閣樓中的殭屍：探討《夢迴藻海》的克里奧爾化和帝國主義現象

Abstract

在十九世紀英國女性作家夏綠蒂．勃朗特所著的小說《簡愛》（Jane Eyre）中，女主人翁簡愛（Jane Eyre）親眼目睹了糾纏著羅徹斯特莊園居處的女鬼魂：如野獸般，在黑暗中潛伏的一個不明生物－柏莎．梅森（Bertha Mason）。在勃朗特的筆下，對柏莎行徑的不解透露出其英國維多利亞時代的帝國主義主導意識。茲此，多明尼加女性作家珍‧瑞絲（Jean Rhys）撰寫了《夢迴藻海》（Wide Sargasso Sea），不僅作為呼應《簡愛》的前傳，還挑戰簡愛對柏莎的主觀偏見，並嘗試從瘋狂、殭屍化現象解釋女主人翁安東娃妮塔（Antoinette）（柏莎）發瘋的原因。而從印度後殖民主義學者史碧華克（Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s）提出的壓迫第三世界被殖民者現象－第三世界系統（thirdworldism）理論，可做為解釋壟罩整本小說之下的權力運作體系與對克里奧爾人的種種影響和迫害。在瑞絲的筆下，她寫出安東娃妮塔遭受到丈夫羅徹斯特的帝國主義式、專權統治般的對待，更進一步，他對她施行了「殭屍化」（zombification），成為屬於他的女殭屍。本論文以瑞絲的文本架構為基礎，從史碧華克的「世界化」（worlding）和馬提尼克學者格里頌（Édouard Glissant）的克里奧爾化現象（Creolization）討論顛覆帝國主義現象的可行性；並且，透過分析被當代整體社會種族體系否認克里奧爾身分的女主人翁處境，進一步解釋她對羅徹斯特施行殭屍化和失敗；而後，作為反擊，羅徹斯特對其妻的終極殭屍化。最後，透過分析女主人翁被囚禁在英格蘭閣樓中所經歷的夢境，闡述她如何從中自我覺醒，並促成了她至終戰勝自我的去殭屍化現象（de-zombification）。

A monstrous, unknown creature lurking in the night was the description of the ghost woman haunting Rochester’s manor in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – Mrs. Bertha Mason – as witnessed by the protagonist, Englishwoman Jane Eyre. Beneath Brontë’s writing, the author’s contempt for Bertha revealed the underlying dominant consciousness of British Imperialism in the Victorian age. Dominican female writer Jean Rhys’s novel Wild Sargasso Sea offered a different perspective of the “mad woman in the attic” than that of Brontë. Rhys’s Wild Sargasso Sea served as a prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Rhys attempted to explain that a multitude of reasons contributed to the madness, or zombification, of her heroine, Antoinette Cosway. In Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concepts on postcolonial critique, Spivak introduced the notion of Western “thirdworldism” suppressing the colonized populations, which will be incorporated later in this thesis.\nIn contrast to Brontë’s version of the heroine’s psychopathic personality, Jean Rhys had endowed an utterly different life on Antoinette. Rhys’s Creole heroine pointed out the fact that she suffered deeply from an identity crisis under Rochester’s tyrannical attempts to westernize and imperialize her. In the end Antoinette became the “crazy wife,” a lifeless being like a zombie. From uncovering the imperial system that Western countries imposed on the third world, I will further explain the generalization of zombification as the outcome of imperial discourse. \nFor the purpose of this thesis, I will apply to Édouard Glissant’s hermeneutic of Creolization, and Spivak’s ideas such as ‘deworlding,’ to discuss a new anti-imperial possibility for Rhys’s different portrayal of the heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea. Furthermore, through the negation of Antoinette’s Creoleness, I will discuss the issues of why Antoinette fails to zombify Rochester, and in the opposite how Rochester performed the zombification successfully. As a result, I will focus on the analysis of Antoinette’s series of dreams in the attic of Thornfield Hall, which is seen as her awakening in the triumph of fulfilling her de-zombification.