摘 要

《金苹果》是作者尤多拉·韦尔蒂本人最为钟爱的一部作品。这部作品由七个相互关联的故事组成，讲述了生活在密西西比河畔小镇摩根纳里的一群富有传奇色彩的乡民的故事。通过对一些女性角色的人物描写，小说表达了对女性主体意识的主题关怀。本文着重分析了《金色阵雨》中的房子，《六月演奏会》中的钢琴和《月亮湖》中的月亮湖这三个物，同时分析了四位女性角色的情感，并展示了尤多拉韦尔蒂如何从三个独特的物以及四位女性角色的生动描写来传达她的女性主义思想。

关键词：尤多拉·韦尔蒂；《金苹果》；主题；女性主体意识

Contents

1. Introduction................................................................................................................1

2.Demonstration.............................................................................................................3

2.1 A Memorial Box: House as the motif in Shower of Gold.........................................3

2.1.1 House as the significant setting in the story..........................................................3

2.1.2 House as a memorial box of Miss Snowdie Maclain............................................4

2.2 Piano and people: Piano as the motif in June Recital..............................................6

2.2.1 Pursing freedom: Piano and Virgie Rainey...........................................................6

2.2.2 Breaking convention: Piano and Miss Eckhart.....................................................7

2.3 Epiphany of Easter: Moon Lake as the motif in The Moon Lake............................9

2.3.1 Moon Lake as the central plot line in the story.....................................................9

2.3.2 Baptizing in the Moon Lake as the climax in the story.......................................10

3. Conclusion................................................................................................................11

Works Cited..................................................................................................................12

Bibliography.................................................................................................................13

House, Piano and Moon Lake

——A Study of Three Motifs in The Golden Apples

1. Introduction

Eudora Welty, born in 1909, was a renowned short story writer in Southern America in the twentieth century. She was a great master of literature whose works were selected to the American library when she was still alive. Famous writers like Raymond Carver, Toni Morrison, Alice Monroe, Truman Capote, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oz and others were all influenced by Eudora Welty’ s works.

Welty was good at writing short stories and she was known as “Chekhov in the United States.” The famous Chinese translator Feng Yidai once gave her the high evaluation:

In the turbulent U.S. society, a woman writer who is never married and lives in a quiet little market can take a closer look at the world’s sadness and joy, and is good at mastering it. Laws, and the use of superb artistic techniques to reproduce in the creation of novels, are indeed commendable. No wonder many critics love to compare her with the author of the 18th-century British woman writer Pride and Prejudice. (qtd. in Su 31)

As one of her favorite works, The Golden Apples is generally considered as one of the best examples of wide-ranging and diversified forms. It consists of seven interlaced stories which are skillfully structured. Although they are complete and separate short stories, the previous story is united to the entire ring in a way that is always invisible. The setting of this novel is in a Mississippi town —— where, as the Legendary villagers gathered together and say, “time goes like a dream no matter how hard you run.” In Morgana, the young always think of other places and want to go out of the town while the old know every name on every stone in the cemetery at the town’ s edge. Young and old, black and white, married and spinster, restless and settled, the voices that male up this collection of interrelated stories prove that Welty, as Katherine Anne Porter once wrote, had “an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork.” Like James Joyce’ s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’ s Winesburg, Ohio, The Golden Apples, though it gives readers a particular time and place, is both timeless and universal.