『블라이드데일 로맨스』의 여성 재현 연구 (A Study on Representation of Women in The Blithedale Romance)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 동국대학교 영어권문화연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 영어권문화연구 / 13권 / 3호 / 81 ~ 105페이지
· 저자명 : 김선옥

초록

This paper aims to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s third novel, The Blithedale Romance from the feminist perspective focusing on representation of female characters. Hawthorne is generally known to have had conservative attitudes towards women’s role in patriarchal society and seems to have projected his ideas on the male narrator in representing female characters of The Blithedale Romance. Especially, the irony that the female protagonist, who led the social reform movement as an active feminist, commits suicide because of the failure in love with the anti-feminist man arouses some doubt that the conservative male author may have made a satire of contemporary feminists. However, The Blithedale Romance includes so much ambiguity and complexity that we cannot dismiss it as just an anti- feminist novel for the reason that the author and the male narrator reveal negative views of women. Even though Hawthorne seems to often express his conservative ideas of women directly through the male narrator, he allows readers to deviate from the narrator’s point of view and watch female characters and events from the different perspective by making him an unreliable narrator with limitations and flaws as a man. In short, although the protagonist created by the conservative male author reveals some limitations and flaws as a female activist, she still shows possibility of a new woman rarely seen in 19th-century American society beyond the author’s personal views of women in his real life, which makes possible a feminist approach to The Blithedale Romance.

영어초록

This paper aims to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s third novel, The Blithedale Romance from the feminist perspective focusing on representation of female characters. Hawthorne is generally known to have had conservative attitudes towards women’s role in patriarchal society and seems to have projected his ideas on the male narrator in representing female characters of The Blithedale Romance. Especially, the irony that the female protagonist, who led the social reform movement as an active feminist, commits suicide because of the failure in love with the anti-feminist man arouses some doubt that the conservative male author may have made a satire of contemporary feminists. However, The Blithedale Romance includes so much ambiguity and complexity that we cannot dismiss it as just an anti- feminist novel for the reason that the author and the male narrator reveal negative views of women. Even though Hawthorne seems to often express his conservative ideas of women directly through the male narrator, he allows readers to deviate from the narrator’s point of view and watch female characters and events from the different perspective by making him an unreliable narrator with limitations and flaws as a man. In short, although the protagonist created by the conservative male author reveals some limitations and flaws as a female activist, she still shows possibility of a new woman rarely seen in 19th-century American society beyond the author’s personal views of women in his real life, which makes possible a feminist approach to The Blithedale Romance.

참고자료

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