Earticle

초록

영어

The present paper examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance in terms of morbidity inherent in antebellum middle-class culture. The chaos and confusion created by excessive social fluidity and mobility during the Jacksonian period made the middle class—the newly emerging hegemonic social group—feel chronically insecure about its own social status. Such middle-class anxieties led to the creation of the symbol of the “Veiled Lady,” the image of an oppressively disembodied female body. This cultural image was vigorously promoted by the domestic ideal and the popular culture of the nineteenth century such as mesmerism and spiritualism in order to help white male middle-class Americans to forget the heartless reality of extreme capitalist competition. Middle-class culture, in turn, created Coverdale, an apolitical and voyeuristic consumer confined in the enclosed private world of the home, in which he consumed the lean and wan female image of the Veiled Lady to gratify his sexual and patriarchal desire vicariously. Blithedale is therefore designed as a place to reform this morbid state of middle-class culture. Its ambition for reform, however, is forestalled because it has been merely a mask to hide the egotism of middle-class reformers at Blithedale. Rather than reforming them, the utopian community exacerbates and drives into catastrophe their egotism and morbidity, simultaneously revealing structural limitations persisting in the cultural elements of the middle class such as domesticity, mesmerism, spiritualism, privacy, and consumerism. Eventually, in the process of investigating the failures of the utopian experiment, the author Hawthorne specifically exposes drawbacks intrinsic both to the middle-class reform ideology of sentimentalism through the disingenuous narrator Coverdale and to the middle-class genre of romance through the extravagantly abortive narrative of The Blithedale Romance. In other words, the writer disintegrates his existing authorial practices based on sentimentalism and the romance genre, discerning the impending violent breakdown of the corrupt middle class.

목차

I. 모호한 로맨스 “베일을 쓴 여인”과 커버레일
 II. 중산층의 형성: 병리적인 자립적 남성성과 억업받는 여성성
  (1) 가정생활
  (2) 대중문화 산업의 아이콘: 빈약한 여성
  (3) 최면술과 심령술
  (4) 사생활 영역(privacy)과 소비
  (5) 병리적인 남성성과 착취되는 여성성
 III. 중산층의 개혁 : 가면으로 가려진 이기주의
 IV. 중산층의 감성주의와 로맨스의 한계
  (1) 화자 커버데일이 덮어버리는 것 : 중산층 감성주의의 허위
  (2) 호손이 드러내는 것 : 중산층의 로맨스와 감성주의의 한계
 인용문헌
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 김은형 [ EunHyoung Kim | 서울대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813