1) Throughout the nineteenth century, novelists and poets drew on gypsies to represent a complex of meanings. Balzac, for instance, makes brief mention of them as figures of escape, exotica, and fortune-telling in eleven of his novels, Louisa May Alcott in eight novels deploys the gypsies as a trope for outdoor pleasure and sexual licentiousness, and Edward Bulwer Lytton in countless volumes invokes the gypsies as the dark ancestors of possibly dangerous characters. To characterize someone as a gypsy in the nineteenth-century novel is to bring in a host of negative connotations ranging from criminality to miscegenation. Estella's terrifying convict mother has gypsy blood in Great Expectations, Heathcliff's mysterious darkness and dangerousness stem from possible gypsy blood in Wuthering Heights, and Will Ladislaw's bohemian recklessness is explained by the inhabitants of Middlemarch as a product of gypsy parentage. Real gypsies were shunned during this period for allied reasons. As Celia Espuglas has set out, these reasons were underlaid by racism; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European accounts stressed the absolute racial apartness of gypsies as well as their status as a "degenerate" breed of humankind. (2) Gypsies were also disliked because they refused to fit into the prevailing economic system, relying instead on "fortune-telling, hawking secondhand goods, and clearing discarded waste" to make money (Espuglas 148). Grellmann's 1783 account of the gypsies, for instance, focused on the gypsies as indolent; Leo Lucassen notes that even when they worked as, for instance, musicians or hawkers, such activities were often a form of indirect intimidation and thievery (75). (3) Moreover, their standards of hygiene and cleanliness were far less stringent than those held by the typical British citizen--gypsies often left bodily waste in open trenches near their encampments and were renowned for their dirtiness and aversion to baths. Gypsies also had a reputation, probably merited to some degree, for unrestrained licentiousness and prostitution; certainly the figure of the female gypsy as an enticing alien (her descent from Cleopatra was legendary (4)) marked depictions such as that by George Crabbe: in his "The Lovers' Journey," Crabbe described a gypsy woman whose "light laugh and roguish leer express'd / The vice implanted in her youthful breast" (158-59). …