Enacting Repulsive Bodies in Djuna Barnes’s The Dove

情動惡女身：株娜邦斯之戲劇《白鴿》

10.6257/JOTS.2016.17149

王寶祥(Pao-Hsiang Wang)

美國女性戲劇 ； 株娜邦斯 ； 莎孚文學 ； 反佛洛伊德 ； 現代主義 ； American drama by women ； Djuna Barnes ； Sapphic literature ； anti-Freud ； modernism

戲劇研究

17期（2016 / 01 / 01）

149 - 169

英文

一九二十年所謂的「爵士年代」美國婦女終於贏得投票權，成為政治上獲得解放的「新女性」，但幽微的心靈，甚至禁錮的身體解放課題，仍有待文學作品展演。邦斯這位標竿性的美國現代主義／女性主義作家藉由短劇《白鴿》以隱諱的象徵手法探討公領域解放後，女性私領域尚未解放的身體，如何成為權力與慾望抗衡的新戰場。藉由在紐約大都會蟄居的一對未婚姊妹，汲營蒐集知識／武器，卻荒廢探索慾望／身體，收養了神秘年輕號稱「白鴿」的外來女客，視其為救贖她們「惡女」怪誕身體的契機，來企圖探討女性身體自發的能動性，能否打破知與行，權力與慾望的二元對立僵局。我將以反現代主義優深層於表面之偏好為切入點，用邦斯「背佛洛伊德」的反深層心理分析觀，來探究本來無底層的情慾無底洞，點出中產階級對於背德之恐懼嫌惡，與其共生之反面吸引關注，此僵局端賴缺乏行動的語言分析並無法獲致救贖，對身體的自我禁錮及嫌惡，終究導致暴力宣洩的毀滅。

1920s marked the unbridled Jazz Age when American women were finally empowered to vote after decades of struggles. Universal suffrage emancipated women on the political and public front, but whether they were liberated in the private and psychological realms remained to be investigated in literary works. The fraught issues of sexual and psychological emancipations are addressed implicitly in Djuna Barnes’s play The Dove, in which the quintessential modernist/feminist writer configures the newly enfranchised women’s bodies as a new battleground of power and desire to inscribe self-defense as well as self-hatred. The grotesque bodies, which borrowing from Barnes’s poem I call “repulsive bodies,” are liberated politically yet sexually charged, and embodied by the spinster sisters in The Dove who thrive on accumulating knowledge/weapons yet skimp on exploring their desires/bodies. Through the introduction and intrusion of an enigmatic figure called the Dove into their exclusive and reclusive lives, the sophisticated Burgson sisters expect to find salvation out of their impasse of sterile knowledge and futile desiring, first through sexuality, then through violence, both enacted on the repulsive bodies. I adopt Barnes’s distinctive modernist yet anti-Freudian approach to explore the limits of psychoanalytic language in dealing with the ambivalence of sexual fear and desire, and examine the options of sexuality of self-loathing and violence of self-destruction as possible means of women’s darker inner liberation.

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