Women's Cultural Function in the Rise of the English Novel

本文从复辟时期和十八世纪英国的女性形象和女作家、女演员的文化功能两个方面对英国小说的起源进行了重新审视。已经清楚地表明，女性和现实女性(作家和女演员)的形象代表了小说形式创作的社会和文化趋势。出于几个原因，这项研究主要关注复辟运动中一位具有代表性的女作家阿芙拉·贝恩。首先，贝恩是英国文学史上第一位职业女作家，这一事实与类属文化的转型密切相关。这部小说的基础可以在贝恩在当时厚颜无耻的自我中心的男性文化中建立和保护她的身份的斗争中找到。其次，贝恩的作家生涯似乎代表了占主导地位的文学形式从戏剧向小说的转变。在她晚年，她写了几部散文浪漫小说，包括她著名的中篇小说《奥鲁诺科》。诚然，1682年，两家特许剧院的联合迫使她冒险进入有利可图的浪漫爱情写作领域。两家剧院的合并对像贝恩这样依赖剧场收入的专业剧作家来说是一个毁灭性的打击。然而，这种转变给贝恩的写作方式带来了实质性的转变。她在当时以男性为中心的文化中找到了一种更好的媒介来表达女性的困境。特别是在她的最后一部浪漫小说《大野子》中，我们可以看到第一部分的浪漫叙事向第二部分的现实主义转变中的文化动力的转变。这是女性文化功能的确凿证据，正是这种文化功能促成了18世纪小说的诞生。

This is a reconsideration of the origin of the English novel in terms of the image of women and the cultural function of women writers and actresses of the Restoration and eighteenth century England. It has been made clear that the image of women and actual women (authors and actresses) represent the social and cultural trend towards the creation of the novel form. The study has been mainly concerned with one representative woman writer of the Restoration, Aphra Behn, for several reasons. First, the fact that Behn was the first professional woman writer in the history of English Literature is closely connected to the generic cultural transformation. The foundations of the novel may be found in the struggle of Behn to establish and protect her identity in the unashamedly egotistical male culture of the time. Secondly, Behn's career as a writer seems to represent the shift of the dominant literary form from the drama to the novel. In her late years she wrote several prose romances including her famous novella Oroonoko. It is true that she was forced to venture into the field of lucrative romance writing by the union of the two licensed theatres in 1682. The merger of the theatres was a crushing blow to professional playwrights such as Behn who depended on the income from the playhouses. However, this shift brought about a substantial transformation of Behn's way of writing. She has found a better medium for the expression of the predicaments of women in the male-centered culture of the time. Especially, in her last romance, Oroonoko, we can witness the shifting cultural dynamism in the transition of the romance narrative in the first part to the realism of the second part. This is a definitive proof of women's cultural function that brought about the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century.