維多利亞時代單身女主角的鄉愁：《克蘭福德》與《維萊特》中的舊日情懷與韌性

Nostalgia of Victorian Single Heroines: The Old Days and Resilience in Cranford and Villette

這一份研究探討維多利亞時代女性作家，如何在小說中運用「鄉愁」（Nostalgia）的概念，來呈現社會變遷、階級差異及女性成長。本文以伊莉莎白·蓋斯凱爾（Elizabeth Gaskell）的《克蘭福德鎮》（Cranford）與夏綠蒂·勃朗特（Charlotte Bronte）的《維萊特》（Villette）為主要研究文本，探索鄉愁在不同語境下的功能以及對女性的意涵。研究指出，鄉愁不是單純地對過去的情感渴望，更是一種社會與心理的應對機制，用來協助維多利亞時代女性，適應劇變的世界。《克蘭福德鎮》展現出，集體鄉愁如何使社群得以維持社會秩序與文化認同，同時，未婚女性長者的個人鄉愁在實現自我療癒（self-healing）方面亦發揮了重要作用。相比之下，《維萊特》則聚焦於個人鄉愁建構自我與認同的方式。主角露西（Lucy）對布萊頓（Bretton）一家的渴望，交織了其甜蜜的童年記憶與內在對歸屬感的渴求。透過鄉愁的實踐，露西這位年輕單身女性不僅在追尋過去的片段，更是在這些片段中，尋求個人的成長與認同之可能性。這兩部小說皆超越了單純的鄉愁抒發，以相似卻又各異的態度，細膩地剖析維多利亞時代的社會變革、階級衝突以及女性間的互助與自立。這兩部小說的分析，證明鄉愁不是單純的一種情緒，更是一種社會與心理的生存工具，幫助個體在面對變遷時，在內心深處裡面，錨定歸屬感。

This study examines how Victorian female writers employed nostalgia in their fiction to represent social movements, status differences, and feminine development. Taking Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette as case studies, the paper explores the role of nostalgia in diverse contexts and its implications for women. This study presents nostalgia not only in terms of emotional longing for the past but also as a social and psychological coping mechanism that helped Victorian women adjust to a changing world. Cranford illustrates how collective nostalgia allowed the community to maintain social order and cultural identity. The individual nostalgia of unmarried female elders also played a significant role in achieving self-healing. Villette, by contrast, is about the ways that individual nostalgia creates self and identity. Lucy’s longing for the Bretton family is a combination of her sweet childhood memories and her innate desire for a sense of belonging. Through the act of nostalgia, Lucy as a young single woman is not just searching for moments of her past but also for the possibility of personal growth and identity through these moments. Both novels go beyond nostalgia to incisively examine social changes, class conflict and self-help among women in the Victorian era with similar and different attitudes. They also demonstrate that nostalgia is not just an emotion, but a social and psychological survival tool that helps people locate a sense of belonging in themselves when confronting change.