简·奥斯汀：飞驰的女孩
Jane Austen: Galloping girl | Prospect Magazine
译者：Irenex
Jane Austen wrote fast and died young. Her life on paper may have spanned three decades, but all six of her celebrated novels made their public appearance between 1811 and 1817. The phrase “tell-tale compression,” self-consciously applied by the narrator towards the end of Northanger Abbey (1817), captures something of Austen’s authorial career, too. Indeed, in her case it is appropriate that the word “career” can mean a short gallop at full speed, as well as the potentially slower progress of an individual’s working life. Novelists are more usually seen as long-distance runners than as sprinters, and Austen’s mature fiction has been cherished for the gradual emergence into consciousness of its heroines’ thoughts and feelings. Yet speedy progress—described in Emma (1815) as the “felicities of rapid motion”—remained central to this writer’s craft from start to finish.
简·奥斯汀一生笔耕不辍，却英年早逝。她的写作生涯跨越三十年，但是所有六部著名的小说是在1811年和1817年之间问世的。作者自觉的在《诺桑觉寺》（1817）的末尾使用的“故事精讲”这个词，也说中了奥斯汀的职业生涯。确实，于她而言，说“职业”这个词意味着短暂的全速疾驰是很合适的，同时也意味着一个人的工作生命的潜在的缓慢的进步。小说家们通常更容易被比作长跑者而不是短跑者，简·奥斯汀的成熟的小说因其逐渐浮现她的女主人公的思想和情感的意识被珍视。然而快速的进步——在《艾玛》（1815）中被描述成的“快速行动的幸福”——仍然是这位作家自始至终的写作风格。
《成为简·奥斯汀》剧照
Two hundred years ago, on St Swithun’s Day in 1817, Austen, near death, dictated an odd poem about horse racing to her sister Cassandra. From her sick bed in Winchester, she imagined how the festivities outside her window had come into being. The poem opens like this:
二百年前，在1817年的圣斯威辛日，奥斯汀，面临死亡，口述了一首奇怪的关于赛马的小诗给她的妹妹卡桑德拉。在温彻斯特的病榻上，她想象着窗外的即将到来的欢宴。这首诗开头是这样写的：
When Winchester races first took their beginning
It is said the good people forgot their old Saint
Not applying at all for the leave of Saint Swithin
And that William of Wykeham’s approval was faint.
当温彻斯特赛马刚刚开跑
据说好人都忘了他们古老的圣人
对圣斯威辛的离开没有任何回应
威廉姆·威科姆的同意虚弱无比
The races however were fixed and determined
The company came and the Weather was charming
The Lords and the Ladies were satine’d and ermined
And nobody saw any future alarming.
然而比赛笃定的继续
众人汇集天气醉人
先生小姐锦衣华服
无人知晓未来的警告
The Hampshire locals, hell-bent on having fun, ignore their religious allegiances. But, in placing their bets on pleasure rather than on duty, they have backed the wrong horse. The reward for such fixity and determination is an eternally blighted party: St Swithun curses the races, in perpetuity, with rain.
汉普郡的人们，固执的狂欢，遗忘旅行他们该对宗教赋予的忠贞。但是，由于把他们的赌注加之于享乐而不是责任，押错了注。如此笃定和决断的回报是一场永恒的毁灭的聚会：圣斯威辛用雨水永远的诅咒着这场比赛。
Austen died three days later, on 18th July 1817. Imagining, in her last known literary composition, the origins of a horse race and the fatal allure of the “charming,” she was also excavating the origins of her writing life. That her Winchester poem concerns how the dead are mostly (even in the saintliest of cases) forgotten has perhaps also to do with her sense of a future abruptly foreclosed, and of authorial work left undone. Not only undone, but largely overlooked: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared together in four volumes, posthumously, at the very end of 1817, in a print run of 1,750 copies; three years later, 282 remained unsold.
奥斯汀三天后去世，死于1817年7月18日。在她最后的知名的这一文学创作中，她想象着一场赛马比赛的起源和醉人的天气的致命诱惑，她也在挖掘她写作生涯的起源。她的温彻斯特诗歌关于死人（甚至是最为神圣的人）为什么大多被人遗忘的担忧或许和她感觉到自己的未来日子突然被上帝收回和自己的写作工作还未完成有关。不仅是未完成，而且绝大部分被忽视：《诺桑觉寺》和《劝导》共同构成四卷在她死后于1817年年末出版，印刷量为1750本；三年后还有282本没有卖出去。
Austen, depicted by her immediate family as a covert, dutiful, and domestically-minded writer, has since her death been serially repackaged by critics and imitators as a conservative and a radical, a prude and a saucepot, pro- and anti-colonial, a feminist and a downright bitch. Perhaps this fluidity and adaptability spring from her reluctance to be pigeonholed. After all, Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey warns that “from politics, it was an easy step to silence.” But facing down such overt discouragement, many critics from the 1970s to the present have discerned in Austen a writer who was far from apolitical.
奥斯汀，在她直系至亲的眼里，是一个隐秘的、有责任心的和家庭观念很强的作家，而在她死后被一些评论家和模仿者不断的重新包装成一个保守派同时是激进分子，一个故作正经的女人同时是个闷葫芦，一个赞成同时又反对殖民主义的人，一个女权主义者同时是一个彻头彻尾的泼妇。或许这种易变性和可变性是源于她不愿意被分门别类。毕竟，亨利·蒂尔尼在《诺桑觉寺》里警告说：“从政治到沉默只有简单的一步。”但是面临如此公然的挫败，从二十世纪七十年代到现在，许多评论家已经发现奥斯汀远不是一个不关心政治的人。
During Austen’s time of apprenticeship, radical novelists typically presented their heroes and heroines as the victims of a rotten system. Conservative writers of fiction tended, by contrast, to treat their protagonists as sinners in need of correction and redemption.
在奥斯汀还是学徒的时候，激进的小说家们一般会将他们的男主人公或女主人公作为一个腐败的系统的受害者呈现出来。正相反，保守的作家则倾向于把他们的主人公视为需要被纠正和救赎的罪人。
An opposing school of Austen criticism has sought to present her as sympathetic to radical politics, seeing her novels as an attempt to challenge or at least to revise the established order, especially patriarchy. Several decades ago, Edward Said drew attention to the simultaneous presence of and silence about empire and slavery in Mansfield Park, a line of enquiry that has most recently been pursued (with different conclusions) in Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, published last year.
一个反对简奥斯汀的评论派系，曾经企图证明她对激进的政治的同情，把她的小说视为一种挑战或者至少修正既定秩序尤其是父权制的尝试。几十年前，爱德华·萨义德把众人的视线引到《曼斯菲尔德庄园》中同时存在的君权制和奴隶制，以及作者对这两种制度的沉默态度，这一系列问题来自海伦娜·凯莉去年出版的《简·奥斯汀：秘密的激进者》，至今仍在追寻答案，结论各异。
But does all this make her a feminist? Maybe, maybe not. Silly, outspoken, and unruly female characters in Austen find themselves ridiculed and brought to book. Her heroines are compelled to sacrifice their freedom to the men who sometimes rescue and always confine them, although such a sacrifice is not necessarily presented as a bad thing. Those heroines are also subdued to the generic requirements of a three-volume courtship novel that must end in marriage.
但是所有这一切就说明她是一个女权主义者吗？或许是，也或许不是。奥斯汀身上的愚蠢，率真和不拘一格的女性性格被夸大地写入作品。她的女主人公，为了偶尔伸出援手却总是限制她们的男人们，被迫牺牲自由，尽管这样的牺牲不一定是坏事。这些女主人公也往往屈服于三阶段求爱小说的一般性要求，必须要以婚姻作为结局。
《傲慢与偏见》剧照
Some of Austen’s women appear to glimpse the possibility of escape and to chafe against novelistic and social convention. Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813) gets to turn down the appalling Mr Collins, and good for her. But she does so only to make a far more spectacular match with Mr Darcy (having initially turned him down, too). Lizzy’s friend, Charlotte Lucas—someone who is sensible and intelligent, but neither rich nor pretty—decides on prudential grounds to throw in her lot with Mr Collins instead. Lizzy’s immediate reaction to this turn of events is utterly uncompromising: Charlotte, she thinks, is disgracing herself. But Lizzy’s first thoughts are often proved wrong. The novel itself is less judgemental than its heroine as far as Charlotte’s coolly pragmatic decision is concerned. Yes, she has chosen to marry a pompous clod in exchange for the “worldly advantage” of a house, a garden, and some chickens; on the other hand, this may not have been the worst of bargains. In fact, we are told that “at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome,” Charlotte “felt all the good luck of it.”
奥斯汀的一些女性人物似乎瞥见逃脱的可能性，从而激怒小说传统和社会惯例。《傲慢与偏见》（1813）中的利齐·贝内特敢于拒绝可怕的柯林斯先生，干得好。但是她这么做只是为了能够与达西先生有更远的未来（她起初也拒绝了达西先生）。利齐的朋友，夏洛特·卢卡斯——一个不富有也不漂亮的，却敏感和智慧的人——却经谨慎决定后，将自己的赌注压在柯林斯先生身上。利齐对事情的这一转变而立即做出的反应是完全不妥协：她认为夏洛特是在轻贱自己。但是利齐的最初的想法往往证明是错误的。考虑到夏洛特的实用主义决定，小说本身比主人公还要有批判性。是的，她选择嫁给一个自大的笨蛋，为了换取世间荣华、房子、园子和一些小鸡；另一方面，这比交易她也不算吃亏。事实上，我们被告知“在27岁时，从来与漂亮不沾边”的夏洛特“觉得这样的结果已经很幸运了。”
Critics of Austen too often forget that she was primarily a writer and defender of fiction, not a polemicist. To say this does not mean we have to bleach her work of historical purchase, topicality, or partisanship. But it does entail acknowledging that her commitment was to everything that novels might be and do, rather than to any political cause. In her beguiling ability to convey sympathy, meaning, information and suggestion through the faulty, shifting perspectives of her characters, we come to know, and learn how to judge, a little of the world we are in. That does not mean we arrive at an understanding of everything about human behaviour, or of what motivates it. “Seldom, very seldom,” as the narrator cautions us in Emma, “does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
奥斯汀的评论家们经常会忘记，她首先是一位作家，小说的捍卫者，而不是一个辩论家。这么说不意味着我们想漂白她的作品的取悦大众、实事性或者党派性特点。但是我们有必要知道，她一心写小说，没有任何政治原因。通过作品中人物的认知错误以及认知改变，她含蓄的传达了同情、观点、信息和建议，我们可以得知，并且学会如何评判我们所生存的世界。那并不意味着，我们对于人类行为和动机，达到了无所不知的地步。正如作者在《艾玛》中对我们的警告，“很少有完全的真理是人类揭秘的，没有一点伪装或一点错误的事情很少发生。”
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