英文摘要 |
The nineteenth century was a period of social progress and technological innovation, a period which saw a more prodigious number of inventions than any preceding era. The bicycle, either as a means of transportation or as a form of recreation, was one of the most influential technical productions in the last decade of the nineteenth century. As the bicycle was gradually improved and became both safe and affordable as an ordinary vehicle in everyday life, it gained in popularity and exerted the greatest influence on people of different classes and genders. Miriam Henderson, the heroine in Dorothy Richardson's ”Pilgrimage” (1915-67), has a great number of experiences and impressions of London public places and streets. Like other working girls, she is greatly interested in the new machine-the bicycle. Cycling is one of her favorite pastimes and activities. However, this new mode of personal mobility and recreation is inevitably interlocked with social and cultural mores that influence the perceptions of the female body. There are thus questions to be explored: How was a woman's bike-riding in the late nineteenth century imbued with the social and cultural beliefs of that time? How was her body oriented or re-molded by this new means of mobility? What specific connection is there between a woman cyclist's body and the bicycle? As for the above issues, Iris Marion Young's perspective, combined with a feminist reading of phenomenology, sheds a profound light on the modalities of the female body with concepts of feminine bodily comportment, motility and spatiality. Employing Young's theoretical perspective, this paper proposes that although Victorian social and cultural mores influenced the perception of a woman's body, her body could still take advantage of the bicycle, like the case of Miriam in ”Pilgrimage”. Cycling reveals the woman's potential in regard to different aspects of mobility, the woman then acquiring certain agency to ride her machine. The woman lives her space through the bicycle since she is the very subject who faces the daily potentiality and possibility of her bodily existence. |