퓌그말리온, 오비디우스, 그리고 윌리엄 해즐릿의 『사랑의 서(書)』 (Pygmalion, Ovid, and William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국영미문화학회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문화 / 16권 / 4호 / 101 ~ 144페이지
· 저자명 : 육은정

초록

Ever since its publication in 1823, William Hazlittʼs Liber Amoris, the record of his disastrous infatuation with the teenage daughter of his landlord, remains a difficult as well as uncomfortable read. In engaging with this strange little book, an anomaly--and some says, an embarrassment--in Hazlitt's oeuvre, this paper finds inspiration from its subtitle, ʻʻThe New Pygmalion.ʼʼ To call oneʼs own book--or its protagonist H, the persona of Hazlitt--the ʻʻnewʼʼ Pygmalion inevitably invites comparison with the ʻʻold,ʼʼ or the original Pygmalion from Ovid's Metamorphosis Book X. In Ovid the Pygmalion episode is flanked by the story of Propoetides, the first ever prostitutes, and of Myrrha, a daughter in love with her progenitor. Hazlitt, as well versed in Ovid as any educated man in his own days, must have known the concatenation of these three stories in Metamorphosis. It is the claim of this paper that the story of Pygmalion have to be treated in this concatenation. By comparing Liber Amoris with this ʻextendedʼ version of Pygmalion story, we can tease out a narrative of a sort from the rich contradictions of Hazlittʼs torturous story of love, jealousy, and obsession: how H venerates S/Sarah Walker as modesty incarnate on the one hand and keeps his physical intimacy with her (which sometimes borders on heavy petting) on the other; how he lauds S to the skies as his sovereign queen at the same time he likes to picture her as a scruffy housemaid in all the sweats and dirt; and above all, how he, in spite of his envisioning her as a heroic warrior for freedom, ends up demoting her to a domestic woman confined in the private sphere of home and hearth as a revenge and a compensatory act.

영어초록

Ever since its publication in 1823, William Hazlittʼs Liber Amoris, the record of his disastrous infatuation with the teenage daughter of his landlord, remains a difficult as well as uncomfortable read. In engaging with this strange little book, an anomaly--and some says, an embarrassment--in Hazlitt's oeuvre, this paper finds inspiration from its subtitle, ʻʻThe New Pygmalion.ʼʼ To call oneʼs own book--or its protagonist H, the persona of Hazlitt--the ʻʻnewʼʼ Pygmalion inevitably invites comparison with the ʻʻold,ʼʼ or the original Pygmalion from Ovid's Metamorphosis Book X. In Ovid the Pygmalion episode is flanked by the story of Propoetides, the first ever prostitutes, and of Myrrha, a daughter in love with her progenitor. Hazlitt, as well versed in Ovid as any educated man in his own days, must have known the concatenation of these three stories in Metamorphosis. It is the claim of this paper that the story of Pygmalion have to be treated in this concatenation. By comparing Liber Amoris with this ʻextendedʼ version of Pygmalion story, we can tease out a narrative of a sort from the rich contradictions of Hazlittʼs torturous story of love, jealousy, and obsession: how H venerates S/Sarah Walker as modesty incarnate on the one hand and keeps his physical intimacy with her (which sometimes borders on heavy petting) on the other; how he lauds S to the skies as his sovereign queen at the same time he likes to picture her as a scruffy housemaid in all the sweats and dirt; and above all, how he, in spite of his envisioning her as a heroic warrior for freedom, ends up demoting her to a domestic woman confined in the private sphere of home and hearth as a revenge and a compensatory act.

참고자료

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