英文摘要 |
This paper employs Ruth Benedict's concept “shame culture” to understand the conflict between individualism and the communitarian tradition of Europe represented in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. I analyze the novel's aesthetic of shame that relocates drama in the heroine's introverted psychology. Through the free indirect discourse, James seemingly intends to establish an individuated interiority to ward off the conformist pressure imposed by European communitarian culture. Such divide between an internal psychological world and an external reality, however, risks oversimplification. To redress this pitfall, I invoke Eve Sedgwick's notion of “periperformativity” to argue that Isabel uses her free indirect discourse to rebel against conventional performative language often seen in the theatricality of a shame society epitomized as a lie or strategy to treat people as means to an end. Her resistance constitutes an anti-theatrical mode at the margins of theatricality. Due to the liminal character of periperformatives which usually traverse the boundaries of constatives and performatives, her free indirect discourse often produces unintelligible dramatic effects which culminate in a deconstruction of the internal psychology/external drama divide. This understanding can lay bare how the novel's ambiguous ending demonstrates an intricate dialectic of theatricality/anti-theatricality and teases out the Emersonian tradition of individualism characterized by the melding of self into a depsychologized world. |