男性、女性、第三性--论《夜林》中超前的女性意识

朱娜.巴恩斯的代表作《夜林》对西方现代社会的生存状态,尤其是男性与女性的关系进行了深刻探讨。它不仅对在历史上占统治地位的男权文化加以嘲谑,而且令后人对被激进女性主义广为接受的本质论观点产生质疑;它不仅无意中表现了后世的女性主义试图建立独立于男性文化样板之外的女性文化梦想的不可能性,还使后世的读者意识到激进女性主义者试图颠倒男女地位的荒谬性,并且激发他们对性别批评者的关于消除性别差异的倡议和第三性存在的可能性进行反思。

Masculinity, Femininity, and the Third Sex: On the Advance Feminist Consciousness in Nightwood

Nightwood,Djuna Barnes' masterpiece,probes into the very state of existence of modern western society,especially the relationship between male and female.It not only satirizes the patriarchal culture,which had dominated human history for so long,but also prompts later generations to question the essentialist notions widely accepted by the radical feminists;it not only reveals unawares the impossibility of the later feminists' dream to establish a kind of feminist culture utterly independent of the norm of patriarchal culture,but also enables readers of later generations to realize the absurdity of the radical feminists' attempt to invert the status of men and women,and furthermore stimulates them to doubt the gender critics' suggestion to eradicate the differences between masculine and feminine genders and the possibility of the existence of the third sex.