Linguistic Regionalism and the Emergence of Chinese American Literature in Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance

語言地域主義及水仙花的《春香夫人》中的華裔美國文學的出現

Marjorie Pryse

《Tamkang Review》 38卷1期 (2007/12) Pp. 27-70

https://doi.org/10.6184/TKR.200712_38(1).0002

摘要

本文從一開始便主張水仙花／伊頓(Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton)(1865-1914)無法納入批評家在華裔美國文學裡所建立的現成的範疇，本文賦與她地域文學作家的地位，她的作品展現出她在抗拒十九世紀晚期美國出版界對中國人的主流再現，而且她透過在《春香夫人》中英文的使用獲致藝術形式及一種能幫助讀者達到不同看法的策略。了解水仙花對美國文學的貢獻其關鍵在於分析這本代表她生涯巔峰的著作裡英文的使用。使用費特麗(Judith Fetterley)與卜萊斯(Marjorie Pryse)所謂的「邊界語言」(”language on the border land”)或是我在本文中所謂的「語言雙文化」(the linguistic bicultural)，水仙花在經過多年掙扎後，在英文本身的結構裡發現如何再現在美國的中國人經驗。她重新塑造英文，使其一方面能反映這種經驗，另一方面又展現她的移民人物能意識到英語這種語言將支配性予以符碼化的方式，而這種支配性正反應這個時期的美國政治。本文將水仙花的地域主義與哈特(Bret Harte)的書寫裡對中國人的「地方色彩」式的再現加以對比，並對《春香夫人》當中的數篇小說—「春香夫人」、「身分低下的女人」、「自由之土」、「新異的智慧」、「寶珠(Pau Tsu)的美國化」、「搖擺的意象」－提供語言學式的閱讀。

關鍵字

美國文學地域主義 ； 中國移民經驗 ； 亞裔美國文學

並列摘要

Beginning by suggesting that Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) readily fits none of the categories recent critics have established within Chinese American literature, this essay situates her as a regionalist writer whose work demonstrates her struggle against mainstream representations of the Chinese in the late nineteenth-century American press and who achieves artistic form and a strategy for helping her readers see differently through her use of the English language in Mrs. Spring Fragrance. The key to understanding Sui Sin Far's contribution to American literature lies in analyzing her use of English in this volume that serves as the culmination of her career. Writing what Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have called ”language on the border land” (192), or what I am calling in this essay the linguistic bicultural, Sui Sin Far, after years of struggle, discovers in the structures of English itself how to represent the Chinese experience in America. She refashions English in such a way both as to reflect that experience and to demonstrate her immigrant characters' consciousness of the ways the English language encodes a dominance that reflects U.S. politics of the period. The essay contrasts Sui Sin Far's regionalism with ”local color” representations of the Chinese in the writings of Bret Harte, and offers a linguistic reading of several stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance -”Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” ”The Inferior Woman,” ”In the Land of the Free,” ”The Wisdom of the New,” ”The Americanizing of Pau Tsu,” and ”Its Wavering Image.”

並列關鍵字

American literary regionalism ； Chinese immigrant experience ； Asian American literature

參考文獻

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