From Restricted to Unrestricted Expenditure: Body Economy in James's The Sacred Fount

從限制性到無限制性消費：詹姆士《聖泉》中的身體經濟

10.30092/JHCLANCHU.200709.0013

王俊三(Chun-San Wang)

聖泉 ； 原慾交換 ； 渾雄經濟 ； 恐怖靈視 ； 情色想像 ； 消費 ； The Sacred Fount ； libidinal exchange ； sublime economy ； vision of horrors ； spermatic economy ； expenditure ； pornographic imagination

興大人文學報

39期（2007 / 09 / 01）

401 - 440

英文

詹姆士《聖泉》一書中匿名敘述者所建構的聖泉理論一直困惑著讀者，而評論家通常將它簡化成敘述者個人情色想像的創造物。相對於這種看法，本文將聖泉理論視為後維多利亞時期性意識形態的產物，並藉由探討文本中個體慾望與意識形態間的辯證關係而嘗試提出下列結論：《聖泉》一書再現、同時亦解構後維多利亞時期的性意識形態，並爲個體慾望標定出逃離其監控的（不）可能路線。

The theory of the sacred fount constructed by the unnamed first-person narrator in The Sacred Fount has baffled its readers since its publication in 1902. For most Jamesian critics, this theory is merely a whimsical and prurient fantasy of the narrator. However, this article argues that, more than a private fantasy of the narrator, the theory of the fount is inscribed within the sexual ideology of the late-Victorian age. This approach allows us to see the theory not simply as the outcome of the narrator's solipsistic idealism as many illustrious scholars hold it to be: it is a logical consequence of his belief in the late-Victorian sexual ideology. This article examines the complex interchanges whereby the ideological structure of beliefs is translated into a narrative structure that encodes and perpetuates those beliefs. However, as this article also attempts to show, the very act of deciphering the plot and characterization uncovers a simultaneous counter-narrative: the persistent undermining of the dominant sexual ideology by the contradictions concealed within the specific form that its representation has assumed. Therefore, the aggressivity of the novel is not, as some critics have asserted, aimed at its reader, so much as it is targeted at the sexual ideology itself: embedded and inscribed within the repressive sexual ideology, The Sacred Fount simultaneously represents and undermines that ideology by locating its inherent fissures and gaps and thus maps out, for the individual's desires, a(n) (im-)possible route of escape from the surveillance of that ideology.

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