简·奥斯丁与罗曼蒂克诗人

Chapter Four

第四章

Emma

爱玛

Ambiguous Relationships

模棱两可的关系

Although Emma alludes to “Tintern Abbey,” as I noted in chapter 1, in connection with one of its central themes, that of the imagination, it is neither that allusion nor that theme that I will be discussing here.For while Wordsworthian ideas about the imagination as a cognitive faculty clearly inform the novel, Emma’s greatest debt to the British Romantic poets lies elsewhere. From Wordsworth in particular, but also from Coleridge and Byron, Austen drew ideas here about new possibilities for intimate relationships—their complexity and depth, their freedom from conventional social hierarchies and categories, their transformative potential. Indeed, the novel initiates its exploration of such ambiguous relationships in its very first lines. For the opening of Emma is strangely proportioned. A single sentence characterizes the heroine, a second her relationship with her father, then fully four more her relationship with her governess. That last passage is itself strange, and worth quoting in full:

正如我在第一章中所言，尽管《爱玛》中提及“特纳恩修道院”，与其中一个主题——想象力有关，然而，它并不是我在这里将要讨论的典故和主题。但是华兹华斯的关于想象力作为一种感知能力的观念（想法）很明显影响了这本小说，对于英国浪漫主义诗人，《爱玛》最欠缺的（地方）在于别处。奥斯丁尤其从华斯华斯，也从科尔里奇和拜伦这里汲取了关于亲密关系的新的可能性的观念（想法）——它们的复杂性和深度，它们脱离传统社会等级制度和类属（范畴），它们的变革潜力。确实，这部小说从一开始就发起对这种模棱两可关系的探索。因为《爱玛》的开场比例很奇怪。描绘女主人公的特征只有单独一句，第二句则是描述她与父亲的关系，之后从第四句开始则更详细地阐述了她与其家庭女教师的关系。开场的最后部分（此处指《爱玛》开头第二段的结尾以及第三段）本身很奇怪，值得完整引用：

[Emma’s] mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own. (7; emphasis in the original)

（爱玛）的母亲去世得太早，她的爱抚只给爱玛留下个模模糊糊的印象，而取代母亲位置的，是个十分贤惠的女人，她身为家庭女教师，慈爱之心不亚于做母亲的。

泰勒小姐在伍德豪斯先生家待了十六年，与其说是孩子们的家庭驾驶，不如说是她们的朋友。她非常疼爱两个姑娘，特别是爱玛。她俩之间情同手足，真比亲姐妹还亲。泰勒小姐性情温和，即使名义上还是家庭教师时，也很少去管束爱玛。后来师生关系彻底消失了，两人就像知心朋友一样生活在一起，爱玛更是爱做什么就做什么。她十分尊重泰勒小姐的意见，但她主要按自己的主意办事。

“Governess,” “mother,” “friend,” “sister”—what, after all that, was Miss Taylor’s relationship to Emma? The more labels the narrator deploys, the farther she seems to get from finding the right one. Not only do these terms keep displacing and thus mutually qualifying one another, each is itself qualified as it makes its appearance, its adequacy undermined even before it can be enunciated: “little short of a mother,” “less as a governess,” “more the intimacy of sisters.” “Friend” does seem to win out by the end of the passage—a circumstance to which I will return—but before we put too much stock in that alternative, we should note that the “friend” of “friend and friend,” the phrase that marks the final stage of Emma and Miss Taylor’s relationship,clearly means something different from the “friend” of “less as a governess than a friend,” one of the competing definitions of the earlier stages. These different stages, however, do give us a way of making sense of this profusion of relational terms. We can conjecture that Miss Taylor, hired as a governess, was first something like a mother to the orphaned five-year-old, then, as Emma matured, became a kind of friend, then finally, after further maturation on Emma’s part, achieved something of the intimacy of a sister.

“家庭女教师”、“母亲”、“朋友”、“姐妹”——泰勒小姐与爱玛的关系到底是什么？叙述者使用的标签越多，她似乎离正确的那个（表示关系的标签）就更远。这些词语不仅会相互替代，从而使彼此相互限定，而且每个词语本身在出现时都有其本身的限定，甚至在其被阐明之前其充分性就被削弱：“几乎是母亲”，“作为一位家庭女教师逊色了一些”，“更多的是姐妹间的亲密”。“朋友”似乎确实会在文章结束时胜出—之后我将会回到这种情况—但在我们选择过多替代方案之前，我们应该注意，“朋友的朋友”的“朋友”这句短语标志着爱玛与泰勒小姐关系的最后阶段，显然意味着一些不同于“比起一位朋友作为一位家庭教师逊色了一些”的“朋友”的内容，这是较早阶段具有竞争性的定义之一。但是，这些不同的阶段确实为我们提供了一种理解这大量表示关系词汇的方法。我们可以猜想，被聘为家庭女教师的泰勒小姐，在一开始如同一位五岁孤儿的母亲；然后，随着爱玛的成熟，成为一种朋友；再然后，爱玛进一步成熟之后，泰勒小姐终于获得了像姐姐一样的亲密感。

（翻译：Freesia）