摘要:自從1980年代以來,浪漫學者開始注意到長久受到嚴重忽略與不公平待遇的女性文學。首先學者從女性主義先驅即維多利亞小說的批評家如Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)所建立的傳統出發。Anne Mellor (1988; 1993; 1999; 2000)以新的視野檢視浪漫時期女性文學,企圖建立女性專屬的概念與再現的母體結構,包括認識論、美學等層面,以相對於評論家依據六位男性經典作家所建構的浪漫文學典範。Marlon Ross (1989), Stuart Curran (1988)等,更嘗試建立女性自己的文學傳統、族譜、經典、批評準則。1790s-1830s期間,活躍的女詩人在自我審視與公眾論壇的交集一定會面臨的難題:亦即「正統的女性角色」相對於「國家認同」的困頓。這個多重難題有著複雜的歷史背景。現代女性主義評論者通常解釋「感性的人」的現象為男性剽竊、侵用女性的優勢以鞏固本身的權威。但是「感性」對女性作家卻從不是單純的優勢,有時反而是缺陷。本計劃擬探討三位女作家的詩作:芭柏、史蜜絲、賀蔓絲。我選擇詩而非小說的原因有二:一是詩的有限空間、嚴謹格律、
Abstract: Since the late 1980s, Romantic critics began to pay attention to the unduly neglected large chunk of literary output by women. Firstly, critics brought in the legacy of pioneering feminist readings on Victorian novels, such as that offered by Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979). Foremost among them, Anne Mellor (1988; 1993; 2000) provides a new perspective on literature of this period, with a view to building a feminine epistemology, aesthetics, etc., as a matrix to counter that drawn up by critics reading mainly six male poets. Marlon Ross (1989), Stuart Curran (1988) among other critics try to establish a literature of women’s own, with its own genealogy, cannon, and criteria, etc. Their trailblazing works are laudable and long overdue in that they have restored the contemporary literary scene, which was dominated by women writers, a dominance bypassed by male critics since modernism. Isobel Armstrong (1995; 1999) explains this deliberate overlook as based on modernist’s denunciation of sentiment, which serves as a central backbone to Romantic writing by women. Armstrong further points out that Mellor, Ross and the like, have risked placing and locking these women writers back into the binary system that their critique set about to expose as obsolete from the outset. To put it more bluntly, they are driving toward the cul de sac of essentialism. Instead, Armstrong seeks to reach for a hermeneutics of female poetry, through a radical vindication of emotion, by means of reading women alongside with men. In a similar manner and with a similar spirit to that held by Armstrong, this project sets out to bridge the apparent divide between the lyrical tradition of the “poetess” and women’s political writing endeavour, a divide already noticed by Mellor (2000). . I will conduct a critical examination of sentiment employed in these two types of works with a special emphasis on the intersections of proper womanhood and national identity, which is a crux of self scrutiny and public debate involving women writers active around the 1790s-1830s.
Interwoven contentions about women writers with intentions to influence the society are centred around the paradox of “female patriot” (Lootens, 1994). How can they contribute to the society they saw as increasingly fraying, without being dismissed as irrelevant, or derided as ridiculous, as what they were condemned in Richard Polwhele’s notorious The Unsex’d Females (1798)? Women associated with the Bluestocking circle, for example, Anna Barbauld, bear the blunt of the relentless attack. Women writers have to shrewdly negotiate their image of authorship and authority as public women participating in a nascent market economy (Hofkosh, 1993). It is through works centred on sentiment that they are seen to have fulfilled a role sanctioned by the society, as guardians of morality (Craciun and Lokke, 2001). Sentiment provides a leverage with which women writers hope to wrench the society away from certa