DubiousprogressinDHLawrence27sTicketPlease学习资料Word下载.docx

1、with mute, stupefied faces （346）1 2 Womens struggle for their rights and a real social status was at times very violent; in August an（.）2Yet, for all its apparent simplicity, the plot is as baffling for the reader as their newly-acquired identity is for the girls. There is more than meets the eye in

2、 the story: it was written during the First World War and it uses the moral and social upheaval brought about by the conflict, insisting on the psychological consequences of the change in womens status resulting from employment and following their fight to be given social recognition and the vote.2

3、At the time, that new social role of women was regarded as a form of progress by the male-dominated society and by some women, as Lawrence makes critically clear. The girl conductors benefit from their new status in the microcosm of the tram system before becoming aware of their real second-rate sta

4、tus when it comes to direct human relationship. Living under the delusion of being real actors recognised as fully responsible human beings, they are brutally shown by the chief inspectors offhand attitude how wrong they have been. Their subsequent violent reaction reveals their deep frustration and

5、 the ambiguous relationships between the sexes, marred and warped by progress.3Like the girls, the miners are both beneficiaries and victims of progress; they form the social background of the story, at the same time realistic and symbolical as the introduction of the short story shows. The miners e

6、conomic function is laden with an implicit symbolical value; extracting coal to fuel the industry is like raping the earth by plundering its riches, which has far-reaching consequences for human beings. German mythology provides a similar image of agression when dwarves wrest gold from the earth, tu

7、rning the latter into a wasteland where spirituality and transcendentalism are dead. In , the incidental effects of progress on humanity are shown through the Lawrentian central theme of the relationship between men and women. Here, the weaker sex and the stronger sex are respectively and ironically

8、 embodied by Annie Stone and John Thomas Raynor.4The girl conductors are fearless young hussies （335） who bravely face the dangers of the tram journeys and the male passengers advances; as such, they belong to a different class of women whose job is exceptional: This, the most dangerous tram-service

9、 in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with pride, is entirely conducted by girls. （335） Such a positive and indirectly self-congratulatory statement is immediately tempered with the grimly humorous description of the girls, tranformed into hybrids: In their ugly blue uniform, skirts up

10、 to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer. （335） 3 In the description of Tavershall, all went by ugly, ugly, ugly. Lady Chatterleys Love（.）5One of Lawrences key-wordsugly3is used here to describe the devalued official u

11、niform worn by the girls, just as the word is repeated to stigmatise the industrial landscape crossed by the tram in alliterative phrases （long ugly villages,last little ugly place of industry, 334）. Resembling transvestites in their ugly uniforms, the conductors retain only a bawdy sort of feminity

12、 with their skirts up to their knees. They are the drivers fit counterparts; the latter are men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks （334） who compensate for their physical deficiencies by taking foolish risks while others, effeminate, creep forward in terror. （335） Excessive prudence o

13、r rashness betrays their deep imbalance, a defect reinforced by the chaotic rhythm of the syntax in the long opening paragraphs of the short story. They lack the sang-froid which characterizes the girls, as if they might just as well swap jobs with them. A parallel can be drawn between the drivers l

14、oss of manhood and the conductresses loss of womanhood. Lawrence makes it clear that the price to pay for social progress is the loss of gender differentiation: the girls assume a new authority, which turns them into sham soldiers （non-commisioned officer, 335） with a masculine, sailor-like behaviou

15、r:this roving life aboard the car gives them a sailors dash and recklessness. What matter how they behave when the ship is in port? Tomorrow they will be aboard again. （336）6Annie Stone is one of them and her name, which is evocative of a hard, mineral substance, is in keeping with her inflexible, a

16、damant way of asserting her brand new soldier-like authority. Lawrence ironically insists on the girls commitment to her job through tapinosis, referring to the Greek battle of the hot gates:The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae. （335） In order to show the ambiguity of the relationship betwee

17、n men and women, the young inspector John Thomas Raynor is introduced as a central device to the meaningful melodrama that gradually develops. A fine cock-of-the-walk he was the young mans numerous conquests make him an object for scandal; always on the lookout for pastures new, he considers himself

18、 as the proprietor of the girl conductors （his old flock, 340）. This vocabulary aims at revealing his simplistic approach to his relationship with his subordinates; he is reduced to a shallow figure of a man, meant to embody a male-dominated system that gives women the outward attributes of authorit

19、y within the limits of the tram car and under mans supervision. Annies personality is more complex; she has two faces, a superficial one on board the tram and a deep, instinctive one outside the system. Impervious to one another in the first half of the short story, the two identities then begin to

20、overlap. As a conductor she takes her job seriously, which increases her natural shrewishness and consequently she first adopts the same attitude with John Thomas Raynor as with the other male passengers:Annie . was something of a Tartar, and her sharp tongue had kept John Thomas at arms length for

21、many months （336）, before allowing a gradual complicity, both intimate and distant to develop between them:In this subtle antagonism they knew each other like old friends, they were as shrewd with one another almost as man and wife. （337） 4 See the use of impudent, 336 and 341, which echoes hussies,

22、 p. 3357Each of them knows the rules of the game and plays them on board the tram within the frame of a relationship superficially liberalised by their respective functions and their young age4; however, Annies feminine instincts and impulse are still there, to be given full play on a fit occasion.

23、5 Italics mine.8There is a drastic change of attitude between Annie-the-conductor and the girl who has a night off and goes alone to the November fun fair. Despite the sad decline in brilliance and luxury, （337） many people are there for entertainment, and the general illusory, transient atmosphere

24、of the event is indicated by the expression artificial wartime substitutes （337）, describing ersatz coconuts. In an environment whose hostility is suggested by the expressions drizzling ugly night （337） and black, drizzling darkness （338） introducing and closing the fun fair scene, the place, for al

25、l its shabbiness, is a fit place for a love encounter; furthermore, To be at the Statutes without a fellow was no fun. Lawrence explicitly links the change of place with the change of rules which at the fun fair define the status of men and women; the latter resume their traditional passive attitude

26、, whereas men assert their long-established economic superiority. Annie is no longer the woman in charge; she has left her uniform to don her best clothes, more appropriate in this place where it is advisable to observe a ritualistic form of behaviour to be in the right style （337）, which is in fact

27、 an intimation of submissiveness. The new quality of the relationship between Annie and John Thomas is emphasized by the repetition of round; like the world, The roundabouts were veering round5, and the fair, despite its sham, allows a re-enactment of the real positions of men and women in society:J

28、ohn Thomas made her stay on for the next round. And therefore she could hardly for shame repulse him when he put his arm round her and drew her a little nearer to him, in a very warm and cuddly manner. （337） 6 J. Chevalier et A. Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, Paris: Laffont, 1995, p.962.9Joh

29、n Thomass permissive attitude, accepted by Annie as a matter of course, is an implicit denial of the reality of the social progress giving women authority and autonomy. The conformist rules at the Statutes Fair are those of the society of that time: men pay for women, thus resuming in civil activities the dom