WAYWARD Girls and Wicked Women : the title of this collec-
tion is, of course, ironic. Very few of the women in these stories
are guilty of criminal acts, although all of them have spirit and
one or two of them, to my mind, are, or have the potential to be,
really evil. The horrid adolescent in Katherine Mansfield s The
Young Girl , for example, selfish, vain, rude to her mother,
uncivil to strangers, beastly to her little brother. (Though Kath-
erine Mansfield herself, who was an adventuress in a mild way
and boasted the reputation of a wayward girl in her own life-
time, emerges here as narrator as a woman of such transparent
good faith that small boys instinctively trust her to stand them
expensive ice-creams.)
Most of the variously characterized girls and women who
inhabit these stories, however, would seem much, much worse if
men had invented them. They would be predatory, drunken
hags; confidence tricksters; monstrously precocious children;
liars and cheats; promiscuous heartbreakers. As it is, they are all
presented as if they were perfectly normal. On the whole,
women writers are kind to women.
Perhaps too kind. Women, it is true, commit far fewer crimes
than men in the first place; we do not have the same oppor-
tumties to do so. But, from the evidence of the fiction we write,
we find it very hard to blame ourselves even for those we do
commit. We tend to see the extenuating circumstances, so that it
is difficult to apportion blame, impossible to judge - or, indeed,
to acknowledge responsibility and then take up the terrible
burden of remorse as it is summed up in Samuel Beckett s phrase,
my crime is my punishment .
I cannot thirik of any woman in any work of fiction written by
/
具體描述
讀後感
用戶評價
還是挺有意思的一本書，編者有意選瞭世界各國的作品，不隻是偏重西方文學
评分還是挺有意思的一本書，編者有意選瞭世界各國的作品，不隻是偏重西方文學
评分還是挺有意思的一本書，編者有意選瞭世界各國的作品，不隻是偏重西方文學
评分還是挺有意思的一本書，編者有意選瞭世界各國的作品，不隻是偏重西方文學
评分還是挺有意思的一本書，編者有意選瞭世界各國的作品，不隻是偏重西方文學
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