论《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中多角爱情关系所诠释的爱的绝望(英文)

Abstract: The Ballad of Sad Café is one of the representative works of Carson McCullers, the Southern American women writer. The novel narrates a tragic love story and describes a group of characters with grotesque personalities and distorted psychology. In the process of their own salvation through love giving, they experience painful struggle but no one succeed and all fall in the abyss of love desperation. From the aspect of polyhedrosis interlocking love relations of three heroines—Miss Amelia, Marvin Macy, and Cousin Lymon, and the analysis of causes of their triangle love with the relationship between love desperation and spiritual isolation, this paper attempts to discuss one concrete theme of The Ballad of Sad Cafe—love desperation. The research is of significance to understanding and exploring human spirit in the modern industrial society.

Key words: grotesqueness; polyhedrosis love relationship; desperation

摘 要：《伤心咖啡馆之歌》是美国南方女作家卡森•麦卡勒斯的代表作之一。小说讲述了一个悲剧爱情故事,刻画了一组性格荒诞,怪异,精神极度扭曲的人物,在希望通过爱的付出来救赎自己的过程中,他们经历痛苦的挣扎,却以失败告终，陷入爱的绝望中的深渊。本文从三位主人公—爱米莉亚小姐,马文•马西以及驼背李蒙—之间环环相扣的悲剧爱情关系的角度出发,通过对他们三角恋爱关系的成因及爱的绝望和精神孤独之间关系的分析,探讨《伤心咖啡馆之歌》中所诠释的爱的 绝望。本研究的意义在于理解和探讨现代工业社会中人类的精神状态。

关键词：怪诞；多角爱情关系；绝望

Introduction
     The Ballad of Sad Café is generally considered as one of McCullers’s best works of fiction and her most successful exploration of her signature theme: loneliness and the effects of unrequited love. It is grotesque and tragic love story illustrated through the romantic longings and attractions of the three eccentric characters: Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy. Through its portrayal of a group of characters with grotesque personalities and distorted psyche, it vividly and powerfully represents the grotesque social reality, namely, the loneliness and alienation in the modern society. Thus the novel actually reveals a horrible spiritual world in which people are unable to communicate with each other in a life of industrialization in the south [1]. Human spirit in modern society has become the major theme of universal concern by the modern writers, but in McCullers’s The Ballad of Sad Café, it performs more powerful, full of dramatic conflict, humor and tragic atmosphere. At present, there’re a great number of scholars have carried out their own analysis of the theme of The Ballad of Sad Café from different aspects, such as its writing techniques, characters’ personalities, social background and religion. However, these researches all concentrate on its central theme but ignore some other themes connected with and inflected the central theme, and until now none of them has analyzed the theme from the point of polyhedrosis interlocking love relationships of three characters. Thus, this paper attempts to discuss one concrete point of the theme of the novel—love desperation from the aspect of polyhedrosis interlocking love relations of three heroes. The narration of their polyhedrosis love relationship will be presented in the first chapter in detail, then love desperation, one of the themes of The Ballad of Sad Café, will be analyzed in the second chapter from the following two aspects: the causes of their love relations and the relationship between love desperation and spiritual isolation, the central theme of this novella.

1  Polyhedrosis Love Relationship of The Three Characters
The Ballad of Sad Café enjoyably and precisely portrays the irrational nature of love in the ill-fated love triangle of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy. None of the three characters are portrayed as particularly appealing people, yet they were loved.
The story is set in a small town in Georgia, where Miss Amelia lives alone in a boarded-up building. Most of the story is told in a flashback that explains how Miss Amelia came to her present situation. Miss Amelia is described as a tall, somewhat masculine woman who becomes the richest person in town from her earnings with the store and a very prosperous still that produces the best liquor in the country. A grim and solitary person, Miss Amelia surprises the town when she agrees to marry Marvin Macy, a handsome and apparently industrious man, but has a history of nefarious and sadistic activities. His marriage to Miss Amelia lasts only ten days, mainly because, having married only to gain companionship, she refuses to consummate the marriage. She puts him out of her house. Macy leaves town vowing revenge and quickly returns to his old ways, robbing gas stations and supermarkets and becoming a suspect in a murder. He is eventually arrested and sentenced to serve time in prison. Then on one April evening eleven years later, a hunchbacked stranger named Lymon Willis shows up. Claiming to be a distant relation of Miss Amelia, “Cousin Lymon,” as he comes to be known, is a sociable man. Miss Amelia takes him in. Then, for Lymon, she starts a café, largely due to her compassion for Lymon’s fear of the night: the company and pleasure the customers bring help him pass the hours. Six years later Macy returns to town. Cousin Lymon, hearing that he has been to Atlanta and been in jail, becomes infatuated with this dangerous character and follows him around. For his apart, Macy shows nothing but contempt and disgust for Lymon. But Miss Amelia endures Lymon’s refocused affection. The climax of the story occurs when the hatred between Miss Amelia and Macy explodes in a first fight. After thirty minutes of so of struggling, Amelia is about to win the fight when Lymon suddenly leaps onto her back and claws at her throat, enabling Macy to get the upper hand. During the night Macy and Lymon destroy the café, steal Amelia’s belongings, and break her still; by morning, they have left town. For three years Amelia waits for Lymon to return. Eventually giving up hope, Amelia boards up the house and locks herself in.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net