DubiousprogressinDHLawrence27sTicketPlease学习资料.docx

1、DubiousprogressinDHLawrence27sTicketPlease学习资料Dubious progress in D. H. Lawrences Tickets, PleaseBernard-Jean Ramadier1Tickets, Please is one of the short stories in the collection England My England, published in 1922. It is a simple anecdote told in deceptively simple language; a young inspector o

2、f the tramway system seduces all the conductresses on the Midlands line. One of them, Annie, eventually falls for him on a special occasion, but she wants more than a flirtation. As she becomes more and more possessive, the young man lets her down and picks up another girl: Annie then decides to tak

3、e revenge. As all the other conductresses more or less consciously bear a grudge against the seducer, they set a trap for him; one evening they manage to attract him into their waiting-room at the depot where they molest him. The girls pretext for harassing him is to make him choose one of them for

4、his wife: eventually he spitefully chooses Annie who, far from being proud and contented, falls prey to conflicting feelings. Freed at last, the inspector walks away alone in the night while the girls leave the depot one by one with mute, stupefied faces (346)1 2 Womens struggle for their rights and

5、 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 the story: it was written during the First World War and it uses the mo

6、ral 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 At the time, that new social role of women was regarded as a form of pro

7、gress 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 status when it comes to direct human relationship. Living under the delusio

8、n 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 the ambiguous relationships between the sexes, marred and warped by pro

9、gress.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 economic function is laden with an implicit symbolical value; extracting

10、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, turning the latter into a wasteland where spirituality and transcendentali

11、sm are dead. In Tickets, Please, 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 embodied by Annie Stone and John Thomas Raynor.4The girl

12、 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 in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with

13、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 to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads

14、, 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 uniform worn by the girls, just as the word is repeated to

15、 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 with their skirts up to their knees. They are the drive

16、rs 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 or rashness betrays their deep imbalance, a defect reinfo

17、rced 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 loss of manhood and the conductresses loss of womanhood.

18、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 behaviour: this roving life aboard the car gives them a sailors

19、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, adamant way of asserting her brand new soldier-like auth

20、ority. 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 between men and women, the young inspector John Thomas Rayno

21、r 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 as the proprietor of the girl conductors (his old fl

22、ock, 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 authority within the limits of the tram car and under mans su

23、pervision. 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 overlap. As a conductor she takes her job seriously,

24、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 many months (336), before allowing a gradual complic

25、ity, 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, p. 3357Each of them knows the rules of the game an

26、d 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. 5 Italics mine.8There is a drastic change of attitu

27、de 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 of the event is indicated by the expression artific

28、ial 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 all its shabbiness, is a fit place for a love encount

29、er; 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, whereas men assert their long-established economi

30、c 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 an intimation of submissiveness. The new quality o

31、f 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:John Thomas made her stay on for the next round. And

32、 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.962.9John 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