英语本科毕业论文从《喧哗与骚动》中凯蒂的悲剧看20世纪初女性的社会地位.doc

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1、 本科毕业论文从喧哗与骚动中凯蒂的悲剧看20世纪初女性的社会地位学生姓名： 学生学号： 200310206002 院（系）： 外国语学院 年级专业： 2003级英语本科2班 指导教师： 二七年五月Social Status of Women in the Early 20th Century Reflected from Caddys Tragedy in The Sound and the FuryShe PingUnder the Supervision ofFan XiyingSchool of Foreign Languages and CulturesPan Zhihua Unive

2、rsityMay 2007ContentsAbstract.Key Words.摘要.关键词.Introduction.1.A Brief Introduction to William Faulkner.2.A Brief Introduction to the Novel.3III. The Causes of Caddys Tragedy.5 A. The Pressure from the Family.6 Backward Feudalism and the Traditional Code.9. Womens Social Status Reflected from Caddys

3、Tragedy10 A. Women Having Fewer Rights at That Time.10 B. Womens Unfair Treatment.11Conclusion.13Acknowledgements.14Bibliography.15AbstractCaddy was the central character in The Sound and the Fury. There was no separate chapter to express her thoughts, but everything was connected with her. From Ben

4、jy to Jason, the narration of each of them reflected what Caddys life was like. Caddy was a tragic character in the novel.In the novel, Faulkner used multiple-angled narration to express Caddys tragedy, and the causes of it mainly came from two aspects. One was the pressure from her family, Benjy, h

5、er youngest brothers complete dependence on her. Quentin, her elder brother, who had a special affection for Caddy, thought excessively highly of her virginity. What Caddy had suffered caused his loss of mental balance; at last, he chose to commit suicide. Besides, her mother and brother Jason treat

6、ed her heartlessly. The other cause was the backward feudalism and traditional code. All of these turned Caddy into a promiscuous, degenerate woman from a pure girl. However, Caddys tragedy showed a fact that women had a low social position and were treated unfairly in the early 20th century. At tha

7、t time, women got only few economical, political and educational rights, they could not enjoy equal rights with men and they were not respected by society.Key WordsCaddy; tragedy; code; womens right摘要在小说中， 凯蒂是整个故事的中心，虽然没有以她的观点为中心的单独的一章， 但是所有的都与她息息相关，从班吉到杰生，他们每个人的叙述都反映出了凯蒂的生活。她所扮演的是一个悲剧角色.在小说中，福克纳运用了

8、多角度的叙述法来表现凯蒂的悲剧。而凯蒂的悲剧主要来自两方面。一方面来自她的家庭的压力，小弟班吉对她的完全依赖，而哥哥昆丁对凯蒂有一种特殊的感情，他过分看中凯蒂的贞节 ，凯蒂所遭受的一切使他在精神上失去了平衡，最后，他选择了自杀。另外，她的母亲以及大弟杰生对她冷酷无情。另外一个原因就是落后的封建主义以及传统的准则。所有的这些原因使凯蒂从一个纯洁的女孩变成了一个轻佻浪荡的女人。然而，凯蒂的悲剧揭示了一个事实，在20世纪初期，女性的社会地位极端的低下，而且她们不能得到公平的对待。在那个时代，女人只能享有极少的经济，政治以及教育的权利。她们不能与男性享有平等的权利，也得不到社会的尊重。关键词凯蒂；悲剧

9、；行为准则；女性权利IntroductionThe Sound and the Fury, Faulkners fourth novel, was his first masterpiece, and was considered his finest work. It was recognized as one of the most successfully innovative and experimental American novels of its time and one of the most challenging to interpret. The novel dealt

10、 with the downfall of the Compsons, who had been a prominent family in Jefferson, Mississippi, from before the Civil War.Although there was not a separate chapter of Caddy in this novel, everything was related to her. Just because of the pressure that her family gave, and the traditional, idealized

11、Southern code, she became a promiscuous, degenerate woman from a pure girl. This thesis first gives a brief introduction to the author and the work, and then analyzes the causes of Caddys tragedy from two aspects, namely, the pressure from her family and the backward feudalism and the traditional co

12、de.Lastly, the thesis analyzes Womens social status reflected from Caddys tragedy. In short, Caddys tragedy showed how backward the feudalism of the South America was. Meanwhile, we can see that women at that time could not be respected by the society, and their social status was very low, it was un

13、fair for them. A Brief Introduction to William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a prominent Southern family. A number of his ancestors were involved in the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry a

14、nd political scene. Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but he became bored with his classes later and never finished high school.Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate. Oxford and t

15、he surrounding area were Faulkners inspiration for the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. These locales became the setting for a number of his works. Faulkners “Yoknapatawpha novels” include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! The Hamlet, and Go Down,

16、 Moses (Li Wenjun, 2) . Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explored the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner populated Yokn

17、apatawpha County with the skeletons of old mansions and the ghosts of great men, patriarchs and generals from the past whose aristocratic families fail to live up to their historical greatness. Beneath the shadow of past grandeur, these families attempt to cling to old Southern values, codes, and my

18、ths that are corrupted and out of place in the reality of the modern world. The families in Faulkners novels are rife with failed sons, disgraced daughters, and smoldering resentments between whites and blacks in the aftermath of African-American slavery (Gao wei, 129) . Faulkners reputation as one

19、of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century was largely due to his highly experimental style. Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time. Faulkner often employs stream of consciousness narrati

20、ve, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and complex sentences. Not surprisingly, these stylistic innovations make some of Faulkners novels incredibly challenging to the reader. However, these

21、 bold innovations paved the way for countless future writers to continue to experiment with the possibilities of the English language. For his efforts, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in Mississippi in 1962(Li Wenjun, 3).The novel The Sound and the Fury, was first

22、 published in 1929, Faulkner described the human experience by portraying events and images subjectively, through several different characters respective memories of their childhood (Gao Wei, 130). The novels stream of consciousness style is extreamely opaque. Despite its formidable complexity, The

23、Sound and the Fury was an overpowering and moving novel. It was generally regarded as Faulkners most important and remarkable literary work. A Brief Introduction to the NovelThe Sound and the Fury, Faulkners fourth novel, was his first masterpiece, and was considered his finest work. Depicting the d

24、ecline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, the novel was divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator. According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girls muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers lack the courage. The first section

25、 was told from the point of view of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three-year-old idiot, and recounted the earliest events in the novel use flashback. As an idiot, Benjy was the key to the novels title, which alluded to Shakespeares tragedy Macbeth. For the most part, his language was simplesentences were

26、short, the vocabulary was simple. It was not difficult to read this section. However, sensory stimuli in the present brought him back to another time and place in his past instantly because the idiot had no concept of time or place. Most of his memories involved his sister, Caddy, who was the centra

27、l character of the novel. Benjys earliest depicted memory, from 1898 (when Benjy was three years old), established the essence of her characterthe children were ignorant of the death of their grandmother, Damuddy, and Caddy was the only Compson child brave enough to climb the pear tree and looked th

28、rough the window at the funeral wake while her brothers standed below, gazing up at her muddy drawers, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate. Most of Benjys other memories also focused on Caddy, who alone among the Compsons genuinely cared for Benjy

29、. Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she used perfume, when she lost her virginity, and her wedding. Benjy also recalled his change of the name (from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his Brother Quentins suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate, which leaded to his being cast

30、rated, happened also in 1910. The second section recounted the story from Quentin Compsons perspective. Even though the present-day of this section was almost eighteen years prior to the present-day of Benjys section, it nevertheless followed roughly the chronological development of the novel, for w

31、hile many of Benjys recollections were of their early childhood, most of Quentins flashbacks recorded their adolescence, particularly Caddys dawning sexuality. Quentins section took place on the day he commited suicide, and the present we followed his wanderings around Boston (he is a student at Har

32、vard University) as he fastidiously prepared for his death. Like Benjy, he was obsessed with the past and frequently lapsed into flashbacks. Unlike the fairly discrete narratives of Benjys multiple memories, Quentins were much more fragmentarya repeated word or phrase early in his section often recu

33、red later with greater detail and embellishment. Quentins flashbacks also were much more intellectual than Benjys. Benjy recorded mainly sensual impressions, Quentin often delved into more abstract issues such as character motivation, guilt, honor, and sin. The source of Quentins horror was Caddy. H

34、earkening back to antebellum views of honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity, Quentin could not accept his sisters growing sexuality, just as he cannot accepted his fathers notion that “virginity” was merely an invention of men. Most of his flashbacks concerned directly his involvement in Caddys s

35、exual maturing, but ironically they depicted also just how ineffectual Quentin was. In an attempt to restore “honor” to Caddy and to the Compson family, for example, he confronted Dalton Ames, who may be the man who impregnated Caddy, but Quentin was easily overpowered by Amesand in the present, whe

36、n he mistook a fellow student for the adversary of his flashback, Quentin was beaten up. In another incident, Quentin proposed a suicide pact with Caddy, but ultimately he could not go through with it. Section three was told by the third Compson brother, Jason, and was set on Good Friday. Unlike his

37、 brothers, Jason cared much more on the present, offering fewer flashbacks. The tone of Jasons section was set instantly by the opening sentence: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”(Faulkner 192) Jason was a sadist, and his grimly humorous section revealed just how low the Compson family had

38、sunkfrom Quentins obsessions over heritage and honor and sin to Jasons near-constant cruelty and complaints. The fourth and final section was told from an omniscient viewpoint. It was sometimes known as “Dilseys Section” because of her prominence in this section, but she was not the sole focus in th

39、is sectiona long sequence follows Jason as he pursues his niece, who had stolen about $7,000 from him, to “Mottson.” The focus here was entirely upon the present-day, Easter Sunday, and to that end, all traces of Caddy, including her daughter and even the very mention of her name, had been removed.T

40、he two main narratives presented in this section were fairly straightforward: Jasons pursuit of his stolen money and his inevitable come-uppance when he insulted the wrong man in Mottson; and Dilseys attendance at an Easter church service, at which a preacher from St. Louis, Reverend Shegog, deliver

41、ed a sermon which stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. As she said, following the service, “Ive seed de first en de last . I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”(Faulkner 254) . The Causes of Caddys TragedyAll the readers of The Sound and the Fury know that Caddy was a t

42、ragic character in this novel. Though there was not a separate chapter of Caddy, she was the central character in this novel; and the cause of the tragedy of Caddy mainly came from two aspects.A. The Pressure from the Family This story was about the Compson family, which was a prominent one in Jeffe

43、rson, Mississippi of the South America. Caddy was the only daughter of this family. The first section narrated by Caddys youngest brother Benjy, an idiot, who depended too much on her; he thought repeatedly that Caddy smells like trees. Most of his memory was centered about her. For example, at the

44、beginning of this section, Luster leaded Benjy to a nearby course, hoping to earn back his lost quarter by fetching lost golf balls from the rough. The golf course lay on a stretch of what used to be the Compson pasture, which had been sold to developers by Mr.Compson to pay for his son Quentins edu

45、cation at Harvard. When Benjy heared one of the golfers calling out to his caddie, he moaned because the sound of the word “caddie” reminded him of his sister. In his memory, Benjy and T.P., one of the Compsons black servants, had gotten their hands on some champagne from the wedding, though T.P. th

46、ought the beverage was merely “sassprilluh.” The two boys were drinking and keeping falling down when they watched some cows cross the yard. T.P. and Quentin got into a fight because T.P. had been teasing Quentin about Caddy. The fighting and the alcohol threw Benjys world into chaos, and he began t

47、o cry. Versh carried Benjy up the hill to the wedding party. Moreover, in the present, Luster was still standing with Benjy as he played in the stream. Luster told Benjy not to approach the nearby swing because Miss Quentin was there with her boyfriend, the man with the red tie. This made Benjy recall a time years ago when he saw Caddy and Charlie, her first suitor, kissing on the swing. In his memory, Benj