[Paper Keywords] feminist narratology; Narrator; Narrative authority; Virginia Woolf
[Abstract] Susan Lanser, one of the representatives of feminist narratology, is used to interpret Virginia Woolf's classic novel To the Lighthouse. We can see that Woolf has constructed a modest narrator image in the public narrative layer of the novel, but outlined an ubiquitous narrator image in the hidden narrative layer. By analyzing and discussing what the narrator of the novel did in the hidden narrative level, it can be proved that the narrator of To the Lighthouse is just like the kind of "God" advocated by the classic realistic novels of19th century. Such a "God" narrator relies on and shares the narrative authority of male writers, and Woolf's own pursuit and dependence on narrative authority determines why she can be in modernism and feminism.
To the Lighthouse is a classic work by Virginia Woolf, a modernist novelist and pioneer of feminist movement. Since 1927, it has been favored and sought after by critics and readers. It is not difficult to find that Chinese and foreign critics have studied the novel from many angles and directions, but so far they have rarely interpreted it from the perspective of feminist narratology. This paper attempts to analyze and discuss the works from these angles and draw new conclusions.
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Western classic narratology inherits Russian formalism, accepts British and American new criticism, and then follows French structuralism, aiming at constructing narrative grammar or poetics, focusing on the narrated story, studying the composition, structural relationship and operation law of narrative works, and paying attention to the technical analysis of narrative texts. Western feminist literary criticism is a feminist flag-waving from the women's liberation movement. Elaine showalter believes that it has gone through three stages of development: early criticism of female images, reflection on "misogyny" in traditional texts and revelation of patriarchal center; Constructing the history of female literature in the middle period, including black and gay feminist literary criticism; In recent years, it has developed to the depth of theoretical construction, reflected on the traditional literary theory based on male literature, and put forward the idea of building "female aesthetics". Among them, the French school was influenced by Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, and attached importance to language, reproduction, psychology and philosophy. For example, Kristeva, Sisu and Iligrei put forward the theory of feminine femininity and female behavior criticism. The anglo-American school pays attention to traditional critical concepts such as themes, motifs and characters, and pays attention to social and historical research. Showalter thinks that the imagination, recurring patterns, themes, problems and images of female writers can find continuity on the whole, so he puts forward feminism and gender theory.
Generally speaking, the research objectives of structuralist classical narratology and early feminist literary criticism are different: the former belongs to the formalism category, tends to extract universal laws, generally observes texts, emphasizes objectivity and abstraction, and has the characteristics of concreteness, symbolism and strong technology; The latter belongs to the category of political criticism, which reveals the significance of specific texts in political participation and subjective experience, and has the characteristics of macro-speculation, imitation and politicization. Early feminist criticism usually does not involve narrative skills, while classical narratology generally does not consider gender factors and does not discuss the context, social nature and political meaning of narrative voices. Classical narratology and early feminist literary criticism have their own advantages and disadvantages, and their integration can complement each other.
In view of the weakness of classical narratology in ignoring the ideology and social and historical context of the text, it can be compensated by using feminist theories such as gender, context and representation. In view of the weakness of impressionism in early feminist criticism, we can borrow the systematic formal analysis model in the field of narratology to make up for it. Narratology is a method and feminism is a thinking perspective. The infiltration of the two can trigger a new perspective and break the long-standing opposition between formalism and anti-formalism in western literary circles. Feminist narratology combines narrative form analysis with gender perspective, paying attention to characters, authors, narrators, readers and gender factors, as well as the inevitable relationship between producers and readers in times, classes, gender, sexual orientation and race. Feminist narratology belongs to post-classical narratology theory: on the basis of classical narratology, it turns its attention to the interaction between the author, the text, the reader and the social and historical context, and turns from * * * narrative structure to diachronic narrative structure.
Susan Lancer, an American scholar, is the founder of western feminist narratology. She has the same theoretical background of structuralist narratology as most feminist literary critics and is influenced by Marxist literary theory. 198 1 published Narrative Behavior: A Perspective of Prose Novels, which was the first to discuss the gender significance of narrative forms. 1986 published a declaratory paper "Constructing Feminist Narratology", using the term "Feminist Narratology" for the first time, and systematically expounded the research purposes and methods of this school. Subsequently, the works of two representative writers appeared in the United States: one was Lancer's novel authority-female writers and narrative voices, and the other was Warhol's gender intervention. Related works appeared in Narrative, Style, PMLA and other publications, and feminist narratology gradually became a prominent school.
In order to prove the particularity of female narrative texts, there will be deviations and shortcomings only by using narrative discourse theory. In the book Fictitious Authority, Lancer repeatedly quoted and analyzed the letter text of Atkinson Box (1832)-because the bride has the obligation to disclose all letters to her husband, she wrote a letter to her bosom sister:
I have been married for seven weeks, but I feel there is no reason to regret it. My husband is ugly, reckless, old and useless ... His creed is that his wife should be regarded as ... (neither side should) and he can only concentrate on obedience (not on it); I ... don't expect me to be happier than I am now.
If you read this letter carefully, you will find that it contains mystery, and the difference lies in whether it is staggered or not. The reorganization of words leads to essential changes in semantics and tone: the husband thinks he praises himself, the intimate girlfriend denounces the husband's breaking off his marriage when he sees the bride, the bride's girlfriend cares about the happiness of women's marriage, and the implied reader reads a criticism of the patriarchal ideology of social marriage relations. Lancer pointed out that the superficial writing of letters is a kind of weak female style, imitating the humble Yuan Gang and being submissive and obedient. However, the latent text has the characteristics of dynamic, direct, rational, powerful and authoritative male language. In private, the potential audience is a heart-to-heart girlfriend; The ostensible public audience is the husband. Therefore, in the patriarchal society, female writers should adopt witty narrative strategies in order to win narrative rights in the unrecognized marginalized situation.
Lancer's Fictional Authority studies women's strategies to gain discourse authority in a specific period, aiming at constructing the theory of female narrative voice. The word "voice" refers to the narrator in narratology, which is different from the author and non-narrative characters; In feminism, it means identity and power. Lancer integrated them into Bakhtin's "Sociological Poetics" and thought that narrative voice and the narrated external world were interrelated, so the discussion of female narrative voice should link social identity with narrative form, text and history. Lancer creatively summed up the strategies for female narrative voice to realize discourse authority through three narrative voice modes: author type, individual type and collective type. Author narrative voice refers to the narrative state, collectivity and potential self-reference of different stories. The narrator comments on the narrative process from an omniscient perspective, and deeply thinks and evaluates other writers and texts. The personal narrative voice is what Genette refers to as his own story narrative. I am the protagonist, and the private voice is open. Collective narrative voice refers to the same voice that expresses the group.
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In The Authority of Fiction, Lancer said that Woolf "cautiously joined her narrative behavior. The "sense of distance" of "not erasing the author's distance" gives her the narrative authority of the novel. Based on Lancer's exposition of the narrative voice in Woolf's works, this paper analyzes in detail what the narrator of To the Lighthouse has done in the potential text. The author thinks that the narrator of this novel is like an omnipotent and respected "God" who is above the classical realistic novel. Such a "deified" narrator relies on and shares the narrative authority of male writers, thus helping Woolf himself establish his position in literary modernism and feminist movement.
Mrs dalloway (1925) and to the lighthouse (1927) belong to Woolf's medium-term stream of consciousness novels. In these two works, the author adopts the narrative method of focusing on multiple characters, focusing on the fleeting thoughts and feelings of the characters, but on the whole, the narrator of To the Lighthouse is more hidden but more important than the narrator of Mrs. Dalloway. In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrator hides behind the characters, recording and conveying their thoughts. When reading, readers can skip this behind-the-scenes narrator and directly enter the inner world of the characters. However, in To the Lighthouse, the narrator becomes the protagonist. The focus of the novel description is not the thoughts of the characters, but the narrator himself. In fact, the narrator shuttles between the consciousness of many characters but does not agree with their consciousness. Although the narrator also tries to "listen to politics behind the scenes", on the whole, she is a failure, a complete failure. The narrator's image is "everywhere" and her "voice" is full of the whole text. Even in the first and third films, which are praised by critics as "the author's self-erasure", readers can find the narrator hidden behind the characters according to those ubiquitous clues. In the second part of the novel, the narrator directly skips the characters and jumps to the foreground to express her philosophical understanding of life and death.
The third-person omniscient and omnipotent narrator usually appears in classical realistic novels. He is independent of the story, as high as "God", knows everything that happens inside and outside the story, and has unlimited authority. The narrator in modernist novels can no longer override himself and call himself God, and at the same time, he no longer needs and demands the exposed omniscient and omnipotent authority. Generally speaking, the narrator of To the Lighthouse plays the role of God rather than human being, and she exercises the infinite authority of the omniscient and omnipotent narrator in19th century classic realistic novels. In the novel, she made a comprehensive observation and authoritative comment on the characters' words and deeds, and finally caught the voice that originally belonged to the characters.
In To the Lighthouse, readers can feel the existence of a Chatman-style "public narrator" because there is always a "person who has the right to interpret the characters' thoughts as indirect expressions". The voice of the characters is suppressed and they are not even allowed to express themselves. The narrator interspersed among them not only speaks for herself, but also for others, and she successfully grabs the right to speak of the characters in the novel. As a "plenipotentiary", the narrator shuttles freely between the consciousness of many characters, telling readers what the characters think and explaining their words and deeds. More importantly, she went beyond the limitations of time and space, successfully observed what happened at different times and places, and showed readers a vast world. In this sense, the novel breaks the limitations of classical modernist novels on the narrator's observation angle and cognitive ability, and obtains the omnipotence possessed by the narrator of classical realistic novels.
The first part of the novel Window revolves around the external event of "measuring socks", in which Mrs. Ramsey and her son James participate. Mrs Ramsey comforted "If the weather is bad today, we will go to the lighthouse another day", and she asked James to stand up and compare whether the socks were long enough. A few lines later, she absently told James to stand still, but the little boy was still disappointed that his mother told him not to go to the lighthouse a few minutes ago, so he looked restless and his legs kept moving. Skipping many lines, we read Mrs Ramsey's harsher warning to James. This time, James obeyed. Mrs Ramsey measured the socks and found that they were too short. After another long interruption, this external event ended with Mrs. Ramsey kissing her son's forehead and offering to help him find another illustration to cut: "Mrs. Ramsey softened her harsh tone, raised his forehead and kissed him. Let's find another illustration to cut.
In the trivial external event of "measuring socks", the author interspersed with the inner activities of many characters. Not only Mrs. Ramsey and James mentioned above, but also people who were not present at the time of the incident, such as "Man" and "Mr. Burns". Who looked at Mrs Ramsey and concluded that "no one has ever looked so sad"? Who is making those ambiguous and incredible remarks that tears gather and fall in the dark? There is no one else in the room except Mrs Ramsey and James. Obviously, these words could not have been said by them, nor could they have been said by the "people" who spoke immediately after them. In that case, the conclusion can only be that those words are the narrator's.
In addition, the "window" has descriptions of other minor external events. From the main line of "measuring socks", these events belong to different time and space, such as telephone conversation and building a house, which happened in other time and space. Shortly after the activity of "measuring socks" began, readers were taken to a new time and space to listen to the conversation between Mr. Bunce and Mrs. Ramsey on the phone about trains and travel. The paragraph about tears takes readers away from their time and space; And this description of telephone conversation brings readers an uncertain space beyond reality. At this point, the narrator of To the Lighthouse got rid of the shackles of focus and limited perspective, and gained omniscient observation angle and interpretation ability, thus giving the author exposed narrative authority.
In the first and third novels, the narrator freely shuttles to the inner world of characters with different identities, backgrounds, ages and mentalities, observes their inner activities, words and deeds from multiple angles, reports positively and makes authoritative judgments. Sometimes she enters Lily's brisk inner activities, sometimes she travels in James's childlike world, and sometimes she falls into Mrs. James's meditation. She knew that James realized that "everything is multifaceted"; She also knows that Lily understands that "the face spectrum of love is ever-changing". Although the narrator tried to confuse her thoughts with those of the characters by quoting freely and directly, making it difficult for readers to perceive her existence, it was a pity that she failed completely. When reading a novel, readers can directly cross the narrator into the inner world of the characters, and the illusion of the narrator's "non-existence" disappears. It's hard for them to believe that James would say something out of proportion to his actual age, and it's hard to believe that "the face spectrum of love is ever-changing" is Lily's own understanding of love. Such philosophical insights and epigrams are expressed in the simple present tense (different from the thoughts and words and deeds of the characters expressed in the simple past tense) and attached to the brackets of the characters in the novel. This time difference widens the distance between narrative and characters, and distance means narrative authority.
In fact, the narrator of To the Lighthouse hides the truth and puts outdated narrative techniques such as meditation, persuasion and prediction, which are no longer accepted by these modernist novels, into the depths of the text. She shared the supreme authority of the traditional omniscient narrator and authorized the characters to think and say what. Woolf erased the narrator in the surface text of this novel and made it blend into the consciousness of the characters, but kept the complete and clear narrator image in the deep text. In this way, Woolf's narrator realizes omnipresence through omnipresence. Because, if all the characters in the novel speak with one voice and use the narrator's language in unison, then such a narrative will establish a higher and greater authority that cannot be copied, which is what female writers like Woolf yearn for and pursue.
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Starting from Flaubert; The new "indirect and horizontal" narrative technique advocated by James and supported by Percy lubbock requires that the feelings of the characters in the novel replace the "off-screen voice" of the narrator. As Joyce expressed in The Portrait of a Young Artist: "The ideal narrator should practice silence and invisibility". The ideal narrator of modernist novels is different from the "God" narrator who gives orders to characters in realistic novels. It hides behind the characters, introduces the voices of different characters, does not interfere with these voices and lets them develop freely.
Once the surging vitality around everyone is injected into everyone with its explosive power, they will gain a unique and intangible aesthetic life, and dramatic scenes will be produced ... Artists are like the god of creation, up and down, inside and out, invisible and unknown, and casually manicuring their nails.
Such aesthetic consciousness requires the narrator of modernist novels to give readers an illusion of "erasing", which comes from "suppressing the narrator's self-consciousness, hindering the communication between the narrator and the receiver, and shielding the external mark of narrative position".
In the modernist novel To the Lighthouse, Woolf tries to give the reader an illusion of "erasing" by focusing on the characters, but no first-person narrative is adopted in any part of the novel, or even any narrative focusing on a single point of view. Woolf adopts multiple focus in the first and third parts of the novel, and zero focus narrative in the second part. On the public narrative level, she tried to make the narrator melt into the conscious activities of the characters without success, but on the implicit narrative level, she kept the clear image of the narrator, thus constructing a ubiquitous but ubiquitous narrator and helping her gain narrative authority. The author thinks that some answers can be found from Woolf's family background and feminist position.
Woolf grew up in a literary family, but such a family did not provide her with the opportunity to receive formal education. Her brothers can go to Cambridge to receive the most orthodox English education, while she can only study in her father's study. Although she grew up to be a conscious feminist, she had to be sheltered by the dominant male avant-garde. She is deeply dissatisfied with the situation that men dominate the world in modernist novels, and also realizes that it is necessary for those female groups suffering from "aphasia" to stand up and make their own voices.
Just like Mr Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, Woolf himself can't get rid of the threat of fame and death. As a conscious feminist, she longs for a permanent reputation, as famous as a modernist male novelist like Joyce. At the same time, she also knows how difficult it is for a woman writer to gain such fame and status in English literature where men dominate the world, but Woolf tried and did it. She is famous not only in the trend of modernist novels, but also in the feminist movement. Being close to and relying on the unique narrative authority of white men in English literary tradition has firmly established her dual important position in the modernist novel movement that denigrates female modernist writers and the feminist movement that criticizes men.
Of course, Woolf's creative process is also inseparable from the development of her feminist position. Woolf was an old feminist at first, insisting that men and women should enjoy equal political, economic and cultural rights. But she soon realized the limitations of this thought, and realized that in a patriarchal society, even if women have equal rights with men outside the family, it is more difficult for them to fight for equal rights inside the family, especially in people's minds. Therefore, Woolf began to deconstruct male political thoughts, that is, cultural hegemony, and tried to establish a female perspective of writing history, thus becoming a pioneer of new feminism. What is commendable is that Woolf has not solidified her thoughts, but has moved towards a more ideal and harmonious feminist stage. Because Woolf realized that in a patriarchal society, the oppressor and the oppressed are not free. The liberation of human beings must be based on the premise of eliminating the slavery of one sex to the other, and must be based on the coordination and interaction between the two sexes to achieve unity and harmony. So she tried to find a new solution, which is her famous "androgyny" theory. Woolf started from the old feminism which unilaterally emphasized the legal equality between men and women at first, and deconstructed the male political and cultural hegemony from the cultural perspective in the 1960s and 1970s, and established a new feminist inheritance from the female perspective. Finally, she emphasized the new direction of feminist development predicted by the harmonious development of men and women in the post-1990s society. Woolf did not take the legal rights such as the right to vote and the right to education as the ultimate goal, nor did she take the equal treatment of women in ideology and culture as the ultimate goal. On the contrary, she regards the liberation of human society as the ultimate goal of feminism. From the development of her feminist position, it is not difficult to understand why Woolf relies so much on the narrative authority of interpretation and evaluation mastered by male novelists in To the Lighthouse to make herself authoritative. In fact, the narrator of the novel is "a feminist" in the text and is given the author's real name.