ABSTRACT

George Eliot wrote “Janet’s Repentance” as one of her Scenes from Clerical Life (1857) to support Barbara Leigh Smith’s campaign for freer access to divorce. Eliot was inspired to sign Smith’s petition by brutal stories of abused wives such as Caroline Norton. She was distressed by the idea of women trapped in marriages to violent men by the misogynistic divorce laws. Eliot then made the unusual artistic choice of writing a “scene” about middle-class drinking (as opposed to working- or upper-class drinking) and marriage featuring a lawyer, Robert Dempster, and his wife, Janet. Middle-class drinking was a subject rarely broached by popular novelists or temperance campaigners, who had until this time focussed on less socially transgressive subjects among the working-classes and aristocracy. However, Eliot was angered by the portrayals of innocent husbands trapped in unhappy marriages by their drunken and irresponsible wives written in temperance fiction and by popular authors such as Charles Dickens. The latter’s account of Stephen Blackpool’s wife in Hard Times, written to support his own campaign for changes to the divorce laws in the early 1850s, makes the figure of the drunken wife abhuman. Eliot’s “scene” counterbalances such common figures. This article will examine the cause and effect of Eliot’s portrayal of a drunken husband and the psychological impact on his intelligent and caring wife.

摘要

乔治·艾略特（George Eliot）撰写了《珍妮特的悔改》，这是她的《牧师生活》中的场景之一（1857）支持芭芭拉·利·史密斯（Barbara Leigh Smith）争取离婚自由的运动。艾略特（Eliot）受到卡罗琳·诺顿（Caroline Norton）等受虐待妻子的残酷故事的启发而签署了史密斯的请愿书。厌恶女权的离婚法使妇女陷入与暴力男子的婚姻中，使她感到苦恼。然后，艾略特做出了非同寻常的艺术选择，写了一本关于中产阶级饮酒（而不是上班族或上层阶级饮酒）和婚姻的“场景”，律师罗伯特·登普斯特和他的妻子珍妮特为之。中产阶级饮酒是一门鲜为流行的小说家或节制运动家提倡的话题，直到那时为止，他们一直关注于工人阶级和贵族阶层中较少侵犯社会的话题。然而，艾略特对节制小说中醉酒且不负责任的妻子以及查尔斯·狄更斯（Charles Dickens）等通俗作家陷于不幸婚姻中的无辜丈夫的刻画感到愤怒。后者对史蒂芬·布莱克浦（Stephen Blackpool）的妻子的描述《艰难时报》（Hard Times）的撰写是为了支持他自己在1850年代初改变离婚法的运动，使醉酒的妻子的形象变得无人为人。艾略特（Eliot）的“场景”平衡了这些普通人物。本文将探讨艾略特（Eliot）描绘醉酒丈夫的成因和后果，以及对他聪明而有爱心的妻子的心理影响。