和好玩的人一起在路上...
您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看，没有账号？立即注册
x
自从《蜗居》热播以来，许多女人热烈投入到评论中去，不少人开始憧憬能当二奶、做小三儿，希冀可以走捷径早日奔小康。但情人并非每个女人都适合去当，更不是人人都能当好。正所谓“没有金刚钻，别揽那瓷器活！”
情人这个话题在西方已经是老生常谈了。“ 在古希腊，重要人物的宠妃、情妇，也就是那些能歌善舞、谈吐儒雅的妓女的法律和政治地位要大大超过那些要人的夫人，她们拥有与自由男性公民同等的地位。”随着后来社会分工的进一步发展，妓女越来越注重对男人的性关怀，而男人在婚姻之外情感需要的工作就渐渐由女情人承包了。
2000 年英国一位女记者兼作家维多利亚 · 格丽芬（ Victoria Griffin ）推出一本别具一格的书 《 情妇：有关女性第三者的神话、历史与诠释 》 ( The Mistress: Histories, Myths and Interpretations of the Other Woman ) 。由于作者自己就是别人的秘密情人，再加上是知识女性，所以其书引经据典，从圣经故事、希腊神话、名人轶事，直到个人感受，侃侃而论，自成一家。 2001 年此书被翻译成德文，书名改为《星期天从来不行》。同年台湾推出繁体中文版，书名直译为《情妇：有关「她」的神话、历史与诠释》（译者：奚修君，出版社：蓝鲸）， 2002 年中国友谊出版公司出版了简体中文版，书名为《 情妇：关于女性第三者的历史、神话与释义》（译者： 张玞，李立玮 ）。
维多利亚 · 格丽芬认为女人和女人不一样，有些女人天生就是贤妻良母，另一些女人则适合做情人。对那些思想深邃、经济独立、不太擅长家务的女人来说，做情人不失为一种不错的选择。这种女人一般都读了很多年的书，修成正果之后发现男人，特别是出色的男人都已经娶妻生子。但她们由于职业原因（作为记者、作家或编辑）往往又有机会接触出类拔萃的男人，日久生情，不经意间就成了这类男人的秘密情人。维多利亚 · 格丽芬写此书旨在唤起读者对爱、忠贞和占有欲重新进行思索。我们爱一个人，并不一定非要完全占有他。大家一定有这样的经验，往往我们借来的书读的概率更高，而那些真正属于我们的书，有时我们一辈子几乎都不会去碰它们。忠贞更是古今中外男权社会对女人的要求，其实每个人对别人的忠诚都是有条件的。即使在中国这样提出过“存天理，灭人欲”的伦理标准的国家，如今都没有人谴责寡妇改嫁为不忠了。我个人坚决反对那种“全上来，都下去”的过堂方式，要么是一个不许改嫁，要么是全体都得再嫁 ; 要么所有妇女都得去工作，要么提倡她们全当全职太太 。其实每个女人的先天条件不同，后天环境各异，每个女人都有权选择适合自己的生活方式。
如果自己是个小心眼的女子，遇事爱斤斤计较，那你还是不要选择情人这条路。男人有句口头禅，叫做“王八好当，气难生。”反之亦然。 维多利亚 · 格丽芬这本书的德文版改名为《星期天从来不行》是有原因的，男情人的节假日和周末常常属于老婆孩子。女情人倘若没有点儿肚量和胸怀，总想独占别人的丈夫，那这种婚外情是维持不了多久的。如今提倡换位思考，你得想想人家老婆也不容易，男人没发达的时候，打扫卫生、熨衣做饭、相夫教子，十几年乃至几十年都是人家在操劳。现在男人出息了，你情人有些像摘桃派似的，动辄就想拆散人家的家，你来取而代之，这不是极品情人所为。情人也要讲“职业道德”。所谓“家花没有野花香”不是说你真比人家香多少，而是你的情人地位让男人对你更温柔、更多请。哪一天你真的让男人离了婚，娶了你，那你又该防着别的情人了，因为偷食禁果的效应没有了。归根结底一句话，当情人就甘心当情人，不要老做“扶正”梦。
如果你是位知识女性，思想解放、经济独立、不善妒、而且没有太多的时间和精力去伺候男人，但又很愿意与有品位和档次的男人交往和交流，那你就具备了做个好情人的先决条件。建议你再读一读维多利亚 · 格丽芬的书 《 情妇：有关女性第三者的神话、历史与诠释 》 ，如果能产生共鸣，那么你就可以去实践了。
As long as there is marriage, there will also be the Mistress. Why then, does our society still behave as if marital infidelity were some unfathomable aberration? Mythology is rich with mistresses-- both divine and mortal--some who have played their roles cunningly and to perfection, and some who have destroyed themselves and all around them. Famous mistresses have not only graced literature but have written it. Courtesans have been a feature of royal courts throughout history. And, whether or not we admit it, or feign nave ignorance, mistresses are women we know, here and now. Victoria Griffin, herself a mistress, brings her steady yet startling focus on the mistresses in history and culture, past and present: from Camille Claudel to Monica Lewinsky, from Madame de Pompadour to Simone de Beauvoir, from George Eliot to Pamela Harriman. It is a subject as rich and diverse as history itself, alive with memorable characters. The Mistress will provoke and delight in equal measure.
At a time when a woman gets invited to the Oscars for doing no more than servicing a president in the White House, the only surprising aspect of a book like ''The Mistress'' is why it hasn't been written before. As the British poet and translator Victoria Griffin -- herself a mistress -- explains, mistresses are historically and culturally ubiquitous, from Circe to Semele to Lilith to George Eliot . . . right on up to Pamela Harriman, Camilla Parker Bowles and Monica Lewinsky. Griffin's own position is clear: ''As long as there is Marriage, there will also be the Mistress.''
Part storytelling, part interview, part rumination and part analysis, ''The Mistress'' is a thorough if long-winded exploration of what it means (and meant) to be the other woman. Though the catalyst for writing is ''self-examination,'' Griffin wisely avoids psychological shots in the dark when delving into her own motivation for being a mistress. That said, it doesn't prevent her from peppering her text with opinions and advice, which run the gamut from wise to ignorant to absurdly adolescent. But Griffin recognizes the manifold difficulty of a subject so emotionally overwrought, and writes soothingly, ''Human behavior is infinitely complex, motives are always mixed, selfless love coexists with self-seeking, nothing can ever be reduced to a simple formula.''
If that sounds like the seeds of a mea culpa, think again. One thing ''The Mistress'' is not is apologetic, and indeed, if one were so inclined, much of the book could be read as a rationalization, based on the weightiness of historical precedence and myth. Griffin interprets much of the literature of adultery as two forces at battle: at one side is the boring and conventional (wife), at the other is the dangerous and passionate (mistress). To Eve, Lilith ''is a source of fascination, jealousy and fear; the two archetypal figures -- wife/mother and femme fatale -- forever circling the one man in a dance of mutual attraction and hatred, united in their opposition to the male, divided by their need and love of him.'' Griffin points out a further, possibly more accurate dichotomy in the mistress herself: a sense of superiority ''over most other human beings, in fact, but particularly over the figure of 'the wife'; secondly, a fundamental lack of self-worth, which betrays itself both in the need for the validating concern of a respected man and the acceptance of a less than 'whole' relationship for herself.''
That particular superiority/inferiority complex interpretation is directed at the famous longtime mistress George Eliot, who fared better than most, since she lived with her lover as ''Mrs. Lewes.'' (The paradox, Griffin notes, is striking: ''On the one hand the mistress seeks to live outside and undermine the institution of marriage; on the other, she is as subject to the institution as is the wife, being defined by it.'') Other mistresses did not do as well: Charlotte Bront withered away in a fruitless wait for epistolary assurances from her married lover; Camille Claudel sank into an obsessive state of perpetual panic after being exchanged for a younger mistress by her teacher Auguste Rodin; the artist Stella Bowen virtually abandoned painting after her lover, Ford Madox Ford, embarked on a passionate affair with Jean Rhys in the mid-1920's.
And yet, according to Griffin, Bowen was ''the best kind of mistress -- Circe-like,'' in that she was wholly accepting of the transformation from one of passion to platonic affection in her relationship with Ford. Bowen herself may have agreed; later, she wrote of the affair's demise: ''I think that the exhilaration of falling out of love is not sufficiently extolled. The escape from the atmosphere of a stuffy room into the fresh night air, with the sky as the limit.'' Just what is the ''best'' kind of mistress, according to Griffin? Certainly the happiest is one who practices ''nonpossessive love,'' who ''need not be a threat to the wife.'' ''It is one of the rules of any marriage which runs successfully alongside extramarital liaisons: the core relationship of husband and wife needs to be given priority amid whatever other relationships are in operation. The mistress who understands this dynamic and accepts it is the 'successful' mistress.'' These are hardly the sisterly words for which our foremothers burned their bras. Indeed, Griffin treads lightly on ''the ambivalent relationship between mistresses and feminism, in that while the mistress appears to enjoy freedom and independence, this so-called freedom is bought at the expense of another woman.''
MORE disturbing is Griffin's acceptance of that patriarchal chestnut: it's a man's world, run by male rules. Or, more specifically: ''Affairs between mistresses and their lovers are usually -- though not invariably -- run on the lover's terms.'' In this same retro vein are observations like ''Wives may find themselves paying dearly for their increased independence and their concomitant lack of time and energy for their husbands.'' In her chapter ''The Political Mistress,'' it's not surprising that those words are echoed by the serial mistress Pamela Harriman: ''I can't help it if somebody doesn't want their husband and then somebody else besides them decides they do. . . . It's not my fault.''
What are we to make of all this? It's hardly shocking stuff; Griffin, if anything, comes off as quaintly old-fashioned. Some energetic editing would have helped: the chapter in which an imaginary conversation is held among fictional mistresses, for example, is tedious and silly. A welcome alternative would have been some focus on the male adulterers, who come off throughout as wholly selfish and egotistical. And yet ''The Mistress'' is not without its pearls. Most illuminating to those rusty on French and British courtesan history is the ''Royal Mistress'' chapter, which places the Diana-Charles-Camilla show in a forgotten context. Griffin is not a historian or literary critic, but she doesn't pretend to be; her text is filled with qualifiers like ''I think,'' ''perhaps,'' ''possibly,'' a tendency that is both frustrating and endearing. In the end, it is to her credit that she articulates the irony of her mistress position: ''Instead of using my much-trumpeted independence to my own benefit, I play a role in his life far more like that of the traditional supportive wife than his actual wife does.''
[此贴子已经被作者于2010-2-16 20:44:32编辑过]
| 
|Archiver|手机版|小黑屋|武汉在路上俱乐部
( 鄂ICP备11000556号 )
发表于 2010-2-14 18:57:00
