论多元理论视阈中《弗兰肯斯坦》和《化身博士》的互文性(3)
In nineteenth century, under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, science and technology gradually developed. Inquisitiveness brought young Victor Frankenstein to a brand new world, which led him to comprehend that how mystical and miraculous the nature was. Frankenstein started to fanatically worship science. He wanted to create a man as what God had done. And that was exactly the beginning of the tragedy. The creation that Frankenstein created felt lonely and hopeless when people saw him as a real monster instead of a real man, even the father of the creature abandoned him and ran away at the first sight of him. This monster killed Frankenstein’s brother, his best friend and his wife for revenge. At last, Frankenstein died on the way to find and kill the monster.
1.2 The synopsis of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
With the rapid development of science and technology during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, social structure changed and new bourgeois grew fast. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde portrayed the dual life of the bourgeoisie Dr. Jekyll in great detail.
Dr. Jekyll ambitiously tried creating a potion which could help people to let the other side of the personality come out so that the long suppressed desire could be released. Freeing from the social morals and rules, Dr. Jekyll was obsessed with becoming Mr. Hyde through drinking the shape-shift potion. Therefore he could do anything he wanted to without any consideration and worry of damaging the reputation of respected Dr. Jekyll. This shape-shift potion opened a door to a long suppressed outpouring of desire. Perhaps, as a hedonist, Henry Jekyll seemed a little bit pathetic. He thirsted for the enjoyment of life more than anyone else, but he never succeeded to strike off shackles of the spotlight until he drank the potion and turn into an uglier, shorter, younger and eviler man Mr. Hyde. He was used to walking into the shadow of the buildings. He often committed the crimes under the cover of the dark moonlight again and again. It never occurred to Dr. Jekyll that the evil side would win the good side and gradually take the lead of him. Finally, the evil side devoured the good side. And both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde died in the battle of becoming the master of the body and soul.
1.3 Concept of Intertextuality
Since Julia Kristeva formally created and introduced the word “intertextuality” in her works in 1969, intertextuality has become an important concept of discourse analysis. In the Chinese version of Tiphaine Samoyault’s L'Intertextualité : Mémoire de la littérature (Samoyault,2002:3), there are several kinds of definitions of “intertextuality” by different eminent scholars elaborated in this book. Intertextuality could be summarized as the connections between texts. Later, the definition of intertextuality was gradually widening into the connections and commonalities among texts, history, culture, art and many other fields of study.
Graham Allen concluded French theorist Laurent Jenny’s definition in her work Intertextuality (the New Critical Idiom Series) that “Jenny’s insistence that intertextuality’s essence lies in the ‘perturbation’ of formal and thematic structures, might strengthen the argument against Genette that what is required is not a poetics which can separate textual from intertextual dimensions but a theory of interpretation which can explore the interpretive processes by which the clash of these two dimensions is registered and reconciled”(Allen, 2000:114), which is an important point to the intertextuality between Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde mainly about their stylistic and thematic structures.
Similarly, in Discourse and Social Change, Linguist Norman Fairclough distinguishes between “manifest intertextuality” and “constitutive intertextuality” (Fairclough, 1992:117). The latter one, constitutive intertextuality, signifies the interrelationship of discursive features in a text, such as structure, form, or genre and so on. Moreover, Luo Xuanmin, the Professor of Qinghua University, summarized Linguist Norman Fairclough’s concept of constitutive intertextuality. He said, “The study of the intertextuality in structure could help to lead reader to comprehend the reason and the intention of deep social culture through analyzing the intertextuality of the text.”(Luo, 2006:65). Hence, this paper intends to let people know more about primary social and cultural causes of the day by means of analyzing the constitutive intertextuality of the theme. Also, it will reveal the intertextuality about the culture background and character between the two works.