【研究事務組訊】

英文系戴雅雯教授(Prof. Catherine Diamond)發表最新期刊論文

Four Women in the Woods: An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home

作者：戴雅雯(Catherine Diamond)

COMPARATIVE DRAMA，卷：51  期：1  頁碼：71-100，出版日期：SPR 2017 (AHCI)

摘要：

In 2002, Futerra, a British media company advocating sustainability, launched "The Seasons Alter," a four-minute video of Titania's "bad weather" speech. Played by two actresses, Titania chides the surly Oberon, chasing him around the sparse modernist set dominated by an enormous clock. He responds to her recital of environmental disasters stemming from their quarrel by placing the onus on her: "Do you amend it then: it lies in you." She then repeats her own last line more forcefully: "We are their parents and original." Formerly, directors were wont to shorten this speech—the longest in the play—because its serious topicality broke the spell of comic fantasy. Futerra, by extracting its prescient relevance to the contemporary global warming crisis, thrust A Midsummer Night's Dream into the Anthropocene. By posing their fault equally, however, Futerra obscures the ethicality of their respective positions. It places Titania's commitments to rectifying the weather patterns upon which farmers depend and nurturing her votaress's child on the same level as Oberon's whim, an expression of power invested in him by a patriarchal hierarchy. Their debate also puts the Fairy Queen's concern for the world's inhabitants in conflict with her maternal affection for one particular child. She is not allowed by Oberon to love both. By trickery, he obtains the changeling, quells her rebellion, and reabsorbs her into his hierarchal order. However, Titania's challenge to his rule lingers from the image of her loving command over the forest dwellers, a delicate dream of an alternative relationship, of a possible something else.

Titania's importance in the play and the expansive expression of her values and desires demonstrates one woman's conflict between her loyalty to nature and to her husband/king. Three other female characters in classical dramas also face similar dilemmas of having to choose between [End Page 71] their identities associated with forest life and their roles in patriarchal societies: Sakuntala in Kalidasa's eponymous fifth century Sanskrit play, Neang Seda (Sita) in the Reamker, the eighteenth century Cambodian version of the Sanskrit Ramayana, and Shakespeare's Rosalind in As You Like It. All four are unusual in that they are aristocratic women who spend the duration of their respective dramas in forests.

(小提醒)教師如有最新發表於AHCI、SSCI、SCI、EI、TSSCI、THCI、「東吳大學外語學門獎勵名單」之期刊論文，歡迎將相關資訊e-mail至rad@scu.edu.tw，研究發展處將會公告於校園頭條，以廣交流。

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