제국의 중심에서 소비하는 여성들: 진 리스의 『어둠 속의 항해』 (Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark and Female Imperial Consumption in the Metropolis)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국현대영미소설학회
· 수록지 정보 : 현대영미소설 / 28권 / 3호 / 141 ~ 177페이지
· 저자명 : 서주희

초록

This paper examines how whiteness as the basis of English identity and femininity is formed and acquired through the consumption of commodity goods in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. Critics have often noted the main protagonist Anna’s cultural and racial hybridity which is rooted in her being a colonial subject, a white creole woman, displaced in the imperial metropolis of London. However, the emphasis on hybridity runs the risk of glossing over the structured racial hierarchy of the colonial spaces such as Anna’s home in Dominica. This paper proposes to look into the ambivalence, rather than hybridity, of Anna’s marginal positionality as a white creole woman in order to underscore the ambivalence of white womanhood that defines the racial boundary of imperial Englishness. First, the paper focuses on the sexual commodification of Anna and her fellow chorus girls and how this commodification conditions their marginalization from domesticity and respectability of the English middle class. Then, I examine the ways in which the female characters of the novel try to appease the anxiety of class mobility through the consumption of commodities that are circulated through the imperial marketplace. Particularly, the goods that flow in from the colonies are transformed into fetishized goods that confirm and form the privileged whiteness which the precariously classed women aspire to achieve. The English domestic space accommodates the racial fetishization of such goods while negating the complex temporalities and histories of the colonies. In the last section, the paper then argues that the declassed state Anna experiences enables her to reread and reevaluate her Dominican past. Through Anna’s fragmented consciousness that weaves together the past and present, the colony and the metropolis, the novel presents a critique on the Empire and its racial/racist formation of identity.

영어초록

This paper examines how whiteness as the basis of English identity and femininity is formed and acquired through the consumption of commodity goods in Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark. Critics have often noted the main protagonist Anna’s cultural and racial hybridity which is rooted in her being a colonial subject, a white creole woman, displaced in the imperial metropolis of London. However, the emphasis on hybridity runs the risk of glossing over the structured racial hierarchy of the colonial spaces such as Anna’s home in Dominica. This paper proposes to look into the ambivalence, rather than hybridity, of Anna’s marginal positionality as a white creole woman in order to underscore the ambivalence of white womanhood that defines the racial boundary of imperial Englishness. First, the paper focuses on the sexual commodification of Anna and her fellow chorus girls and how this commodification conditions their marginalization from domesticity and respectability of the English middle class. Then, I examine the ways in which the female characters of the novel try to appease the anxiety of class mobility through the consumption of commodities that are circulated through the imperial marketplace. Particularly, the goods that flow in from the colonies are transformed into fetishized goods that confirm and form the privileged whiteness which the precariously classed women aspire to achieve. The English domestic space accommodates the racial fetishization of such goods while negating the complex temporalities and histories of the colonies. In the last section, the paper then argues that the declassed state Anna experiences enables her to reread and reevaluate her Dominican past. Through Anna’s fragmented consciousness that weaves together the past and present, the colony and the metropolis, the novel presents a critique on the Empire and its racial/racist formation of identity.

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