纯真年代（连载）
Introduction引言
“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.那你打算拿我们怎么办？”他问道。
“For us? But there’s no us in that sense! We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.”对我们？但我们并不是那种意义上的我们！只有当我们保持距离时，我们才会相互靠近。这样我们才能做自己。否则，我们只是纽兰·阿彻，埃伦·奥兰斯卡表妹的丈夫，以及埃伦·奥兰斯卡，纽兰·阿彻妻子表妹，试图在信任他们的人背后寻找幸福。
“Ah, I’m beyond that,” he groaned.啊，我早就超越那个了，”他呻吟道。
“No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I have,” she said in a strange voice, “and I know what it looks like there.”不，你没有！你从来没有去过外面。而我去过，”她用一种奇怪的声音说，“我知道那里是什么样子。
The Age of Innocence can be summed up as a passionate love story followed closely by the story of a marriage. Wharton’s twist on the classic romance is that the marriage involves only one of the lovers. The other respectfully declines the pleasure of witnessing, as a spectator, the marriage of a man she would have preferred to take as her own husband. Newland Archer is the scion of a prominent New York family; his relationship with the equally well-born, well-brought-up May Welland is profoundly threatened by his unacceptable passion for her first cousin Ellen Olenska. The meticulously described wedding of May and Newland might be at the center of Wharton’s novel, but wedlock is not in—or at—the heart of her characters.《纯真年代》可以概括为一个充满激情的爱情故事，紧随其后的是一个婚姻的故事。沃顿对经典浪漫的转折之处在于，这段婚姻只涉及两个恋人中的一个。另一个尊重地拒绝了作为旁观者见证她更愿意成为自己丈夫的男人结婚的乐趣。纽兰·阿彻是一个显赫的纽约家族的后裔；他与同样出身高贵、教养良好的梅·韦兰的关系因他对她的表妹艾琳·奥尔恩斯基的非分之想而受到严重威胁。梅和纽兰精心描述的婚礼可能是沃顿小说的核心，但婚姻并不在她的角色心中——或者在他们的中心。
According to Shari Benstock’s biography of Edith Wharton, a conspicuous, if unconscious, indication of this disparity between love and marriage is the fact that Wharton inadvertently substituted passages from the services for the burial of the dead in place of the marriage service for the mismatched hero and his bride. Benstock quotes Wharton’s embarrassed editor as commenting, “‘I am not cynical enough to insinuate that perhaps . . . you selected the correct service after all,’” but contemporary readers of The Age of Innocence might be less wary of producing precisely that pronouncement. Marriage is a dead end for most of Wharton’s characters, and the lovers in The Age of Innocence are no exception. In her sometimes ruthless but ultimately compassionate social satire, Wharton seems to offer the observation— or perhaps the lesson—that if you marry someone you do not love, you will inevitably fall in love with someone to whom you are not married.根据莎莉·本斯托克为埃迪丝·华顿撰写的传记，爱与婚姻之间的这种差异有一个显著的、尽管是无意识的标志，那就是华顿无意中用悼念死者的服务段落代替了不匹配男主角和新娘的婚礼服务。本斯托引用华顿尴尬的编辑的话说：“我并不刻薄到暗示也许……你选择的毕竟是最正确的服务。”但当代《纯真年代》的读者可能会更少地警惕产生这样的声明。对于华顿的大多数角色来说，婚姻是一个死胡同，而《纯真年代》中的恋人们也不例外。在她的有时残酷但最终充满同情心的社会讽刺中，华顿似乎提出了这样一个观察——或者也许是教训——那就是，如果你嫁给了一个你不爱的人，你不可避免地会爱上一个你不是已婚的人。
Love and marriage are rarely in one another’s company in Wharton’s vision of New York; they may be coincidental in The Age of Innocence, but they are not causal. “[W]ith a shiver of foreboding” the narrator tells us, the hero “saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.” Drawn together by issues more fiscal than physical, couples pair off with the “random” choice offered to dance partners at a large ball; suitably wealthy and attractively packaged young men and women line up at social engagements and, like strands of DNA, eventually reproduce exactly the same structures that produced them.在沃顿对纽约的描绘中，爱情和婚姻很少相互陪伴；它们可能在《纯真年代》中偶然重合，但并非因果关系。“带着一丝不祥的预感”，叙述者告诉我们，主人公“看到他的婚姻变成了他周围的大多数其他婚姻的样子：一种无聊的物质和社会利益结合体，一方出于无知，另一方出于虚伪而维系在一起。”由于更多的是财政而非肉体问题，情侣们像大型舞会上为舞伴提供的“随机”选择一样配对；合适的有钱且有吸引力的年轻男男女女们在社交场合排队，就像DNA的双螺旋结构一样，最终复制出完全相同的结构，产生了他们自己。
Like Newland Archer, the young men and women of his day are “content to hold [these] views without analyzing” them because “all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated, button-hole-flower gentlemen” who unofficially legislate their world are themselves “the product of this system.” Nevertheless believing himself to be superior to his peers, Newland understands that “grouped together” this group of gentlemen “represented ‘New York’ and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.” Newland resists “striking out” for himself, reluctant to form his own opinions and systems of belief, not so much because he accepts the wisdom of their collective judgment but because to formalize his own way of thinking would “be troublesome—and also rather bad form.”像纽兰·阿彻这样的年轻男人和女人们，他们那一代人“满足于持有这些观点而不去分析”它们，因为“所有那些衣着整洁、穿着白背心、打着花领带的先生们”都是非正式立法者，他们的世界正是由这些人构成的。尽管自认为比同伴优越，但纽兰明白，这些先生们聚集在一起，就代表了“纽约”，而男性之间的团结习惯让他接受他们的道德观念。纽兰不愿为自己挺身而出，不愿意形成自己的观点和信仰体系，这并非因为他接受了他们集体判断的智慧，而是因为将自己的思维方式正规化会“很麻烦——而且也不太符合礼仪规范”。
One of the most important tasks for this group is to see that the right people marry. Under the watchful eyes of various “brocaded matrons,” marriageable couples are united even though each partner knows very little about the other. True understanding of an individual is virtually impossible inside the social circles described by Wharton because every man sees it as “his duty, as a ‘decent’ fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal.” Such so-called “intimate” relationships are virtually barred from genuine intimacy by the preconceived notions of appropriate masculine and feminine spheres of activity, influence, and discourse. Newland, for example, compares the “abysmal purity” of his betrothed with “the thrill of possessorship . . . [and] pride in his own masculine initiation” and assures himself privately that this will all change on their honeymoon when “we’ll read Faust together . . . by the Italian lakes. . . .” Defining himself more by his associations than by his own accomplishments, Newland sees his life unfold before him as if it has been well settled in advance.这个小组最重要的任务之一是确保合适的人结婚。在各种“锦绣贵妇”的监督下，尽管每对伴侣都对对方知之甚少，但适婚的夫妇还是走到了一起。在沃顿描绘的社会圈子里，要真正了解一个人几乎是不可能的，因为每个男人都认为“作为一位‘体面’的绅士，他有责任把自己的过去隐瞒起来，而她作为一个待嫁的女孩，也没有什么需要隐瞒的过去”。这种所谓的“亲密”关系实际上被预先设定的适当男性化和女性化的活动、影响和话语领域所阻止了真正的亲密。例如，纽兰将他的未婚妻的“深渊般的纯洁”与他自己的“拥有中的兴奋……以及对自己男子气概的骄傲”相提并论，并私下向自己保证，这一切都会在他们蜜月时改变，那时“我们将一起读《浮士德》……在意大利的湖泊上……”。定义他由于他的成就更多地源于他的关系而非他自己的努力，纽兰看到自己的生活在他面前展开，仿佛早已被妥善安排好了。
In deriving his status in society from his family and his connections rather than from his work, Newland Archer is not unusual. Wealthy men of the 1870s were to be employed in light work—Newland is a lawyer who occasionally goes into his office to deal with money matters concerning wealthy families, but who never has a problem taking weeks off—and their women were to display, as girls, the wealth of their fathers, and as wives, the wealth of their husbands. Based on ignorance and duplicity, these marriages are destined to fail privately, even while both partners strive to maintain their veneer of permanent affection. Can love exist when a woman’s highest achievement is “to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it,” and a man’s goal is to find a wife who might “be as worldly-wise and as eager to please” as his mistress, asks Wharton? With these paradigms, how can any authentic relationship survive?在社会地位方面，纽兰·阿彻依赖家庭和关系而非工作，这并不稀奇。19世纪70年代的富人从事轻松的工作——纽兰是个律师，偶尔去办公室处理涉及富有家庭的财务问题，但他从不介意请几周的假——而他们的女性作为女儿要展示出父亲财富，作为妻子要展示出丈夫的财富。这些婚姻基于无知和虚伪，注定要在私底下失败，即使双方都努力维持表面上的永久恩爱。当女性的最高成就是“吸引男性崇拜同时又俏皮地拒绝”，而男性的目标是找到一个像情妇一样世故圆滑、渴望取悦的妻子时，爱情还存在吗？惠特曼问道。在这种范式下，任何真实的感情如何能够幸存？
Many relationships survived only because there was no possibility for an alternative. If one spouse grew “weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions,” there were few options aside from quiet adulteries or scandalous and ruinous divorces. “[T]rained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile,” men and women in Wharton learn the corrupting arts of compromise and disingenuousness just as they learned, as children, which silver knife to use at dinner.许多关系之所以能够维持，仅仅是因为没有其他选择的可能性。如果其中一方对“生活在永无止境的温吞蜜月里感到厌倦，没有激情的温度，却要承受其所有苛求”，那么除了默默出轨或者闹得沸沸扬扬、导致毁灭的离婚之外，几乎没有其他选项。在沃顿的作品中，男人和女人“习惯于在斯巴达式的微笑下隐藏想象中的伤口”，他们学会了妥协和虚伪的腐败艺术，就像他们在孩提时学会使用哪把银制餐刀一样。
And yet Newland realizes that the matrimonial two-step is not necessarily easy. Eager to do the right thing by marrying the pretty offspring of a fine family, Newland nevertheless has deep forebodings concerning his attachment to May Welland. We never quite believe he loves her except as a perfect specimen of what he has been taught to regard as appropriate womanhood. “Marriage,” the hero realizes within the first month of his engagement, “was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.” And yet he embarks on this voyage, risking the lives of two women who love him as well as jeopardizing his own sense of self and place in the world. Wharton’s novel supplies the map, the key, and the emotional compass allowing the reader to observe the progress of Newland Archer, his wife, May Welland, and their cousin Ellen Olenska, as they make their journey through the currents and eddies of wealthy New York in the 1870s. In doing so, Wharton indicates repeatedly that it can be as dangerous to be drawn to the shallows, as personified by May, as to the depths, personified by Ellen.然而，纽兰意识到婚姻的双人舞并不一定容易。急于娶一个漂亮的后代为妻，以完成家族的使命，但纽兰却对与梅·韦兰德的恋情感到深深的忧虑。我们从不完全相信他爱她，除了把她当作一个完美的女性标本，符合他所受的教育对他的期望之外。“婚姻，”英雄在订婚后的第一个月就意识到了，“并不是他曾经认为的安全港湾，而是一场在未知的海洋上的航行。”尽管如此，他还是开始了这段航行，冒着失去两个爱他的女人的生命危险，以及危及他自己自我认知和在世界中的地位的风险。沃特的这部小说为我们提供了地图、钥匙和情感罗盘，让读者能够观察到纽兰·阿彻、他的妻子梅·韦兰德以及他们的表妹埃伦·奥尔恩斯卡的旅程，他们穿越了19世纪70年代纽约富人圈里的潮流和漩涡。通过这样做，沃特多次表明每天都要注意，被吸引到浅滩（如梅所代表的）可能和被吸引到深处（如艾伦所代表的）一样危险。
A favored younger son of established, monied New York society, handsome and smug Newland Archer has known irreverent, unconventional, and “slightly foreign” Ellen Olenska long enough for her to remember him in “knickerbockers” stealing a kiss when they were children. The novel opens on the occasion of Ellen’s first public appearance in New York society since her separation from her dissipated husband, Count Olenski, who has remained in Europe. The Mingotts have not yet decided how to treat the prodigal in their midst, but they have protectively closed ranks around Ellen. “Thin, worn, a little older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty,” Ellen nevertheless possesses a magnetic charm that makes every head in New York turn her way as she enters the opera under the aegis of the Mingott clan. Joined in the opera box by Newland, Ellen flippantly recollects that “You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a door.” More important than his stolen kiss, however, is Ellen’s qualifying coda revealing to Newland that “but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that I was in love with.” In her remembrance of childhood, we hear not only intimations of what is to come between Ellen and Newland, but perhaps the reasons behind the muted passion that is the hallmark of Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.作为纽约上流社会中一个有钱有势的家庭的宠儿，英俊而自负的纽兰·阿彻已经认识了那个无礼、不守成规、“略带异国情调”的艾伦·奥兰斯卡夫人很长时间，她还记得他小时候穿着“灯笼裤”的样子，那时他们还是孩子，他偷偷吻了她。自从与放荡的丈夫奥兰斯基伯爵分居后，这是艾伦第一次在纽约上流社会公开露面，而伯爵一直留在欧洲。明戈特一家还没有决定如何对待这个浪子，但他们已经在艾伦周围紧密地团结起来保护她。“身材苗条，面容憔悴，比实际年龄——几乎三十岁——看起来要老一些，”然而艾伦仍然具有一种磁性的魅力，当她出现在明戈特家族的保护下时，让每个在纽约的人都转过头来看着她。纽兰也加入了歌剧包厢，艾伦轻率地回忆起:“你是个讨厌的男孩，曾经在一次门后吻过我。”然而，比他偷走的吻更重要的是，艾伦但真正让我着迷的，是你表妹范迪・纽兰，她从未正眼瞧过我。”艾伦回忆起童年时，我们不仅听到了预示着她与纽兰之间即将发生的事情，还听到了这位普利策奖得主小说家作品中那种克制情感背后的原因。
休息一下~~
