“그토록 잔인한 마음을 만들어낸 이유가 있을게 아닌가?”: 제인 스마일리가 다시 쓴 『리어왕』, 『천 에이커』
“Is there any Cause in nature which makes these hard hearts?”: A Thousand Acres asJane Smiley’s revision of King Lear
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This study aims to analyze Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres(1991), which is at once a remarkably faithful and a profoundly subversive revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In an interview with Chicago Tribune, Smiley confessed that she had always found something wrong with Shakespeare’s depiction of Lear’s older daughters, and her central objective in rewriting King Lear is to provide the plausible motive for the two elder daughters’ cruelty to their father. In placing Goneril/Ginny at the center of her narrative, Smiley asks what could have made the daughters so angry and gives a voice and a history to those otherwise unheard and maligned heroines. Incest and abuse are the guilty secrets that underlie the damaged relations among the family members and the novel understands the daughters’ present relation to their father as a belated expression of their rage at being raped and used. Lust, the sign of female depravity in King Lear, becomes the father’s “unthinkable urge” in the novel. Smiley’s novel is thus a re-membering or revision of Shakespeare’s play King Lear as much as of the history of Smiley's own nation, in that what Smiley reconstructs is nothing more than her own history and memory of her own American father. Larry(Smiley’s Lear) is an American farmer embodying the American value system, exposed by the novel as corrupt at its core and Smiley connects the patriarch's tragedy to national myths of identity and value that erase women and authorize their abuse. A Thousand Acres can thus be described also as Smiley’s “act of survival”, that is her attempt “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” and to create one. It is, however, open to question whether she really succeeds in it. Her novel is charged with anger and it prevents her from finding her way out of her father’s destructive legacies. A Thousand Acres is much darker than Shakespeare’s most apocalyptic play King Lear.
Abstract
This study aims to analyze Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres(1991), which is at once a remarkably faithful and a profoundly subversive revision of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In an interview with Chicago Tribune, Smiley confessed that she had always found something wrong with Shakespeare’s depiction of Lear’s older daughters, and her central objective in rewriting King Lear is to provide the plausible motive for the two elder daughters’ cruelty to their father. In placing Goneril/Ginny at the center of her narrative, Smiley asks what could have made the daughters so angry and gives a voice and a history to those otherwise unheard and maligned heroines. Incest and abuse are the guilty secrets that underlie the damaged relations among the family members and the novel understands the daughters’ present relation to their father as a belated expression of their rage at being raped and used. Lust, the sign of female depravity in King Lear, becomes the father’s “unthinkable urge” in the novel. Smiley’s novel is thus a re-membering or revision of Shakespeare’s play King Lear as much as of the history of Smiley's own nation, in that what Smiley reconstructs is nothing more than her own history and memory of her own American father. Larry(Smiley’s Lear) is an American farmer embodying the American value system, exposed by the novel as corrupt at its core and Smiley connects the patriarch's tragedy to national myths of identity and value that erase women and authorize their abuse. A Thousand Acres can thus be described also as Smiley’s “act of survival”, that is her attempt “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” and to create one. It is, however, open to question whether she really succeeds in it. Her novel is charged with anger and it prevents her from finding her way out of her father’s destructive legacies. A Thousand Acres is much darker than Shakespeare’s most apocalyptic play King Lear.
참고문헌 (18)
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