American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 精彩片段：
Ashputtle or The Mother's Ghost-1
THREE VERSIONS OF ONE STORY
I THE MUTILATED GIRLS
But although you could easily take the story away from Ashputtle and centre it on the mutilated sisters -- indeed, it would be easy to think of it as a story about cutting bits off women, so that they will fit in, some sort of circumcision-like ritual chop, nevertheless, the story always begins not with Ashputtle or her stepsisters but with Ashputtles mother, as though it is really always the story of her mother even if, at the beginning of the story, the mother herself is just about to exit the narrative because she is at deaths door: "A rich mans wife fell sick, and, feeling that her end was near, she called her only daughter to her bedside."
Note the absence of the husband/father. Although the woman is defined by her relation to him ("a rich mans wife") the daughter is unambiguously hers, as if hers alone, and the entire drama concerns only women, takes place almost exclusively among women, is a fight between two groups of women -- in the right-hand corner, Ashputtle and her mother; in the left-hand corner, the stepmother and her daughters, of whom the father is unacknowledged but all the same is predicated by both textual and biological necessity.
In the drama between two female families in opposition to one another because of their rivalry over men (husband/father, husband/son), the men seem no more than passive victims of their fancy, yet their significance is absolute because it is ("a rich man", "a kings son";) economic.
Ashputtles father, the old man, is the first object of their desire and their dissension; the stepmother snatches him from the dead mother before her corpse is cold, as soon as her grip loosens. Then there is the young man, the potential bridegroom, the hypothetical son-in-law, for whose possession the mothers fight, using their daughters as instruments of war or as surrogates in the business of mating.
If the men, and the bank balances for which they stand, are the passive victims of the two grown women, then the girls, all three, are animated solely by the wills of their mothers, Even if Ashputtles mother dies at the beginning of the story, her status as one of the dead only makes her position more authoritative. The mothers ghost dominates the narrative and is, in a real sense, the motive centre, the event that makes all the other events happen.
On her death bed, the mother assures the daughter: "I shall always look after you and always be with you." The story tells you how she does it.
At this point, when her mother makes her promise, Ashputtle is nameless. She is her mothers daughter. That is all we know. It is the stepmother who names her Ashputtle, as a joke, and, in doing so, wipes out her real name, whatever that is, banishes her from the family, exiles her from the shared table to the lonely hearth among the cinders, removes her contingent but honourable status as daughter and gives her, instead, the contingent but disreputable status of servant.
Her mother told Ashputtle she would always look after her, but then she died and the father married again and gave Ashputtle an imitation mother with daughters of her own whom she loves with the same fierce passion as Ashputtles mother did and still, posthumously, does, as we shall find out.
With the second marriage comes the vexed question: who shall be the daughters of the house? Mine! declares the stepmother and sets the freshly named, non-daughter Ashputtle to sweep and scrub and sleep on the hearth while her daughters lie between clean sheets in Ashputtles bed. Ashputtle, no longer known as the daughter of her mother, nor of her father either, goes by a dry, dirty, cindery nickname for everything has turned to dust and ashes.
Meanwhile, the false mother sleeps on the bed where the real mother died and is, presumably, pleasured by the husband/father in that bed, unless there is no pleasure in it for her. We are not told what the husband/ father does as regards domestic or marital function, but we can surely make the assumption that he and the stepmother share a bed, because that is what married people do.
And what can the real mother/wife do about it? Burn as she might with love, anger and jealousy, she is dead and buried.
The father, in this story, is a mystery to me. Is he so besotted with his new wife that he cannot see how his daughter is soiled with kitchen refuse and filthy from her ashy bed and always hard at work? If he sensed there was a drama in hand, he was content to leave the entire production to the women for, absent as he might be, always remember that it is in his house where Ashputtle sleeps on the cinders, and he is the invisible link that binds both sets of mothers and daughters in their violent equation. He is the unmoved mover, the unseen organising principle, like God, and, like God, up he pops in person, one fine day, to introduce the essential plot device.