英语文学论文—《欢乐之家》

本科毕业论文中文题目：《欢乐之家》中莉莉·巴特命运的衰落——追寻自我过程中超越同一性危机的失败外文题目: The Decline of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth –The Failure to Transcend the Identity Crisisin the Process of Self-Discovery系别英语学院专业英语（翻译）年级 2006级学号 200601010031学生姓名马晓瑞指导教师张从成结稿日期 2010年5月10日四川外语学院教务处制《欢乐之家》中莉莉•巴特命运的衰落——追寻自我过程中超越同一性危机的失败摘要：美国现代女作家伊迪丝·华顿是20世纪初现实主义文学代表人物之一，她在作品中塑造的众多女性形象尤其受到西方女权主义者的推崇，被认为是西方女性主义的先驱作家。

《欢乐之家》是华顿的成名作。

故事以作者熟悉的纽约上流社会为背景，描述了女主人公莉莉•巴特寻求嫁给有钱人，但由于无法超越内心的矛盾，她始终找不到心灵的处所，最终在极度的孤独中莉莉结束了自己年轻的生命。

本论文运用美国精神分析学家埃里克·赫·埃里克森的同一性危机理论，对《欢乐之家》中莉莉的命运进行分析，认为她在社会生活中屡受挫折以及她最终结束自己生命是莉莉的早期生活经历使她无法超越同一性危机的后果。

华顿虽和莉莉在成长过程中有相似的经历，但凭着对文学的热忱和执着，她寄托了自己孤独的心灵于文学，成功地超越了同一性危机。

本论文作者希望能从新的视角分析《欢乐之家》这部作品的女主角的精神世界，加深对伊迪丝·华顿艺术创作的理解。

关键词：精神分析；埃里克·赫·埃里克森；同一性危机；超越同一性危机失败The Decline of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth – The Failure toTranscend the Identity Crisis in the Process of Self-DiscoveryAbstractModern woman writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is one of the representatives of Realism Literature in the early 20th century in the United States. The numerous female images she created in her works especially appeal to Western feminists, and she was regarded as one of the precursors of the Western feminist writers. The House of Mirth is her first well-known piece of work, published in 1905. The story, written under the background of the New York upper-class society which Wharton is quite familiar with, depicts the protagonist Lily Bart’s tragedy of dying in her early age as she cannot overcome the conflicts inside herself in the process of searching for a potential rich man to marry.This paper analyzes the final destiny of Lily Bart under the guidance of identity crisis theory of American psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson. Those numerous setbacks in her social life and her final death are mainly due to Lily’s early life which results in her failure to go beyond the identity crisis. Wharton’s early experiences are quite sim ilar with those of Lily’s, yet thanks to her passion and determination about literature where she dwells her lonely heart, Wharton successfully transcends the identity crisis. By writing this paper I hope to analyze the psychological world of the protagonist in The House of Mirth in order to deepen the understanding of Edith Wharton’s artistic works.Key Words: Psychoanalysis; Erik H. Erikson; Identity Crisis; Transcend Identity CrisisAcknowledgementsFirst and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Zhang Congcheng, both for his intellectual guidance and for his warm and constant encouragement during the process of writing this thesis. With patience and prudence, he labored through drafts of this thesis and pointed out defects in my theorizing. Therefore, I owe all the merits in this thesis, if any, to him, though I am fully aware that the thesis might still contain some mistakes, for which I bear the whole responsibility.My cordial and sincere thanks go to all the teachers in the Department of English, whose interesting and informative courses have benefited me a lot during my college years. The profit that I gained from their profound knowledge, remarkable expertise and intellectual ingenuity will be of everlasting significance to my future life and career.I am also very grateful to my classmates, who have given me a lot of help and courage during my stay in the University and throughout the process of writing this thesis.Last but not the least, big thanks go to my family who have shared with me my worries, frustrations, and hopefully my ultimate happiness in eventually finishing this thesis.Content中文摘要 (i)Abstract (ii)Acknowledgements (iii)Introduction (1)I. Lily Bart’s Failure to Go Beyond Identity Crisis in The House of Mirth (5)A. A Brief Introduction to Identity Crisis Theory (5)B. Lily Bart’s Cultivation of the Identity Crisis (5)1. The Influence of Lily Bart’s Family in Lily’s Childhood (5)2.The Influence of Lily’s Aunt and Friends in Lily’sAdolescent Years (8)C. Lily Bart’s Vain Trial to Overcome the Identity Crisis (10)II. The Influence of Identity Crisis on Lily Bart’s Fate (12)A. Lily Bart’s Sense of Isolation and Solitude (12)B. Lily Bart’s Final Death (16)III. Edith Wharton’s Management to Pass Through Identity Crisis (18)A. Edith Wharton’s Transcendence of Identity Crisis (18)B. Edith Wharton’s Attempt to Get Lily Bart Go Beyondthe Identity Crisis (19)Conclusion (21)Notes (23)Bibliography (25)The Decline of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth – The Failure toTranscend the Identity Crisis in the Process of Self-DiscoveryIntroductionEdith Wharton(1862-1937), also known as Edith Newbold Jones Wharton, Edith Newbold Jones, David Olivieri, and Edith Newbold Wharton, is one of the leading American novelists of the 1900s and 1910s, was born Edith Jones to wealthy and conservative parents who were part of New York City’s upper-class society. Wharton had the best that money could buy. She was privately tutored, traveled to Europe, and married at the age of twenty-three in 1885 to a member of her family’s set, Edward Wharton.During the early decades of the twentieth century – at a time when New York City could ban women from smoking in public, Wharton published works which discussed love outside of marriage, scandal, class divisions, and poverty. Wharton is a profilic writer with many a famous novel such as The House of Mirth(1905), Ethan Frome(1911), The Reef(1912), The Custom of the Country(1913), the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence(1920), among which The House of Mirth earns her a worldwide reputation. In 1921, she became the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, and two years later she received an honorary doctorate of letters from Yale University.The House of Mirth is one of the masterpieces of Edith Wharton，in which the protagonist, twenty-nine-year-old Lily Bart, adopted by her aunt Mrs. Peniston after her parents’death, is managing a wealthy marriage for herself. Although she is a beautiful, graceful, and sociable woman in the New York society, she fails to fit herself to those “well-mannered”people. Lily is accused of cheating her friend’s (Judy Trenor) husband, Gus Trenor, of his money, and of having an affair with another friend’s (Bertha Dorset) husband, George Dorset, though she knows those roles of being somebody’s mistress are just what her friends assign to her. There are also two other men, Percy Gryce and Simon Rosedale, the representatives of the New Rich inNew York, whom Lily has ever wanted to marry. However, Lily does not marry either of the two men due to the lack of feelings for both of them. The man Lily really intends to marry is someone who could give her the luxurious life she wants and also could give her the love she wants. Actually there is no such man in her circle. Lawrence Selden is the only one to whom Lily directs her real love, yet has little money to meet her needs. Eventually Lily is deserted by that society, also by those potential spouses. Lily is so lost and helpless, and the whole story ends with her anonymity and death.The House of Mirth (1905) brought Wharton critical acclaim. In this novel Wharton offered a scathing and realistic portrait of what she knew best: New York City society. By showing the wealthy as emotionally frivolous, Wharton shed light on the moral crisis besetting the wealthy in a time of social unrest and upheaval. The House of Mirth became a best-seller in 1905 and 1906. In The House of Mirth, Wharton documents the moral consumption of both the old New Yorks and the new rich during the waning years of the Gilded Age. This Gilded World is described by Wharton as a house of mirth, which is, in fact, taken from Ecclesiastes 7:2-4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”1–indicates that Wharton considers New York society to be vain, petty, and foolish. Wharton wrote The House of Mirth and, later, The Age of Innocence to expose what she knew about the social customs of the wealthy. In a letter to Dr. Morgan Dix, rector of New York City’s Trinity Church, Wharton wrote: “Social conditions as they are just now in our new world, where the sudden possession of money has come without inherited obligations, or any traditional sense of solidarity between the classes, is a vast and absorbing field for the novelist.”2 Wilson Edmund writes that “the book has some originality and power, with its chronicle of a social parasite on the fringes of the very rich… and finding a window open only twice, at the beginning and at the end of the book, on a world where all the values are not money values”3The House of Mirth traces the conspicuous wasting of Lily Bart, who is evidently the victim of the civilization. The House of Mirth is also a novel about the old New York society, because without the confinement of social codes, Lily’spsychological and material life would be very different. Lily has accepted the ideology of her wealthy society; she too believes that her role in life is to be the beautiful ornament that spend s her husband’s fortune on superior things. But, at heart, she longs for freedom, free from everything – from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents, for she is deeply influenced by Lawrence Selden’s “the republic of th e spirit”.4 Wharton’s heroine finds herself doubled or more precisely self-divided. She has two selves and they are not conforming to each other. The journey of Lily’s rebellion against and decline from the upper class is also a journey of her self-discovery. Eventually, Lily is deserted by that society, and the whole story ends with her tragic death.Feminist critics see late-nineteenth-century attitudes toward women as constitutive – but also restrictive – forces in Lily Bart’s and Edith Wharton’s efforts to gain self-determination. Elizabeth Ammons’s Edith Wharton’s Argument with America written in 1980 traces Wharton’s argument with the patriarchal society through her life and fiction. Carol Wershoven’s The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton(1982) and Katherine Joslin’s Women Writers: Edith Wharton(1991) are another two important critical books in feminist approach.Marxist critics examine how class structures and the system or economic exchange construct and position Lily within a capitalist marketplace where she herself is not an agent of change but a commodity, an item of exchange. Wai-chee Dimock’s Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Diana Trilling’s The House of Mirth Revisited are representatives of Marxist criticism on the novel.This paper intends to analyse Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth, using Erik H. Erikson’s identity crisis theory and to disclose how Lily’s failure to go beyond identity crisis affects her ultimate fate. The body of this essay is to be divided into three parts. The first part of this passage gives a brief introduction to Identity Crisis Theory, the most prominent theory of Erikson. And this paper will also study how Lily falls into identity confusion through a brief introduction to Lily Bart’s early childhood when she should build her own identity in a right way. The next part deals with the influence of identity crisis on Lily’s fate – a lack of intimacy with others, asense of loneliness and her final death. In the last part, this paper will present how Edith Wharton manages to go beyond her identity crisis by find an alternative way of self-realization in literary world and how Wharton tries to pull Lily through her identity crisis.The purpose of my essay is to study Lily Bart in a psychoanalytic way under the guidance of Erik H. Erikson’s identity crisis theory in order to reexamine the reason of Lily’s tragic fate, which has long been deemed as the patriarchal social conditions. Lily has also been regarded as an ornament and still a victim of the money-comes-first society as well as a society of male control. Yet simultaneously, the deeper reason why Lily commits suiside is her failure to get herself go beyond identity crisis in a positive way. In the process of pursuing a real selfhood, Lily is too helpless to transcend herself, so she chooses an extremely negative way to extricate herself from the world of money stink.I. Lily Bart’s Failure to Go Beyond Identity Crisis in The House ofMirthA. A Brief Introduction to Identity Crisis Theory“Identity crisis” 5 is the most famous theory coined by Erik H. Erikson, and he believes that it is one of the most important conflicts people face in personal development.According to Erikson, an identity crisis is a time of exploration of different ways of looking at oneself, when an individual loses a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity.The emergence of an identity crisis occurs during the teenage years in which people struggle between feelings of identity versus role confusion.According to Erikson, only those who succeed in resolving the crisis will be ready to face future challenges in life and establish committed relationships with others. Erikson suggests that people experience an identity crisis when they lose a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity. If society is too insistent, the teenager will acquiesce to external wishes, effectively forcing him or her to ‘foreclose’ on experimentation and, therefore, true self-discovery. Once someone settles on a worldview and vocation, will he or she be able to integrate this aspect of self-definition into a diverse society? When it turns out to be wrong, they will build role confusion instead of a certain identity of themselves, and then they become relunctant to commit to an identity. Failure to develop one’s own identity will long affects individuals and will make it difficult to build a trustful and intimate relation with others, especially with those of the opposite sex.B. Lily Bart’s Formation of the Identity Crisis1. The Influence of Lily Bart’s Family in Lily’s ChildhoodAs Erikson points out: “the ego’s beginnings are difficult to assess, but as we know, it emerges gradually out of a stage when ‘wholeness’is a matter of physiological equilibration, maintained through the mutuality between the baby’s need to receive and the mother’s need to give”.6The early development of identity produces a great influence over the later adult life, while the parental influence is an important factor in the psychological development of a little child. In the early childhood, one begins to cultivate a sense of trust, which is the most basic component of mental vitality to develop in life. If a child successfully develops trust in his or her early age, he or she will feel safe and secure in the world. Parents who are “inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, or rejecting”7 contribute to feelings of mistrust in the children they care for. If a child fails to develop trust, he or she will have a sense of insecurity and formulate a belief that the world is inconsistent and unpredictable. This is no good for the child to build a consistent identity later in the psychological development.In Lily Bart’s case, due to the lack of her parents’ love and care, she fails to cultivate the basic trust. Lily Bart in The House of Mirth grows up in a typical upper-class New York family in the late nineteenth century, with a mother who is always obsessed with superficial wealth and social matters, and a dim father as the financial provider. The distinct roles between her parents do not set a good example for little Lily. Our knowledge of Lily’s early life mainly comes from her discontinuous reminiscence. Lily’s early image of her family is “a house in which no one ever dined at home unless there is ‘company’; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table shadowed with square envelops which were opened in haste, and oblong envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depth of a bronze jar”8. As a stylish and socially obsessed mother, Mrs. Bart is deeply interested in arranging dinners, parties and their summer trips, and also in the fashionable clothes brought back from Europe. So she has little time and energy to offer her love and care for little Lily, and the child is left to the nurses or governesses. In Lily’s description of her early life, there is no intimacy mentioned between Lily and her mother, no embrace,no kiss, and no holding hands. Loss of mother’s love, indicated by Erikson, “makes the impression over the child of having been deprived, of having been divided and having been abandoned, all of which leave a residue of basic mistrust”.9 Since trust refers to “an essential trustfulness of others as well as a fundamental sense of one’s own trustworthiness”10 here, Lily finds no one to rely on in her world in the later life.Lily’s mistrust, mainly due to her loss of mother’s love at the early age, causes her isolation with others in the community. Though Mrs. Bart does not show enough interest in her daughter’s life in her early childhood, later, she wishes to regain her social position and wealth by her daughter’s beauty which may bring a wealthy marriage. Lily is thus reared to be a marriageable lady in the society and to follow the forms that the society mandates. After Mr. Bart’s bankruptcy and later death, the only financial provider of the family collapes, and to Mrs. Bart, Mr. Bart means nothing but a money provider. Then Mrs. Bart becomes obsessed with Lily’s prospects for winning a fortune by virtue of her beauty. L ily’s mother is entirely familiar with the rate of exchange in the world in which she lives, and she nurtures and indulges Lily’s beauty – first as the visible sign of the family’s station and finally as its one remaining asset. Lily is brought up in the faith that, whatever it may cost, one must have a good look, and be what Mrs. Bart called “decently dressed”.11Lily is deeply influenced by Mrs. Bart’s belief that she would win back the lost family fortune by virtue of her face. She alternates between worry over money and over-spending, always with the hope that a man will come along who will solve all her money problems. She finds Percy Gryce boring and beneath her in grace and charm, but she is forced by her values to pursue him as a potential marriage partner anyway. Lily learned a good deal from her mother, but still thought of her own values as different. She liked to think that when she reached her goal of winning a fortune, she would make the world a better place by the “vague diffusion of refinement and good taste.”12 She likes pictures and flowers and sentimental fiction. She thinks these values make her desire for money nobly. Her desperation for landing a good marriage as well as the contradictory desire to rebel against the falseness of such a position come out of this conflicted past. All of these indicate that actually Lily cannot fullyaccept the role imposed by her mother, nor can she absolutely eliminate the identification with her mother, since her view againt that of her mother’s is too weak to make a difference. In this way, the role confusion inevitably puts Lily in dilemma.In contrast to the strong-willed, vigorous mother, Lily remembers her father as almost a non-person. In her subtle impression of her father, Mr. Bart is described as follows, “the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks”13. His father exists only as a financial provider to the family or to Mrs. Bart with little free will of his own. In little Lily’s mind, her father is too busy with his business to share the happiness and love with her. Lily, though, does not miss the trail of the love directed by her father. Late at night when father arrives at home, he would come to her room, kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or the governess. But the moment of harmony is often interrupted by the dominant mother either by sending a maid to remind him that he is dinning out or something else. The father has to, involuntarily, plunge into those boring social activities instead. It seems that the father is kept detached from his little daughter, even though he may really enjoy accompanying her and sharing their feelings. As is pointed out, early trust is indispensable for the growth of a firmly developed autonomy. However, the communlcation between Lily and her father seems frequently to be silent, or interrupted or delayed by the outside world. Hence, the infirm, hesitant, docile and suppressed father could find no way to secure his little daughter from the negative factors in her development. Father’s silence indicates futility of action, furthermore, of expressing himself and responding to the active world. Such a father, who does not develop his free will, virtue of purpose and a sense of initiative very well, is unable to encourage his child in her personality development. Lily cultivates no ability to develop her autonomous will and a sense of initiative. Therefore, the confused child, when confronted with the inner conflicts and frustration, could find no way out.2. The Influence of Lily’s Aunt and Friends in Lily’s Adolescent YearsExcept for the family influence in her early childhood, Lily is greatly influenced by her company in the social circle. In Lily’s adolescent years, she drops into a sense of role confusion because of the ineffective company with and the negative influences of her aunt, Mrs. Peniston and her so-called friends, Bertha Dorset and Judy Trenor.As Erikson puts it that “in the adolescent years, adolescents are exploring their independence and developing a sense of self, and they are struggling between feelings of identity versus role confusion”.14 Young people who receive proper encouragement and reinforcement through personal exploration will emerge from this phase of their life with a strong sense of self and a feeling of independence and control. Those who remain unsure of their beliefs and desires will be insecure and confused about themselves and the future. And the emergence of an identity crisis occurs at this time.When Lily’s mother died, her father’s widowed sister, Mrs. Peniston took her. Mrs. Peniston – whose name suggests both penance and stone – feels no sympathy for her niece. She leads a very staid life. “She belonged to the class of old N ew Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed.”15 Lily disgusts the life that Mrs. Peniston has. She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s – its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers. Mrs. Peniston, though Lily’s custodian, is surely not the right person for Lily to rely on wholly. Mrs. Peniston’s act of adopting her niece is out of her vanity, rather than out of her love, sympathy, or responsibility for the girl. The reason for her to assume the charge of Lily is her moral vanity which makes the public display of selfishness difficult. Mrs. Peniston may support Lily financially to some degree, but never take Lily’s best interest at heart. She simply stands outside, and leaves Lily alone to take the field. The over-control of Mrs. Peniston in the household as well as the moral ideas leaves Lily’s autonomy underdeveloped.Another influencial power is Bertha Dorset who is the representative of the fashionable expected females, Lily unconsciously identifies with or acts against her in one way or another. Lily is accused by Bertha of being her rival for her husband’saffection in order to obscure her own affair with the poet Ned Silverton, of fulfilling the role she assigns to Lily, and Lily assumes Bertha’s place as she takes the blame for Bertha’s infidelities in what is later described as a sacrifice. As Waid says, “what is most interesting about Lily and Bertha’s apparent rivalry is a doubling or interchangeability that is related to a confusion of identities”.16 Still another factor is Judy Trenor, who is regarded by Lily as a person she can go back on. Mrs. Trenor is willing to provide chances for her lonely friend, and shows her great care for her friend’s marriage. However, Mrs. Trenor’s great interest is her party in which Lily can be used as an efficient adornment to decorate the hall, to make some short notes, to amuse those dull males, and to cheer up those boring ones. Thus, this kind of friendship helps Lily nothing to overcome her role confusion. In a word, all these influencial powers put Lily into deep role confusion.C. Lily Bart’s Vain Trial to Overcome the Identity CrisisWe learn from Erikson that “beyond childhood which provides the moral basis of our identity, and beyond the ideology of youth, only an adult ethics can guarantee to the next generation an equal chance to experience the full cycle of humanness”.17 This permits the individual to transcend his identity crisis –to become as truly individual as he will ever be, and as truly beyond all individuality. Lily who has not pass through her childhood and adolenscence successfully due to the influence of her family and her aunt and friends finds it difficult to overcome the identity crisis. Lily has tried her best to transcend herself in her relationship with Lawrence Selden yet tries in vain.Lawrence Selden, whom Lily has known for eight years, gives a great challenge to Lily’s concepts about po wer and luxury. He is special to Lily – she admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.18Selden offers Lily his “republic” as a refuge from her social dilemma. In “the republic of the spirit”, people can achieve the personalfreedom which is far “from everything – from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents.” It is a republic that “one has to find the way to one’s self”19 which means not only it is a project motivated by self-will, but also it is the way to achieve one’s self.Lily is attracted by the realm of freedom and purity outlined by Selden. For the first time Lily tries to discover a real self and go beyond the identity crisis. But to travel with Selden into his “republic of the spirit” requires that Lily restrain her longings for the society of the material in which she has been brought up to seek herplace. However, Lily, as a woman, cannot get beyond to secure the spiritual freedom to achieve her ideal self. She understands that Selden wants to cross the boundaries of conventional society, and she admires his impulse to do so; while she has no money, no power, and no independence. Actually, even Selden himself is unable to break away from the material society on every occasion. His affair with Bertha Dorset is a forceful instance. His actions are not consistent with his words. His concept of “republic of the spirit” is just attractive and unrealistic. Lily cannot achieve her self by this.II. The Influence of Identity Crisis on Lily Bart’s FateA. Lily Bart’s Sense of Isolation and SolitudeLily’s early experiences cannot prepare her for passing through the identity crisis; instead, they make the best contribution to her confusion. First of all, Lily’s lack of a harmonious family atmosphere leads to her inability to live a normal psychological life in her childhood. Later in her life, Lily is mainly influenced by her relations with her aunt – Mrs. Peniston and her two friends – Judy Trenor and Bertha Dorsert. Lily abhors her aunt’s way of living yet has to believe that she is safe with her “family”, which at last turns out to be wrong. And her two friends are more likely to use Lily’s naivety for their own good. All these lead to Lily’s social decline and unconsciouly she believes that no one in her social circle is available for help. Lily tends to create an identity under her mother’s guidance of marrying a rich man to help her out of the financial crisis while at the same time she refuses the imposed role by the social power. However, in her trial to resist the imposed role, she fails to transcend the identity crisis due to her feeling that no one is trustworthy. Although she is so interested in Selden’s “the republic of the spirit”, she still cannot completely rely on it because of her material poverty. So we can conclude that Lily is kept in delimma whether she should become a woman the society wants or a lady of a real self, and this is, according to Erikson, an identity crisis. Lily finds herself doubled, or more precisely self-divided as Selden tells Lily “The difference is in yourself –it will always be there”.20According to Erikson, a strong sense of personal identity was important to developing intimate and commited relationships. Those with a poor sense of self tend to have less committed relationships and are more likely to suffer emotional isolation, loneliness, and depression. The intimacy between a person and others are often characterized by marriage. Lily’s failure to go beyond identity crisis stops her to establish an intimate relationship with other members in the society, especially males。