Reviewed by:

• Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught
• Annika J. Lindskog (bio)

Following Carol Loeb Shloss’s 2003 biography of Lucia Joyce, several fictional portraits have appeared of James Joyce’s daughter.¹ She figures in several plays, such as Michael Hasting’s Calico and Sophia Ginsburg’s L, and she is the subject of several works of fiction, most notably Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Alex Pheby’s Lucia.² Collectively, these works suggest that Lucia has come to embody a specific position not only within the biographical context of her father’s life but also in culture at large: she has become a symbol of an abused and traumatized woman—misunderstood and disturbed, silenced and forgotten.

With Saving Lucia, the British author Anna Vaught adds to this growing body of biographical fiction. Her novel—like Moore’s Jerusalem and Pheby’s Lucia—is set in St. Andrew’s psychiatric hospital in Northampton, United Kingdom, where Lucia Joyce was incarcerated in 1951 and where she eventually died in 1982. Not much is known about her long stay at St. Andrew’s, mostly due to the fact that her nephew, Stephen Joyce, destroyed what remained of her correspondence and a rumored novel manuscript in 1988. Perhaps this lack of information is also the reason why the hospital has become an ideal setting for works of fiction that seek to liberate Lucia, both from her supposedly destructive family and from her incarceration: it provides a blank slate for imagining how a talented young woman would end up locked away from the rest of the world.

As the title of Vaught’s novel suggests, this, too, is a work of fiction that seeks to free Lucia from the circumstances of her life. To a large extent, it does so by questioning the idea of insanity that Lucia has come to symbolize: her position as the “dotty daughter of the genius writer” (2). It positions her in the midst of three other women of somewhat similar status. The first of these, Lady Violet Gibson, is the central character of the novel, despite its title and the fact that it is Lucia who narrates. A fellow patient at St. Andrew’s until her death in 1956, Gibson’s claim to fame is her attempted murder of Benito Mussolini in 1926, which failed spectacularly; her shot barely grazed the tip of the Fascist leader’s nose. It is Gibson who mostly speaks in Vaught’s novel, while Lucia both reports on and takes part in her imagined excursions. As part of these, Gibson gives voice to two other women: Blanche Wittmann, one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s most famous hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and Bertha Pappenheim, who has become known as Anna O. through Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria.³

Placing Lucia among these three other supposedly “lunatic” women makes it clear that Vaught’s novel is more engaged in exploring [End Page 221] a general idea of insanity—perhaps especially in connection with gender—than in depicting Lucia Joyce’s life. Despite the fact that Lucia, the narrator, claims early on that what she is writing is “a more-or-less true story,” there is little inclusion of known biographical facts (2). The famous father is only mentioned sporadically and briefly, either as a genius writer or a loved and concerned “daddy” (11). Throughout, Nora Joyce is referred to as “the barnacle,” the “lower case for disrespect” (11). But neither parent forms a presence in the novel; they are only perfunctorily referred to, and their relationships to their daughter remain without any depth. Somewhat similarly, when Saving Lucia alludes to Joyce’s works, it tends to include the reference, as in “Lucia’s father wrote of those [slums] in Dubliners, you know” or “I remember [Daddy] spoke about liberating sounds—and this is what he did in Finnegans Wake—from their servile contemptible role” (97, 109). The most annoying bits of biographical information wedged into the text are those that refer to things yet...

审核人：

• 安娜·沃特《拯救露西亚》
• Annika J.Lindskog（生物）

˚F ollowing卡罗尔·勒布Shloss的露西娅·乔伊斯2003传记，几个虚构的人物肖像出现詹姆斯·乔伊斯的女儿。¹她出演过数部戏剧，例如迈克尔·黑斯廷的《印花布》和索菲娅·金斯堡的《L》，她是多部小说作品的主题，最著名的是安娜贝尔·阿布斯的《乔伊斯女孩》，艾伦·摩尔的耶路撒冷和阿历克斯·菲比的露西娅。²这些作品共同表明，露西亚不仅在父亲一生的传记背景下，而且在整个文化中都表现出特定的地位：她已成为受虐待和受创伤的妇女的象征，被误解，打扰，沉默和忘记了。

英国作家安娜·沃特（Anna Vaught）通过《拯救露西亚（Saving Lucia）》，将这一日益丰富的传记小说加入其中。她的小说-像摩尔的耶路撒冷和费比的露西娅—设在英国北安普敦的圣安德鲁精神病医院，露西娅·乔伊斯（Lucia Joyce）于1951年被监禁，最终于1982年去世。对她长期留在圣安德鲁医院的了解并不多，主要是因为她侄子史蒂芬·乔伊斯（Stephen Joyce）于1988年销毁了她的书信和传闻中的小说手稿。也许是由于缺乏信息，这家医院已成为寻求解放露西亚的小说作品的理想场所，两者均据称是她的本意。破坏性的家庭和她的监禁：它为想象一个才华横溢的年轻女子最终如何被锁在世界其他地方提供了空白。

正如沃特小说的标题所暗示的那样，这也是一部虚构的作品，旨在使卢西亚摆脱自己的生活环境。在很大程度上，它是通过质疑卢西亚所象征的精神错乱来做到这一点的：卢西亚是“天才作家的愚蠢女儿”（2）。它使她处于其他三名地位相似的女性中间。其中的第一部，《紫罗兰色的吉布森夫人》是这部小说的中心人物，尽管它的标题和叙述者是露西亚。吉布森一直是圣安德鲁医院的一名病人，直到1956年去世，吉布森成名的原因是她在1926年谋杀贝尼托·墨索里尼的企图谋杀案，但以失败告终。她的枪声几乎没有掠过法西斯领导人的鼻子。吉布森（Gibson）在沃特（Vaught）的小说中主要讲话，而露西娅（Lucia）则同时报道并参与了她想象中的短途旅行。歇斯底里的研究。³

将卢西亚（Lucia）置于其他三名据称是“疯子”的女性之中，这清楚表明，沃特的小说更加投入探索[End Page 221]精神错乱的一般概念（也许尤其是与性别有关的思想）比描绘露西娅·乔伊斯的生活更重要。尽管叙述者卢西亚（Lucia）早就宣称自己所写的东西是“或多或少的真实故事”，但几乎没有任何已知的传记事实（2）。这位著名的父亲只是偶尔被提及，既是天才作家，又是亲爱的，备受关注的“爸爸”（11）。自始至终，诺拉·乔伊斯（Nora Joyce）被称为“藤壶”，“不尊重的小写字母”（11）。但是父母双方都没有出现在小说中。他们只是被残酷地提及，他们与女儿的关系仍然没有任何深度。与此类似，当拯救卢西亚（Lucia Lucia）提及乔伊斯（Joyce）的作品时，它往往包含了引用，例如“卢西亚（Lucia）的父亲在书中写道那些[贫民窟]都柏林人，“您知道的”或“我记得[爸爸]谈到过解放声音的方法-这就是他在Finnegans Wake中所做的-从他们卑鄙的角色中脱颖而出”（97，109）。文字中最令人讨厌的传记信息是那些引用事物的信息。