浅析英美小说中的双性同体

Androgyny in A Room of One’s Own and A Rose for
Emily
万木春
Abstract
The concept of “androgyny”in Carl G Jung‟s concept belongs to the system of mythology and archetype. That is, each individual has some characteristic of the opposite Sex. Anima is the soul of man and his feminine inner personality,which is present in the unconscious of the male. And animus is the masculine inner personality present in women. The mother archetype stems from an intensification of all anima instincts. These three combine to make the full sense of androgyny. Jung‟s and Virginia Woolf‟s androgyny concept are presented in this essay The short story A Rose for Emily demonstrates the overdevelopment of mother archetype.
Besides this, this thesis explores Woolf”s vision of androgyny in art creation. To Woolf, androgyny is the most propitious writing state, in which a writer can make a perfect artistic expression. At last there is the conclusion that two works present two concepts respectively, and literature is still connected with countless examples of androgyny.
Key Words：androgyny, mother archetype, anima, animus
摘要
“双性同体”是卡尔·荣格在神话和原型理论中提出的重要概念, 其意正如男人身上有女性气质作为平衡, 女人身上也有男性气质作为平衡。

双性同体理论中包含有三个方面。

阿尼玛是体现在男性性格中的阴性灵魂, 潜藏于无意识之中。

而阿尼玛斯则是体现在女性性格中的阳性灵魂。

母性原型产生于阴性灵魂的投射。

荣格的双性同体理论鲜少运用于文学批评中,但因此断言两者之间没有联系性也是错误的。

因为同体理论的范围包括了所有自然界的生物, 文学作品中的人物自然也不例外。

本文详细了介绍荣格和伍尔夫的双性同体理论。

短篇小说《致艾米莉的玫瑰》中体现的母性原型。

此外, 本篇论文还探究了伍尔夫关于艺术创作的两性融合思想。

在伍尔夫看来, 双性同体是一种创作的最佳心理状态, 最有利于作家的艺术表达。

两部作品展现了双性同体理论的两个方面, 而文学世界亦多有范例。

双性同体理论在文学批评工作中有不可或缺的地位。

关键词：双性同体；母性原型；阿尼玛；阿尼玛斯
Contents
Abstract in English (i)
Abstract in Chinese (ii)
I. Introduction of Androgyny (1)
II.Woolf and Jung’a Theory of Androgyny (4)
A. Woolf‟s Theory of Androgyny and its Significance (4)
B. Jung‟s Theory of Androgyny (5)
1. Psychological Aspects of Anima and Animus (5)
2. Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype (6)
III. Androgyny in A Room of One’s Own (8)
IV. The Concept of Mother in A Rose for Emily (11)
A. Anima in Slave Tobe and the Mother Absence (11)
B. Animus and Masculinity in Miss. Emily (12)
V. Conclusion (15)
Works Cited (16)
I.Introduction of Androgyny
Androgyny has more than one meaning. It may refer to the anatomical coexistence of two sorts of sex organs in the same body; or else to the allegory of a form of spiritual perfection. In other cases, it is related to the explicit coexistence of male and female qualities in the same entity. At the present time, androgyny has abandoned its biological implications and is used in the human relationships, politics and the essence of the things.
……Androgyny‟‟can be traced back in the legendary origin of human beings according to Plato. In his Symposium, he tells the story of the circular beings who existed before the split of humans into male and female halves. There are originally three wholes：all male, all female, male and female. In f ear of mankind‟s force, Jupiter split each of them into person of halves. Losing their pairs, all human beings crave to be reunited with their halves.
Since then, each person seeks his other, and the original half might be in search with equal likelihood for the other sex. Plato assumes that only when each person finds her other sex that has been lost, can they together make a whole. In the portrayal, the separation and reunion of androgynous beings gives the origin of love and marriage, and conveys the strong emotional and sexual connection in “androgyny‟‟. When we fall in love at first sight, then we find someone that fills our original halves particularly well. An attitude towards this kind of androgyny is mainly negative.
Aristophanes in Plato‟s Symposium favors homosexual and lesbians that are closely associated with many people‟s concept of androgyny. And we should also admit that there still exit some positive attitudes towards androgyny in the traditional concept.
Androgyny has a long history of physiological and psychological basis. Freud is the pioneer to contribute to the concept of “subconscious androgyny” Freud is also interested in this term, and he argues“Man is an animal organism with an unmistakably bisexual disposition. The individual corresponds to two symmetrical halves. One is purely male and the other female. It is equally possible that each half was originally hermaphrodite (Freud, 52-53).
Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung‟s theory of ……anima and animus‟‟ describes that human beings are endowed with androgynous characteristics both in physiology and psychology. Anima is the soul of man and his feminine inner personality,which is present in the unconscious of the male. And animus is the masculine inner personality present in women. Each individual has some characteristic of the opposite sex.
“The anima is the female aspect present in the collective unconscious of men which may be personified as a female, very spontaneous and intuitive”(Jung, 54). And the animus is the male aspect in the collective unconscious of women, which may be incarnated as a wise old man. The anima and animus are the archetypes through which human beings communicate with the collective unconscious generally, and it is essential to get into touch with them.
Androgynous vision also appears in literary works. In Shakespeare‟s Hamlet,
the prince if depicted as feminized and impotent man and Sarah Bernhardt comments that “some wish to see in Hamlet a womanish, hesitating, flighty mind. To me Helmet seems a manly, resolute, but thoughtful being. In another great tragedy Macbeth, he hero is also preoccupied with the androgynous ideas. The phrase the single state of man is a description of his integrity, both moral and psychic.
Androgyny enjoys great reputation both in the past and the present, and now literature critics are more ready to apply it to more works to gain the novel experience.
II.Woolf and Jung’a Theory of Androgyny
A. Woolf’s Theory of Androgyny and its Significance
Virginia Woolf is one of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century. As a generally acknowledged pioneer and leader of the feminist movement, Woolf refuses to position herself in the single sexual polarity or gender. Hence, in her essay A Room of Ones Own she puts forward her androgynous idea in literary writing, that is, the most favorable writing state is to write with an androgynous mind. We may classify Woolf‟s androgynous ideas as follows：
(1) Androgyny is the perfect state of the male-female relationship. As Woolf states in her A Room of Ones Own, “the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness” (Woolf, 102). Due to the social and historical influence, men pursue knowledge and perceive the world by sense while women by intuition. So it is claimed that men have intellect and reason but lack geist, but the opposite is true of women. The assignment of male and female characteristics is arbitrary, and the physical difference between two polarities is obvious. But in Woolf‟s theory,the harmonious mall-woman relationship is equal, mutually dependent and complementary, just like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay in A Room of Ones Own.
(2)Androgyny is also the best state of a writer. Woolf comment s Coleridge‟s writing in this way: “ It explodes and gives birth to all kinds of ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that is has the secret of perpetual life”
(Woolf, 5). She sees the need for women writers especially, to keep a harmonious balance of masculine and feminine tendencies in their heart during the process of literary production. It is better for a person to overcome the gender he or she holds, just bears it in mind that he or she, as a unity,is an individual.
(3)Woolf‟s androgynous idea anticipates the “postmode rnism. ” Culture is a split land separated by numerous borders where different elements are kept in opposition while in the postmodern culture the borders tum to margins where different elements begin to communicate and have a dialogue with one another. By subverting the hierarchical opposition between male and female, masculinity and femininity,man and woman, Woolf sees the change of a dynamic merging of conflict traits moving toward perfection. She regards fusion of two sexes as the utmost goal of feminism in her life.
Woolf‟s androgynous idea still has realistic significance nowadays. In modern society,women go out of their families and celebrate their liberation both in physic and spirit, trying to seek for a decent position in society and a proper relation with men.
B. Jung’s Theory of Androgyny
1. Psychological Aspects of Anima and Animus
The psyche has been claimed as an independent factor, then we must logically conclude that there is a psychic life which is not subject to the caprices of our will. One of the main proofs of this is the almost universal parallelism between
mythological motifs, on account of their quality as primordial images, Jung has already called it archetypes.
It seems to Jung, anima and animus was more like two polarities, rather than a harmonious union. H e continues that……no one Can get round the fact that by taking up a masculine possession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature”(Jung, 171).
Both anima and animus have positive effect respectively. The latter gives woman‟s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge, while the former supplies the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, and loyalty. They Can thus be a psycho pomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and personification of the spirit. Anyone who combines them inside is said to be within the perfect state according to Woolf.
2. Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype
The characters associated with anima are maternal instinct, such as Solicitude, sympathy and embracing love for children. These qualities are no longer the solo authority of the female, because male also seeks the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle. This leads to the motif of the dual mother, an archetype to be found in many variants in the field and comparative religion.
Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears diversely with an almost infinite variety of aspects. Among the most representative ones are personal mother and grandmother,stepmother and mother-in-law; next to these roles are any
woman with whom a relationship exists, for example, a nurse or governess or perhaps a remote ancestress. Then there are images which might be termed as mothers in a figurative sense, such as the goddess, Mother of God, and the Virgin.
Other images of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our yearning for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, and the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many things arousing devotion or holy feeling, for instance, the church, university,city of country,the woods, the sea of any still waters, especially the underworld and the moon, Can be mother-symbols. Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype. Because of the protection and enveloping love maternal instinct implies, hollow things such as ovens and cooking vessels are associated with the mother archetype.
As for the evil mother images, the witch, the dragon of any devouring and entwining animal, such as a large fish of a serpent, the grave, deep water, death, nightmares are on top of the list. They represent the most important features of the mother archetype. These negative and unfavorable sides of characteristics may include anything secret, subtle, dark, and anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is horrible and inevitable like destiny.
All these symbols can have a favorable meaning or negative meaning. This essay devotes to uncovering the evil beneath literature images, so that projection of Jungian theory on literature can be detected.
III.Androgyny in A Room of One’s Own
In the second chapter of A Room of One‟s Own it is known that the narrator goes into the British Museum,and there are a vast number of texts that have been written about women by men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women. She finds in these texts a bewildering array of categorical, but contradictory statement about the nature of woman. What surprises her particularly, however,is the anger she finds in these texts. It is a patriarchal society- man have all power and money, hold all important positions. She says that throughout the history, women have served as models of inferiority, who enlarge the superiority of man. women have served al these centuries as looking glasses the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Men are logically become angry and defensive if women criticize them. Women cease to be inferior and the men accordingly lose the status of superiority on which they are dependent. The men are overly concerned with attacking the other sex and so, ultimately, end up concentrating mostly on their own gender. Their arguments lose objectivity, as they are not developed “dispassionately”, and instead become subjective,easily picked-apart beliefs. Their power does not confer freedom of thought.
The final chapter of A Room of One‟s Own begins and ends with images. At the outset, the narrator looks out of the window and sees a very ordinary sight:a man and a woman come down the street, meet at the comer, and get into a cab tighter. It is a common image, but one the narrator finds herself investing with a rhythmical order. It
was a picture, she felt, of even fusion, and seemed somehow to ease her mind. The narrator has been thinking about the distinctions between two sexes throughout the essay, whereas she finds her cannot have the unity of the mind. She stales in the essay: “Perhaps to think,as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex is distinct from the other er is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together and get into a taxi-cab.”( Woolf, 126)
The image of a man and a woman getting into the cab gives a clue to her th at there are two sexes in her mind corresponding to two minds in the bodies os exes, whether they are required to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?"(I bid128). The narrator goes onto s ketch a plan of the soul: in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain. The man predominates over the woman, and the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If on is a man still the woman part of brain must have effect, and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. (Ibid, 128)
This fusion, she believes, is what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was describing when he said a great mind is androgynous. Woolf never questions the political, historical or bodily significance of sexual identity. What she does challenge is the rigidity with which the categories of man and woman are produced in contemporary fiction. Woolf argues for the importance of a unified creative mind,
which would express both masculinity and femininity, arguing that. It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman puer and simple, and one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.
IV.The Concept of Mother in A Rose for Emily
A. Anima in Slave Tobe and the Mother Absence
The anima is perhaps the most complex part of Jung‟s archetypes. It is the “soul—image, ”the spirit of a mall‟s 6lan vital, his life force of vital energy. In the sense of“soul, ”says Jung, anima is the“living thing in man that live s of itself and the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness(Jung, 26-27)” Anima gives Tobe a feminine designation in his male psyche, SO that his psyche contains the contra sexual part, and the image of the opposite sex that he carries in both his personal and his collective unconscious. This assertion will be somewhat clearer with the details in the fiction. Tobe is dumb and silent, and readers never learn anything more than what his name tells US：he is the protector of Miss Emily,and his destiny is to be with her. His lifetime career is a combined gardener and cook, going in and out with a market basket, and he is the only sign of life about the Grierson Family after Miss Emily locks herself alive from the outside world and no longer went out. Never a single remark was heard from Negro Tobe, let alone a whole sentence. This makes US think whether he has ever endured the painful moment of speech delivery. “He talked to no one, probably not even to her,for his voice had grown harsh and rusty,as if from disuse”(Faulkner, 221). This line demonstrates Negro Tobe‟s difficulty in speaking resulting from his own unwillingness to talk, just like the way Miss Emily always behaves. Black has been used to signify many kinds of absence—the absence of light, of goodness and purity,of rationality. The strategy of absence that Faulkner
uses in A Rose for Emily calls attention to the prolonged absence of another maternity character. Image of Emily‟S mother never appears, but her absence is a central motivating and symbolic presence in alluding the sacrificial victim of Negro Tobe. The marked absence of utterances further emphasize the subtle relationship between Miss Emily and Tobe, which Can hardly be articulated or grasped in language. Ambiguity between two genders and combination of bisexuality are incarnated in Tobe. Buying poisonous drug from the store and murdering the disloyal lover are the uttermost exhibition of the mother‟s evil love.
B. Animus and Masculinity in Miss. Emily
Obstinate, asocial, out of step with the tenor of modem life, Emily lingers, when alive, as a……monument”to a glory gone with the wind. Yet she possesses a measure of dignity,a stature of tragic dimensions, which inspires wonder and admiration. Her past represents to some t ownspeople“not a diminishing road bur, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touch”(Faulkner,223). That golden era is now encased in the minds of people as an ideal of some kind to look back to, somehow When she dies, she lies in state under a mass of bought flowers for people to view.
The development of animus in Emily‟s character is absolutely unavoidable. We may take a close look at the triple relationship among the shadow,the persona and the animus. According to Jung, the three are structural components of the psyche that human being has inherited long before. Mr. Grierson impressed the codes of southern
lady and the family status, or persona upon Miss. Emily. But the later fails to mediate between her ego and the external world, that is her mask showed to the world or her social personality is quite different from her true self. The shadow is the darker side of Emily‟s unconscious self; the inferior and less pleasing aspects of the personality, which Miss. Emily does not want to suppress and comes to her tragic love and lifetime neurotic disturbance. In the deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that Miss. Emily always drags behind her.
These few explanations may still not suffice to characterize the experience of projection on Miss. Emily. She could hardly get round the shadow that an emotionally charged content is lying ready in the unconscious and springs into projection on her at a certain moment. This content is the animus and it expresses the fact that a masculine element is always coupled with a feminine one. Citizens had long thought of them as a tableau of father and daughter,……Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and c lutching a horsewhip” (Faulkner, 223). This sentence is instantly cited and analyzed to define the father—daughter relationship, and as the analysts point out：“spraddled silhouette‟‟is the typical figure headstrong and obstinacy,as for the horsewhip clutched represents the power of patriarchy.
Emily‟s father suppressed the personality development of Miss Emily. Since the absence of real mother image in the novel has been discussed, and it is the truth universally acknowledged that mother always plays an essential role. The mother is the first feminine being with whom the daughter comes in contact, whereas in the case
of being brought up by the father solely,she cannot help growing into a lady of masculinity. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray,when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy··four it Was still that vigorous iron gray, like the hair of an active man”(Faulkner, 224).
A significant role is played by the image of the woman‟s sexual counterpart, the animus, in Emily‟S life. Overtly or covertly,consciously of unconsciously,it is hard for Emily to be aware of her own personality. Extreme stubbornness and distortion are also related to psychopathology,thus they are associated with the intention of injury and illness. No wonder Miss. Emily comes to the tragic end.
V.Conclusion
This thesis can be divided into three parts. The first two chapters lay the theoretical foundation for analysis; then the following two chapters focus on the theory of androgyny in two literary works; and the last part comes to a safe conclusion.
The comparatively wide range of study of this archetype proves that the three concepts are a fundamental psychic factor of great practical importance. No matter whether characters and readers understand how and in what way they are influenced they can not deny the archetype. Analysts need remain conscious of the world of literature, which is still peopled with countless examples of androgyny.
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