本文是一篇英语论文，在小说中，作者描述了无名的维多利亚女同性恋者，她们因在异性恋主导的社会中未能扮演规定的性别角色而被排斥在外，并被视为似乎不存在而感到痛苦。包括性别、阶级等级、语言等在内的文化符号具体化为各种异性恋规范，以维持父权制异性恋社会的权力运作。
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 An Introduction to Sarah Waters and Affinity
Sarah Waters, who was born on 21 July 1966 and one of the most influential contemporary lesbian British novelists at the turning of this century, is best known for her Victorian1 Trilogy—Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002), a trilogy which has won wide critical acclaim and a wide readership. Her experience as an academic who obtained a Ph.D. degree in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London not only inspires her to “write a lesbian historical novel of [her] own” (Armitt, 2007: 120), but also lays a solid foundation for her novel-writing. Among Waters’ all six works heretofore, Affinity won her most prizes and praise, enlarging her influence worldwide especially on one of the largest LGBT groups for awarded the Somerset Maugham Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction in 20002, and the Stonewall Book Award of Literature in 2001 as exceptional merit relating to the lesbian experience in English-language books published in America3.
英语论文参考
Affinity deftly presents an intriguingly criminal story of two female protagonists set in the 1870s London by utilization of a double-voice narration—Margret Prior’s diaries written in chronological order interweaving those of Selina Dawes in flashback,through which the narrative suspense creates and is only solved in the end. The former protagonist, spinsterhood and a history scholar following her idolized father’s step, tries to record the story of prison Millbank as a Lady Visitor there and meets the latter, a spirit medium who is convicted of fraud and puts the same trick on Margret in the end. Raised in a middle-class family in Chelsea, Margret receives education at home and has an affinity relationship with her beloved father’s student Helen. But she loses both of them in the same year—the death of her father and Helen’s marriage to her brother Stephen, leading to her attempted suicide and nervous problems, regarded as her shameful secrets. Nevertheless, during Margret’s visit to Millbank, the incarcerated Selina intrigues Margret’s curiosity to know about her and pretends to be a powerful spirit medium who knows Margret’s past.
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1.2 Literature Review
There has been considerable foreign research on Affinity, which can be generally categorized into three perspectives, including historical fiction and neo-Victorianism, feminism and queer theory, spiritualism and gothic novel, overlapping with each other. From different interdisciplinary viewpoints, studies more or less put forward some discoveries concerning gender, mainly coming down to the profound meaning of female attempts to reverse heteronormative regimes or masculinized history.
Firstly, studies focusing on historical fiction and neo-Victorianism often refer to topics of history, class, sexuality, gender, and so on. Due to scholars’ enormous andenduring interest in the Victorian era, it is one of the most prominent research orientations concerning Affinity, and the central issue comes down to the relationship between the reality (either of historical discourse or of modern life) and the history. Different from most critiques that Affinity offers the female a way into traditionally masculinized history, in “Into history through the back door: The ‘past historic’ in Nights at the Circus and Affinity” (2004), M.-L. Kohlke elucidates parodies of repressions of realism and history and deems that the unrestrained playfulness of historiographic metafiction unveils Waters’ negative view of transgressive possibilities through probing into the enigma of Selina as well as the dark and labyrinthine interior of Millbank which “represents the final impenetrability of history” (162) and resist reconstruction. Mariaconcetta Constantine also emphasizes the historical relevance. She points out the anxieties and yearnings that Victorians shared still haunt contemporary people in “‘Faux-Victorian Melodrama’ in the New Millennium: The Case of Sarah Waters” (2006), especially in terms of women’s marginalized role, queerness in protagonists, social problems including class inequalities in Affinity.
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CHAPTER TWO THE CONFINEMENT AND LIBERATION IN BODY
2.1 Costume Norms and Spatial Scrutiny on Bodily Performance
According to Butler, the heterosexuality matrix that takes heterosexuality as the absolute desire relies on normative instruction made by the continuous alliance of sex, gender and desire to the performativity of inpidual gender identity. Its absolute position excludes and represses those who can’t fit into such a matrix to be the marginalized.
Costume norms are one of the concrete norms utilized by the heterosexual matrix to enforce its superior power and exclude the marginalized. Victorian women, since 1830s, besieged by layered materials, were caged in tightly laced corsets. “Men placed women on lofty pedestals where they perched uncomfortably throughout the rest of the nineteenth century” (1977: 124), as Kemper strengthens, to guarantee that hapless women in fashionable prisons behaved like proper ladies, in men’s expectations for women roles. In male-centered culture, clothing in Affinity reveals how Victorian women being confined in a materialized cage delicately made of fabrics to performfemininity of body.
Furthermore, as a particular production corresponding to social norms, heterosexual normative gaze not only becomes a disciplined power that requires the object of gaze to act on certain bodily performance following norms, but also strengthens the sculpture of normative world. Thus, being inflicted ubiquitous heteronormative scrutiny, Victorian lesbians in Affinity perform specific gender roles imprinted in mainstream culture which constructs a physical as well as mental prison for them. For spinster Margret, seamless scrutiny mainly wielding by family members is in invisible form, to rear her into an Angel at home. For spirit-medium Selina, at the bottom of hierarchical prison system, she is under visible confinement and oppression in the panoptic prison to be reconciled.
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2.2 Drag and Escapes to Liberate Sexuality
Butler places a high concern on the status quo as well as rights of minority groups and makes positive investigations in her theory. She reveals the subversive possibilities of heterosexual hegemony through exposing the discontinuity among sex, gender and sexuality. In Gender Trouble, she denies the ontological existence of gender and uncovers the performativity of gender construction: “[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results”. In other words, the categories of male and female, masculine or feminine temperaments, are productions of performativity, a “becoming” rather than an original “being”. Through repeated bodily acts of performativity, the subject is always in the ongoing process of construction since “gender is always a doing” (Butler, Gender Trouble 33, 25), and thus one’s gender identity shall not be considered a stable one. Moreover, this kind of performativity is never fully realized because failure may occur when the subject cites the norms, which means there’s possibility to rework, resignify the rigid norm.
Base on this, Butler suggests possible ways to resist and subvert heterosexual norms for the sexual minority: gender parody, dressing and imitating the opposite gender. The original identity does not exist prior to parody as a being, but is a becoming, a fluidity being produced and constituted though performance of parody, which offers possibilities of intervention and resignification to rework gender norms. In this sense, parody contains the subversive force of revealing the historical contingency and fictionality of gender, exerts the effect of destabilizing substantive identity, and makes room for the marginalized to rework gender norms.
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CHAPTER THREE THE CONFINEMENT AND LIBERATION IN DISCOURSE...............38
3.1 Muteness and Impediment in Heterosexual Discourse ....................................... 38
3.1.1 Submission and Self-regulation: A Mad Woman Margret ...................... 39
3.1.2 A Lie in Lesbian Discourse: Sneaker Vigers and Cheater Selina .......... 44
CHAPTER FOUR CONCLUSION ....................................... 57
CHAPTER THREE THE CONFINEMENT AND LIBERATION IN DISCOURS
3.1 Muteness and Impediment in Heterosexual Discourse
Butler thinks of the relationship between materiality and language as indissoluble, arguing that “every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process” (Bodies That Matter 68). It means that language is material in the sense that its signifying process takes place necessarily with the participation of materiality; andmateriality never escapes from the process by which the language is signified. In association with Butler’s understanding of body that there’s no being before becoming, body is signified in language and discursively constructed, closely linked with linguistic acts that name it and constitute it, through which body realizes its materiality. Thus, for the marginalized group, language becomes a vital means to emphasize one’s “materiality”, the legitimacy of their existence, the construction of the subjects. Meanwhile, in the cultural context dominated by heterosexuality, discourse (or language) becomes one of the means to oppress the marginalized groups. To compensate the historical regret that the Victorian lesbian shared little vitality in history, neo-Victorian novelists utilize writing as a way to look back the past, Waters included. Focusing on the discursive predicaments protagonists in Affinity suffer—Margret’s admission of illness and falling into the trap constructed by other lesbians—this section will illustrate how the social existence of marginalized groups is pathologized in historical discourse, how their voice is muted and impeded, and how it influences their formation of identity.
英语论文怎么写
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CHAPTER FOUR CONCLUSION
Utilizing Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, this thesis analyzes the predicaments and attempts of self-liberation of the marginalized group in British novelist Sarah Waters’ Affinity. In the novel, the author depicts the nameless Victorian lesbians in anguish of being excluded and deemed to be seemingly non-existent since they fail to play the prescribed gender roles in the heterosexual-dominant society. Cultural signs including gender, class-hierarchy, language, etc., materialize into various heterosexual norms to maintain the power operation of the patriarchal-oriented heterosexual society. Confronted with such predicaments, the lesbian protagonists strive to subvert the stability of heterosexual hegemony and win the right to free and open sexual expression.
While they are heavily confined bodily, the lesbian protagonists resist the heterosexual norms and respectively chase every opportunity for a glimpse of lesbian life. On the one hand, the complicated Victorian dress code exemplifies that women are tamed into delicate slaves of costume, which becomes the first barrier for lesbians to transgress gender norms. On the other hand, marriage is used by omnipresent heterosexual hegemony to confine Victorian women within the prescribed framework in domestic areas. Being bodily confined in the elaborate cage, lesbians search for personal liberation in different ways. Gender parody opens a path for lesbians to achieve bodily liberation: Ruth disguises herself as the ghost Peter in séance hosted by the psychic Selina, and her masculine performances there diffuse the inherent binary genderdifferences, which reveals the essential characteristics of cultural construction of gender norms and the possibility of subversion.
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