女性讀寫／讀寫女性－女性志異小說與《科學怪人》

本文探討十八世紀末與十九世紀初期英國女性志異小說與社會的互動、女性作者及女性讀者與當時志異傳統的生產、複製與傳播的關係。論文第一部分討論志異小說「興起」的背景及當時社會結構與意識型態對於女性書寫與閱讀之影響，並將女性志異與女性成長小說並置比較。其二經由閱讀《科學怪人》中的成長敘事，討論雪萊如何在《科學怪人》中以性別越界的「扮裝書寫」刻劃女性在傳統社會中如何遭到性別化的限制，從而重新詮釋女性志異小說。然而《科學怪人》的不同版本也展現的雪萊日漸保守的書寫策略與心態，可為文化生產與社會間互動的具體表現。

關鍵字

女性志異小說；《科學怪人》；瑪莉．雪萊；文化生產

並列摘要

This paper explores the development of the English female gothic from roughly 1760 to 1820, and examines the development of the genre from cultural, political, and economic perspectives with a specific focus on women's role in the production, reproduction, and transmission in the early gothic tradition. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses the socio-political background behind the ＂rise＂ of the English gothic novel and how the act of writing and that of reading the female gothic could potentially undermine the bourgeois ideology of domesticity. Moreover, I argue that the female gothic provides an alternative narrative of Bildung for women since women writers and readers are able to negotiate a release of their ＂veiled＂ or repressed desires and encode a possible construction of female subjectivity within the textual space. The second part consists of a close reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Through reading the multiple narratives of Bildung in the novel, I explore the ways in which Shelley deploys the strategy of cross-dressing writing to highlight the gendered roles of women in a traditional society and to reinterpret and reinvent the genre as a whole. As revealed in the different editions of the novel, however, we can also come to understand the increasingly conservative attitude of Shelley, which embodies intimate and inevitable interactions of social forces and cultural production.