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论《献给艾米丽的一支玫瑰花》中的哥特式情结

摘 要

美国作家威廉.福克纳的作品《献给艾米丽的玫瑰花》被视为美国南方哥特式小说的杰作。这部小说讲述了爱米丽小姐悲惨的一生，充满悬疑，耐人寻味。这篇论文主要从几个角度讨论了《献给艾米丽的玫瑰花》的哥特式风格。

这篇论文分为四部分，第一部分，对威廉.福克纳和他的短篇小说《献给艾米莉的玫瑰花》作了简要的介绍，并且指出了这篇论文的目的和意义。第二部分主要介绍了哥特式文学的来源和哥特式特点在文学上的体现。第三部分,也是这篇论文最重要部分，通过分析环境描写，主题，叙述方式还有人物描写来体现《献给艾米丽的玫瑰花》中的哥特式特点或风格。最后部分对这篇论文作了总结，它所得出的结论是《献给艾米丽的玫瑰花》很多方面体现了哥特式特点，并且因为它的哥特式特点作者才成功地表达了他所想表达的主题。

关键词：哥特情结；环境描写；主题；叙述方式；人物

Study on the Gothic Complex in A Rose for Emily

Abstract

A Rose for Emily written by American writer William Faulkner is regarded as the representative work of southern gothic fiction of America. The story writes Miss Emily’s tragic life and it’s full of suspense and intensely interesting.

This paper discusses the Gothic characteristics of A Rose for Emily on several angles, and it is divided into four parts.

In the first part, it introduces the William Faulkner and his A Rose for Emily briefly and points out the aim and the significance of the study.

In the second part it introduces the gothic characteristics in literature. In the third part which is the most important part, it points out that the author uses gothic characteristics from four aspects of the description of environment, the theme, the narrative way, and the character. In the last part, it concludes that the author combines gothic characteristics with the realistic content successfully and expresses his complicated feeling precisely because of using gothic characteristics.

Key words: gothic complex; environment description; theme; narrative way; character

Study on the Gothic Complex in

A Rose for Emily

1. Introduction

1.1 A brief introduction of William Faulkner and his A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner is one of the most distinguish writer in American literature. He was born and lived in the South, which influenced him greatly, therefore, most of his works described the people and their lives in the South. As the appearance of Faulkner, the South appeared the literary glories of “the South Renaissance”, which ever was called “the literary desert."(Yu Jianhua, The Second Prosperous of American Literature, 460).

He invented a county and a town in his imagination, and he wrote about the society in the South by inventing families which represented different social forces: the old, decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of “poor whites”; and the Negroes who labored for both of them. His major works included Sartoris, The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, The Town and A Rose for Emily (Laurence B.Holland, The Norton Anthology of American Literary ,534-537).

Published in 1930, A Rose for Emily was one of the best known and the most widely read novel among William Faulkner’s short stories. The story took place in a mythical town that William Faulkner called Jefferson, Mississippi. The story happened at the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the town was learning to live with South’s loss in the Civil War and the consequent dismantling of the slavery-based society that had preceded it. Because of the loss in the Civil War, people in the south led a poor life. Especially the white people, their life suddenly become poor because most of the slaves went to the north to work for the northern industry，so the white people couldn’t get accustomed to the life change in a short time, but they still pretended to be noble and kept their family’s dignity (Howard Clin cotton, American History, 30).

The story described a white woman, Emily’s tragic life under the South’s loss in the Civil War. Emily’s life was strongly dominated by her father, and she had no right to date with males and choose her lover. After her father’s death, she could only date with a northern worker. But to her disappointment, the worker refused to marry her, and the refusal drove her to kill him by using poison, and she let his body company her. After Emily’s death, the town people discovered a skeleton in the house, and found out that the poor Emily was a murder, and people were shocked by the discovery.

Thematically, this short story is not as simple as it seems. The conflicts in the story can be interpreted on different levels. On the superficial level, it was a murder story with gothic characteristics. It described an eccentric woman who lived in her old decaying mysterious house that other people had not visited for decades, and, of course, a dead body in the house finally was discovered after so many years. On another level, the story can be read as a conflict between the South and the North with Emily representing the declining South and Homer Barron representing the North. On a deeper level, the story explores the inner world of a human being, or the inner struggle in the human heart.

1.2 Introduction of the Gothic Characteristics in Literature

The word “Goth” came from the name of a Germanic tribe. The gothic people were famous for their brutal and uncivilized features. They ever lived in north Europe, then invaded in Rome Empire from the third AD century to the fifth AD century, and set many kingdoms in Italy, Spain, south part of France and North Africa. A thousand years later, after the Rome Empire died out, Italian Vasari (1511--1574) used the "Goth" for the first time to refer to an architectural style in middle age, which was "tall sharp pointed, vaulted roof or tower ,narrow windows, colorful glass, darkness houses, gloomy ladders."(Xiao Minghan, Criticism of Foreign Literature, 9) The gothic architecture was originated in France in 11th century, and it was popular in Europe from 13th century to 15th century. This kind of architecture style mostly is seen in the church, and also in common architecture. The gothic architecture has a high status in the history of architecture because of its excellent skill and its achievement in the field of art. The gothic characteristics not only appear in architecture, but also appear in many fields such as literature, movie, music and clothing.

The so-called “Gothic Revival" appeared in aspects of architecture and literature during eighteenth century to nineteenth century, which was the gloomy and depressed tone in middle age. Meanwhile, some literary works enjoyed the same tone with "Gothic fiction" in the time. Take Horace Walpole for example, his "The Castle of Otranto" set an example for early classic gothic fiction. The birth of "Gothic fiction” was not only related with the "Gothic feeling" of the cemetery poetry of England, but related with the "Gothic characteristics"，the aesthetic standard of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) as well.

The gothic characteristics in literature are that the story mostly takes place in a distant ages and desolate places, the characters are locked or imprisoned in narrow spaces or in a mysterious gothic building and suspense often mingles with love. There are some usual ways of suspense, such as mysterious inheritance, secret antecedents, lost will, the secret of family, ancestral curse and so on. And at the end of the story, the mystery or the suspense is solved, the evildoer is discovered and the impediment of the love between the hero and the heroine is brushed aside. Compared with romantic fiction, the gothic fiction mostly describes adventurous story and the impediment of love mostly is caused by the evildoer, while the romantic fiction mostly describes the family’s triviality, and the impediment of the love in the romantic fiction between characters is caused by them. The theme of the gothic story mostly reveals through death, murder, violence and horrible scene. In a short, the novels with the gothic characteristics reveal a mysterious, horrible, depressed and gloomy atmosphere. Since the 18th century, the gothic characteristics had been used in the literary works popularly, and there are many famous novels with the gothic characteristics, such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights，Notre Dame de Paris, A Rose for Emily and so on. A Rose for Emily is especially the most representative work of gothic fiction.

2.Literature Review

After I look up in CNKI, China Journal Net, VIP information and other journals I have found two acad