찰스 체스넛의 『삼나무 뒤의 집』에 나타난 집의 상징성 (What the House Stands for: The Symbolic Meanings of the House in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 신영어영문학회
· 수록지 정보 : 신영어영문학 / 62호 / 65 ~ 98페이지
· 저자명 : 육은정

초록

Unlike other literary works that have “house” in the title, the eponymous house in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars(1900) failed to draw critical attention so far. Considering, however, the fact that the novel went under the working title “Rena Walden” during its long revising process to be rechristened as The House Behind the Cedars in its final form, the synecdochical relationship of the house to the heroine’s name suggests its centrality in her progress and final demise as a woman of mixed blood who chooses to pass as white in the racial American South of the 1870s. This paper focuses on the physical details of the house behind the cedars, its inhabitants, especially our heroine Rena, her mother Molly, and Frank Fowler with his family and house as figurative extension of the house behind of the cedars. In the process of “reading” this house, I believe we can revisit many of the central issues of the novel: the question of miscegenation; white people’s fear, suspicion, scrutiny, and hypocritical denial of the presence of mixed-race people, the result of white fathers’ “unpardonable sin”; the uneven distribution in the novel of social success and (white) racial identity along the line of gender; and last but not least, the subtle but undeniable gaze of blacks, who in subconscious resentment and self-loathing haunt the interstitial people of mixed blood as their unacknowledged and unwanted “double.”

영어초록

Unlike other literary works that have “house” in the title, the eponymous house in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars(1900) failed to draw critical attention so far. Considering, however, the fact that the novel went under the working title “Rena Walden” during its long revising process to be rechristened as The House Behind the Cedars in its final form, the synecdochical relationship of the house to the heroine’s name suggests its centrality in her progress and final demise as a woman of mixed blood who chooses to pass as white in the racial American South of the 1870s. This paper focuses on the physical details of the house behind the cedars, its inhabitants, especially our heroine Rena, her mother Molly, and Frank Fowler with his family and house as figurative extension of the house behind of the cedars. In the process of “reading” this house, I believe we can revisit many of the central issues of the novel: the question of miscegenation; white people’s fear, suspicion, scrutiny, and hypocritical denial of the presence of mixed-race people, the result of white fathers’ “unpardonable sin”; the uneven distribution in the novel of social success and (white) racial identity along the line of gender; and last but not least, the subtle but undeniable gaze of blacks, who in subconscious resentment and self-loathing haunt the interstitial people of mixed blood as their unacknowledged and unwanted “double.”

참고자료

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