Earticle

초록

영어

This essay attempts to provide a new perspective on Wieland’s reason for murdering his wife and four children in Charles Brocken Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation. Countering the critical consensus that Wieland’s devout faith in and love of God is what drives him to kill his own family, I contend that the real modus operandi for his murder is not his love of God but his love of self. I also argue that Wieland’s apparent obsession with religious faith is inextricably linked to his uncanny relationship with his sister Clara, which is an unconscious manifestation of his narcissistic desires. Having inherited his forefathers’ religious faith, Wieland forces himself to believe that he is a sincere believer in God and leaves himself with no outlet for his self-love. Wieland thus projects his narcissistic desires onto his sister, Clara, who bears a close resemblance to him, and in his unconscious endeavor to justify his unreasonable desires for his sister, he projects them once again onto his wife and children with whom he is so “happy” that he feels guilty. This is how Wieland ends up deceiving himself that he honors and glorifies his God through his act of murder. Through Wieland’s transformation from a man of noble intention into a monstrous criminal, Brown demonstrates how dangerous it is completely to deny one’s narcissistic desires and thereby offers a critique of the tradition of Calvinism and Puritanism which pressured people to have ardent faith and instilled guilty feelings in people who did not know how to have a conversion experience.

키워드

저자

• Yonghwa Lee [ 홍익대학교 ]

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