in Wide Sargasso Sea
in Wide Sargasso Sea
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在广阔的马尾藻海中
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发表时间：
2016
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通讯作者：
Lee Erwin
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作者：
Lee Erwin
让·里斯(Jean Rhys)1966年出版的《马尾藻海漫漫》戏剧性地亮相，这本书的作者在沉默和默默无闻了四分之一个世纪后，倾向于隐藏这本书长达20年的孕育过程中不那么浪漫的事实。然而，这部小说在1945年之前已经写完了一部分，这一点意义重大。从40年代中期到60年代中期，涵盖了大英帝国解体的大部分时间，在里斯的所有小说中，只有《藻海无边》与她在英属西印度群岛的背景完全接触(尽管在一定程度上偏离了历史)，我们可以通过这种叙事来寻找不同的叙事主题读入历史的方式。伊丽莎白·努涅斯-哈雷尔认为《马尾藻海阔天空》可能是对50年代末的S和60年代的S的[西印度群岛]民族主义情绪的一种回应，这种情绪可能导致里斯希望“在西印度群岛文学中占据她的位置”(第287页)。然而，这部小说似乎更像是生活在民族主义之间的悬而未决的境地；它的存在是对“未来之地”的丧失而不是恢复的回应，展开了一场关于身份的斗争，这是对西印度群岛历史的一种独特的现代重读。这部小说的历史背景是1833年颁布的《解放法案》，该法案宣布所有英国殖民地的奴隶最终获得自由，以及围绕它的种族冲突和社会和经济动荡。正如加亚特里·斯皮瓦克所主张的那样，里斯在小说的殖民背景下冒险从“错误的一面”的角度写作，不仅从白人奴隶主的女儿安托瓦内特的角度写作，而且也从一个英国白人的角度(“生产”)进行写作。然而，在我看来，里斯承担的更大风险是建议将安托瓦内特(里斯对《简·爱》中伯莎·梅森的修订版)解雇桑菲尔德厅一事与放火焚烧她家族庄园的前奴隶之间的身份联系起来。除了将这两个事件相提并论外，这部小说还表明，克里斯托弗的《奥贝哈》指导着结局。在罗切斯特离开西印度群岛之前，他被他与克里斯托芬的最后一次长谈所驱使，哭了起来：“如果我从来没有见过这个可恶的地方，我愿意付出我的眼睛。”克里斯托弗回答说：“你选择你所给予的，是吗？然后你来选择。你插手某事，也许你不知道那是什么。因此，当安托瓦内特在桑菲尔德音乐厅第三次也是最后一次梦到她的梦想时，她向克里斯托弗求救，看到自己被一堵火墙帮助了--我们从简·爱那里知道，罗切斯特失去了他所选择的失去的东西。以这种方式布局的《马尾藻海阔天空》似乎是一种背信弃义的行为，只吸引任何仍然能够接受的资产阶级女权主义者。
The dramatic appearance of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, after a quarter-century of silence and obscurity for its author, has tended to occult the less romantic facts of the book's two-decade-long gestation. That the novel had been partly written by 1945 is significant, however. The years between the midforties and the mid-sixties having encompassed much of the break-up of the British Empire, and Wide Sargasso Sea alone of all of Rhys's novels engaging fully (though at a certain historical remove) with her background in the British West Indies, we might look for a difference in the way the subject of a narrative written at one time or another reads itself into history by means of that narrative. Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell has suggested that Wide Sargasso Sea might be a "response to the nationalistic mood [in the West Indies] of the late '50's and '60's," which could have led Rhys to wish "to assume her place in West Indian literature" (287). Yet the novel seems rather to inhabit a limbo between nationalisms; it exists as a response to the loss, rather than the recovery, of a "place-to-be-from," enacting a struggle over identity which is a peculiarly modern rereading of West Indian history. The historical circumstances that set the novel in motion are the Emancipation Act that in 1833 decreed the eventual freedom of the slaves in all of the British colonies and the racial conflicts and social and economic turmoil that surrounded it. As Gayatri Spivak has argued, Rhys takes the risks of writing from the point of view of "the wrong side" in the novel's colonial setting, writing not only from the point of view of Antoinette, the white slave-owner's daughter, but from that of a white Englishman as well ("Production"). Yet, in my view, the greater risk Rhys takes is to suggest an identification between Antoinette (Rhys's revision of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) in her firing of Thornfield Hall and the ex-slaves who set fire to her family's estate. Besides drawing a parallel between the two events, the novel suggests that it is Christophine's obeah that guides the outcome. Before "Rochester" leaves the West Indies, he is driven by his long last talk with Christophine to cry, "I would give my eyes never to have seen this abominable place." Christophine replies, "You choose what you give, eh? Then you choose. You meddle in something and perhaps you don't know what it is" (557). Thus, when Antoinette dreams her dream for the third and last time, in Thornfield Hall, she cries out to Christophine for help and sees that she has "been helped" by "a wall of fire"-and we know from Jane Eyre that Rochester loses exactly what he "chose" to lose. Laid out in this way, Wide Sargasso Sea may seem an exercise in bad faith, appealing only to any vestige of bourgeois feminism still able to ac