本論文探討「憂鬱」與「種族憂鬱」這兩個觀念如何影響了湯亭亭(Maxine Hong Kingston)的第一部長篇文學作品《女戰士：群鬼縈繞的女孩時期回憶錄》(The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, 1976)中複雜的母女關係。《女戰士》在五個章節裡描述了五個關於女人的故事：敘述者的犯了通姦罪的阿姨，「無名女人」的故事；敘述者被「花木蘭」的故事啟發，在自己的想像裡成為一名女戰士的故事；敘述者的媽媽，英蘭(Brave Orchid)，的故事；敘述者另外一個阿姨，月蘭(Moon Orchid)，的故事；還有敘述者/女兒自己的故事。有些故事是來自於敘述者的母親的口傳故事，有些則是來自這對母女在移民家庭中的生活經驗。這篇論文將會著重在這對母女她們彼此的互動以及在與白人社會同化的過程中所遭遇的失落。藉由閱讀女兒的憂鬱，那種不只來自於矛盾的希望與白人同化的心情，還有來自於在精神上與母親保持了一個無法達到彼此的距離，以及來自於害怕失去母親甚至失去自我的可能性，本論文希冀能梳理清楚究竟母女的憂鬱如何構成了母女間不可跨越的鴻溝。 The present thesis will investigate how the notions of “melancholia” and “racial melancholia” in Freud’s, Anne Anlin Cheng’s, and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han's theorization have influenced the complex mother/daughter relationship in Maxine Hong Kingston's first literary work, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, published in 1976. The Woman Warrior narrates five stories of women in the five chapters: the narrator's adultery-committing aunt, the “no name woman;” the narrator as a woman warrior in her imagination, inspired by the legend of Mulan in the ancient Chinese poem, “Mulan poem;” the narrator's mother, Brave Orchid; the narrator's another aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally again the daughter, the narrator herself. Some of the stories told in this novel come from the talk-stories of the narrator's mother, and some are from the life experiences of the mother and the daughter in their immigrant family. My thesis will focus on the losses for both the mother and the daughter in their interaction as well as in their processes of assimilation into the white society. I hope to tease out what and how melancholia has formed between the mother and the daughter the uncrossed gap by reading the daughter’s melancholia as coming not only from the ambivalent assimilation, but also from psychically remaining at an unattainable distance from the mother and from the possibility of the loss of the mother and even the loss of ego, the loss of self.
