Aesthetics and Gender in Modern Society: Eighteenth-century Britain

在18世纪和19世纪初的英国，在与崇高和风景如画的美学范畴的关系中，游记小说和哥特式小说在读者中盛行，不少女性不仅作为读者/消费者，而且作为作家/生产者，试图将美学的语言(审美话语)内化和挪用。但在这一时期，女性被传统地视为审美对象(凝视的对象)，并被主流美学理论定义为受过教育、拥有财产的绅士的一种衬托。因此，一些女性作家对自己作为审美主体(凝视主体)的定位感到不安，在描写自然风光或异域风光以及在那里生活和工作的人时，容易偏离山水美学的标准语言。通过对他们的游记作品的研究，我发现这种偏离是其中的共同特征之一，如M·W·蒙塔古夫人(土耳其)、珍妮特·肖(西印度群岛)、海伦·玛丽亚·威廉姆斯(法国大革命时期)、安·拉德克利夫(荷兰和德国)、玛丽·雪莱(德国和瑞士)等。我想说，这些游记作品正在重新审视诸如沉思概念等美学习俗，揭露其既得利益，并从阶级、种族和性别的角度，通过它们本身的背离或(似乎)不一致，揭示现代美学理论的社会和政治逻辑。

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth Britain, where, in the relationship to aesthetic categories of the sublime and picturesque, Travel writings and Gothic novels were prevailing among the reading public, not a few women have tried to appropriate and internalize the language of aesthetics (aesthetic discourse), not only as readers/consumers but also as writers/producers. But in this period, woman was conventionally regarded as an aesthetic object (an object gazed) and as a kind of foil against which the main stream aesthetic theory defined the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. So several woman writers felt uneasiness in their positioning as aesthetic subjects (gazing subjects), describing the natural scenery or exotic landscape and the people living and working there, and were apt to deviate from the standard language of the aesthetics of landscape. I found this deviation to be one of common characters among them, through my research especially into their travel writings, e.g. Lady M. W. Montague (Turkey), Janet Shaw (West Indies), Helen Maria Williams (France in its Revolutionary period), Ann Radcliffe (Holland and Germany), Mary Shelley (Germany and Switzerland) and so on. I would like to argue that these travel writings are reexamining aesthetic conventions such as the concept of contemplation, exposing its vested interests, and reveal the social and political logic of the modern aesthetic theory from the points of class, race and gender, through their very deviation or (seeming) inconsistency.