From Making Amends to Making Amendments: The Economy of Re/Degeneration, Vitalism, and Suffrage in Votes for Women!

從彌補到修正：《女性要投票》中衰落／重生論、生機論，與投票運動之經濟流動

10.6258/bcla.2017.86.05

王寶祥(Wang, Pao-hsiang)

suffrage ； feminist drama ； Elizabeth Robins ； vitalism ； degeneration ； 投票權 ； 女性主義戲劇 ； 伊莉莎白羅賓斯 ； 生機論 ； 衰落論

臺大文史哲學報

86期（2017 / 05 / 01）

159 - 188

英文

Votes for Women! (1907) by Elizabeth Robins has been known as a stridently political play agitating for women's suffrage in Edwardian Britain in the early twentieth century. Looking beyond its propagandist aspects, the paper examines the discursive formations of re/degeneration and vitalism, theories which were once influential, but now discredited as pseudo-sciences, hidden beneath the rallying cry and public outcry over whether women should be granted the right to vote, in a bid to explore the new Edwardian turn to economics over the old Victorian politics: how home formerly conceived as a regenerative core of procreation to deter degeneration is actually a center of domestic economic production by woman laborers, rather than angels, in the house; how the Victorian melodrama of a fallen woman's personal agonies can be transcended and converted, spiritually and economically, into a new reconciliation based on altruistic common good. The transformation of the old to the new is based on an Edwardian economic paradigm of currency and conversion, which helps convert an enormous inheritance fortune into a lasting legacy for the unfortunate, potential wronged woman's revenge tragedy into conciliatory comedy of alliance and union, and making amends to right old wrongs into making amendments for new rights, all these activated by the vitalist New Spirit of the New Woman from the ＂ferment of feminism＂ to ＂political dynamite,＂ to battle the bastion of patriarchy.

本文關注《女性要投票》中「新女性」對抗維多利亞父權政治層面外，易被忽略的愛德華時代新經濟轉向。以十九世紀末的偽科學：衰落論與生機論為切入點，探討家庭作為維多利亞社會之核心價值，女性做為「家中天使」捍衛血親免受「家道中落」汙染之形象，如何終不敵愛德華時期女性作為家中勞動者貢獻核心經濟生產之真相。除了爭取從齊家到治國的參政權，此劇亦從經濟角度，探究女主角如何捐棄維多利亞舊時代的通俗劇復仇劇碼，以協商的新經濟計算，換取不計個人恩怨，但求群體女性投票權福祉的利益交換。結論為超越個人彌補，朝向集體法律修正案的正向轉折，突顯新女性藉由生機論振奮而起的新精神，突破父權重重物質宰制，成功爭取生氣與重生。

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