欲望的对象:王尔德《理想丈夫》中的艺术与胜利

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2022-03-15 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2022.2057155
T. Groff
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引用次数: 0

摘要

在奥斯卡·王尔德的小说和戏剧中,物品具有象征意义,衬托了对手的情节,并表明了王尔德笔下人物的性欲。《多里安·格雷的画像》(1891)在主人公的画像中描绘了生活经历的变革力量;《认真的重要性》(1895)通过手提包确认了家庭地位和身份;《理想的丈夫》(1895)中的一位主人公适时认出了一只手镯,从而化解了勒索企图。除了充当有价值的自负之外,物体还充当关键的能指,王尔德经常允许物体充当角色本身的延伸。通常,这种延伸行为既是关于定义,也是关于替代,就像《多里安·格雷的画像》中的德·费罗尔夫人一样,亨利勋爵将其描述为“一部糟糕的法国小说的奢华版”,当时“她穿着一件非常时髦的礼服”(2007175),这是《温德米尔夫人的扇子》(1892)中重复的一句俏皮话,当时邓比指的是德费罗尔女士。Erlynne是“一部邪恶的法国小说的奢华版,专门针对英国市场”(1995年b月,26日)。邓比发言末尾的限定词很重要。王尔德认为,他确实在塑造具有丑闻性取向的角色,这些角色可能会像那个时代颓废的法国“黄皮书”一样让英国公众感到震惊,比如J·K·胡斯曼的《反弹》,但以一种允许他们在舞台上为英国观众呈现的方式进行了编纂。我的分析始于这样一个假设,即对象——以道具和会话指称的形式——确实表明了王尔德笔下人物的个人驱动力,包括性和政治野心。《理想的丈夫》有助于仔细阅读其作品,因为王尔德在入狱后专门为印刷品修改了这本书。正如乔尔·卡普兰(Joel H.Kaplan)和希拉·斯托维尔(Sheila Stowell)(1994)所解释的那样,由于王尔德增加了“冗长的舞台指示,确保主题点将通过风格和服装手段提出”(27),该剧“在多大程度上试图为阅读大众创造视觉即时感,这是独一无二的”。《一个理想的丈夫》也许能为读者提供比观众更多的东西。由于王尔德坚持不懈的视觉线索,这部剧除了分析丰富外,还邀请了进一步的分析,因为它的对话和舞台指导中充斥着大量具有性和政治意味的物品,从洛可可绘画到黄书。这些物品不仅提供了对人物性身份的洞察,而且还具有引人注目的政治含义。
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Objects of desire: art and triumph in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband
Throughout Oscar Wilde’s fiction and drama, objects carry symbolic weight, foil the plots of antagonists, and signal the sexual desires of Wilde’s characters. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) figures the transformative power of life’s experiences in a portrait of the protagonist; The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) confirms familial standing and identity through a handbag; and An Ideal Husband (1895) defuses a blackmail attempt when one of its protagonists recognizes a bracelet at an opportune moment. In addition to serving as valuable conceits, objects function as key signifiers, with Wilde regularly allowing objects to serve as extensions of characters themselves. Often, this act of extension is as much about definition as it is about substitution, as with Madame de Ferrol, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whom Lord Henry describes as “an édition de luxe of a bad French novel” when “she is in a very smart gown” (2007, 175), a quip recycled in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), when Dumby refers to Mrs. Erlynne as “an édition de luxe of a wicked French novel, meant specially for the English market” (1995b, 26). The qualifier at the end of Dumby’s statement is important to note. With it, Wilde suggests that he is indeed crafting characters with scandalous sexualities, ones that are as potentially shocking to the British public as the decadent French “yellow book” of the era – like J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours – but codified in a way that allows them to be presented on stage for British theatergoers. My analysis begins with the assumption that objects – in the form of both props and conversational referents – do indeed signal the individual drives, including the sexual and political ambitions, of Wilde’s characters. An Ideal Husband lends itself to a close reading of its objects because Wilde revised it specifically for print following his incarceration. As Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (1994) explain, the play “is unique in the extent to which it attempts to create for a reading public a sense of visual immediacy” due to Wilde’s addition of “lengthy stage directions ensuring that thematic points would be made by stylistic and sartorial means” (27). An Ideal Husband perhaps offers more to the reader than the theatergoer. In addition to being analytically rich thanks to Wilde’s persistent visual cues, the play invites further analysis because its dialogue and stage directions are rife with a surprising number of references to objects with sexually and politically charged meanings, from Rococo paintings to yellow books. These objects not only offer insight into the sexual identities of characters, but they also carry striking political implications.
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来源期刊
CiteScore
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发文量
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期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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