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The Semi-Public Sphere, Maternity, and Regression in Rhys and Mansfield
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory Pub Date : 2017-07-03 , DOI: 10.1080/10436928.2017.1341792
Bridget Chalk

In her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please (1979), Jean Rhys describes her young adulthood in pre-World War I London. Set adrift from the support of family, Rhys recounts the lovers and friends of those days, and the many boarding houses, rented rooms, and cafés through which she passed: “Going from room to room in this cold dark country, England, I never knew what it was that spurred me on and gave me an absolute certainty that there would be something else for me before long. Now I think that the ‘something else’ was something small and limited” (90). Rhys recollects her past as an anticipatory narrative driven by the assumption of a satisfying resolution, generated from a mysterious source. Ultimately, however, she is disappointed and diminished by the resolution of her life as a single woman in the rundown lodging and dining establishments of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, an anticlimax which hints at the confining consequences of female urban visibility in the early twentieth century. In what follows, I trace the links among semi-public spatial environments, women’s sexual respectability, and the symbolic regression to childhood in fiction by Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield, two of the most prominent colonial women modernist writers. I argue that Rhys’s and Mansfield’s plots of domestic irony, read in the context of contemporary discourse and social assumptions surrounding the expanding semi-public sphere and respectability, illuminate the constricted horizon of possibility for single women of little means. Consistently, this urban fiction gestures toward and refuses conventional narrative resolutions of marriage and reproduction: instead of progressing to an ideal domesticity, as in a marriage plot, protagonists confined by circumstances to life outside a legitimate home regress imaginatively or symbolically to the state of childhood. If, as Simon Gikandi has argued, British modernism takes place within “imperial spaces (which) can no longer be conceived—or represented—as spaces that secure English identity” (165), we might further understand the specific patterns of resistance to standard domestic resolutions in the work of these colonial writers to reveal modes of policing gender, class, origin, and reproduction in the imperial metropole.

中文翻译:

Rhys和Mansfield的半公共领域,生育和回归

Jean Rhys在她未完成的自传《 Smile Please(1979)》中描述了她在第一次世界大战前的伦敦的年轻成年时期。瑞丝(Rhys)摆脱了家人的支持,讲述了当时的恋人和朋友,以及她经过的许多寄宿房,出租房和咖啡馆:“在这个寒冷的黑暗国家,从一个房间到另一个房间,我从来没有知道是什么促使我前进,并给我绝对的把握,不久以后我还会有其他事情。现在,我认为“其他”东西很小而且很有限”(90)。Rhys将她的过去作为一种预想性叙事来回忆,由一种神秘的来源产生了令人满意的解决方案。最终,在布鲁姆斯伯里(Bloomsbury)和切尔西(Chelsea)破败的住宿和餐饮场所中,单身女性的生活使她感到失望和失望,这种反高潮暗示了二十世纪初女性在城市中的知名度有限的后果。接下来,我追溯了两位最杰出的殖民女性现代主义作家让·里斯和凯瑟琳·曼斯菲尔德在半公共空间环境,女性的性尊敬以及象征性地回归童年之间的联系。我认为,在当代话语和围绕不断扩大的半公共领域和受人尊敬的社会假设的背景下阅读的里斯和曼斯菲尔德的家庭讽刺情节,阐明了单身女性收入微薄的可能性的狭窄境界。一致地,这部城市小说对婚姻和生育的传统叙事方式表示反对,并拒绝它:没有像婚姻情节那样发展为理想的家庭生活,而是主角根据情况将生活限制在合法家庭回归之外的生活,无论是想象力还是象征意义上的童年状态。如果像西蒙·吉坎迪(Simon Gikandi)所论证的那样,如果英国现代主义发生在“帝国空间(不能再被认为或代表为确保英国身份的空间)内”(165),我们可能会进一步理解抵制标准的具体模式。这些殖民作家的国内决议,揭示了在帝国大都会区管理性别,阶级,出身和繁殖的方式。就像在婚姻情节中一样,主角被情况限制在合法家庭之外的生活中,从想象力或象征意义上回归了童年状态。如果像西蒙·吉坎迪(Simon Gikandi)所论证的那样,如果英国现代主义发生在“帝国空间(不能再被认为或代表为确保英国身份的空间)内”(165),我们可能会进一步理解抵制标准的具体模式。这些殖民作家的国内决议,揭示了在帝国大都会区管理性别,阶级,出身和繁殖的方式。就像在婚姻情节中一样,主角被情况限制在合法家庭之外的生活中,从想象力或象征意义上回归了童年状态。如果像西蒙·吉坎迪(Simon Gikandi)所论证的那样,如果英国现代主义发生在“帝国空间(不能再被认为或代表为确保英国身份的空间)内”(165),我们可能会进一步理解抵制标准的具体模式。这些殖民作家的国内决议,揭示了在帝国大都会区管理性别,阶级,出身和繁殖的方式。
更新日期:2017-07-03
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