Vulnerability and the Failures of Compassion in Stephen Crane’s Maggie
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay seeks to examine vulnerabilities and the failures of compassion in Stephen Crane’s Maggie. As theorists have argued since Judith Butler, vulnerability compels us to realize that all humans are wounded and precarious beings in need of mutual care. The ethics of vulnerability ultimately points to solidarity and interdependence among those suffering under the threat of systemic violence. Butler and others, however, mainly draw attention to the injurability that originates from political imbalance on the macro level, ignoring everyday violence and vulnerability. Stephen Crane’s Maggie portrays the grim everyday life in which vulnerability widens the gap between the self and afflicted others. Crane sheds light on the self-deceiving world of Bowery where compassion, once invoked and embraced, quickly evaporates when forced to assume the burden of action and responsibility. Crane further captures uncanny moments when compassion articulates with parochialism, shallowness, unreliability, inequality, and misrecognition. This essay also explores how characters appropriate the false aura of invulnerability by exploiting vulnerability as a means of deflecting and suppressing their own vulnerabilities. Jimmie constructs the illusion of the invulnerable self by deploying the negative emotional capital of contempt and the symbolic capital of masculinity so as to dispel the unrevealed inferiority he feels towards the wealthy upper-class. Unlike Jimmie, Pete and Mary take ample advantage of the vulnerable Maggie to make themselves seem invulnerable. They themselves are vulnerable, subject to contempt, derision, or job insecurity, but they put on the invulnerable cloak of respectability by incarcerating Maggie in the prison of vulnerability.
Abstract
This essay seeks to examine vulnerabilities and the failures of compassion in Stephen Crane’s Maggie. As theorists have argued since Judith Butler, vulnerability compels us to realize that all humans are wounded and precarious beings in need of mutual care. The ethics of vulnerability ultimately points to solidarity and interdependence among those suffering under the threat of systemic violence. Butler and others, however, mainly draw attention to the injurability that originates from political imbalance on the macro level, ignoring everyday violence and vulnerability. Stephen Crane’s Maggie portrays the grim everyday life in which vulnerability widens the gap between the self and afflicted others. Crane sheds light on the self-deceiving world of Bowery where compassion, once invoked and embraced, quickly evaporates when forced to assume the burden of action and responsibility. Crane further captures uncanny moments when compassion articulates with parochialism, shallowness, unreliability, inequality, and misrecognition. This essay also explores how characters appropriate the false aura of invulnerability by exploiting vulnerability as a means of deflecting and suppressing their own vulnerabilities. Jimmie constructs the illusion of the invulnerable self by deploying the negative emotional capital of contempt and the symbolic capital of masculinity so as to dispel the unrevealed inferiority he feels towards the wealthy upper-class. Unlike Jimmie, Pete and Mary take ample advantage of the vulnerable Maggie to make themselves seem invulnerable. They themselves are vulnerable, subject to contempt, derision, or job insecurity, but they put on the invulnerable cloak of respectability by incarcerating Maggie in the prison of vulnerability.
참고문헌 (39)
- Bailey, Peter, "‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand up?’ : Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability", Journal of Social History, 12(3), pp.336~353 (1979)
- Berlant, Lauren, "Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding)", pp.1~14, Berlant
- Berlant, Lauren, "Cruel Optimism" (2011), Duke UP
- Berlant, Lauren, "Compassion : The Culture and Politics of an Emotion" (2004), Routledge
- Butler, Judith, "Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?" (2010), Verso
- Butler, Judith, "Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice" (2004), Verso
- Butler, Judith, "Vulnerability in Resistance", pp.1~11 (2016), Duke UP
- Caouette, Justin, "The Moral Psychology of Compassion" (2018), Rowman & Littlefield
- Cole, Alyson, "All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable Than Others:The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique", Critical Horizons, 17(2), pp.260~277 (2016)
- Cottingham, Marci D, "Theorizing Emotional Capital", Theory and Society, 45(5), pp.451~470 (2016)
- Crisp, Roger, "Compassion and Beyond", Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 11(3), pp.233~246 (2008)
- Crane, Gregg, "The Cambridge Introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Novel" (2007), Cambridge University Press
- Crane, Stephen, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry", pp.7~78 (1996), The Library of America
- Faflik, David, "Antebellum Apathy : A Study of Indifference in Melville", American Literature, 89(3), pp.529~556 (2017)
- Gandal, Keith, "Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie’ and the Modern Soul", ELH, 60(3), pp.759~785 (1993)
- Garber, Marjorie, "Compassion", pp.15~28, Berlant
- Gilson, Erinn C., "The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice" (2014), Routledge
- Govier, Trudy, "The Moral Psychology of Compassion", pp.61~75 (2020), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Huntsperger, David, "Populist Crane : A Reconsideration of Melodrama in Maggie", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 53(3), pp.294~319 (2011)
- Jones, Gavin, "Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America" (1999), The U of California P
- Joronen, Mikko, "Vulnerability and Its Politics : Precarity and the Woundedness of Power", Progress in Human Geography, pp.1402~1418 (2021)
- Lawson, Andrew, "Class Mimicry in Stephen Crane’s City", American Literary History, 16(4), pp.596~618 (2004)
- Lee, Wendy Anne, "The Scandal of Insensibility; or, The Bartleby Problem", PMLA, 130(5), pp.1347~1362 (2015)
- Mason, Michelle, "Contempt as a Moral Attitude", Ethics, 113(2), pp.234~272 (2003)
- Mason, Michelle, "The Moral Psychology of Contempt" (2018), Rowman &Littlefield
- Moeller, Susan D., "Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death" (1999), Routledge
- Murphy, Ann V., "Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary" (2012), The State U of New York P
- Nussbaum, Martha, "Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions" (2001), The U of Chicago P
- Nussbaum, Martha, "The Politics of Compassion. Eds. Michael Ure and Mervyn Frost", pp.189~207 (2013), Routledge
- Oliviero, Katie, "Vulnerability Politics: The Uses and Abuses of Precarity in Political Debate" (2018), New York UP
- Pizer, Donald, "Stephen Crane’s ‘Maggie’ and American Naturalism", Criticism, 7(2), pp.168~175 (1965)
- Potkay, Adam, "Contested Emotions : Pity and Gratitude from the Stoics to Swift and Wordsworth", PMLA, 130(5), pp.1332~1346 (2015)
- Rowan, Jamin, "Stephen Crane and Methodism’s Realism : Translating Spiritual Sympathy into Urban Experience", Studies in American Fiction, 36(2), pp.133~154 (2008)
- Sabsay, Leticia, "Vulnerability in Resistance", pp.278~302 (2016), Duke UP
- Sussman, David, "Above and Beneath Contempt", Mason, 153~171
- Ure, Michael, "The Politics of Compassion" (2014), Routledge
- Van Dijk, Wilco W., "Schadenfreude: Understanding Pleasure at the Misfortune of Others" (2014), Cambridge UP
- Van Dijk, Wilco, "Schadenfreude: Understanding Pleasure at the Misfortune of Others", pp.131~148 (2014), Cambridge UP
- 왕은철, "“더 타자적인 타자”로서의 동물들: J.M. 쿳시의 「노년의 여성과 고양이들」에 나타난 동물윤리", 영어영문학, 67(4), pp.745~768 (2021), 한국영어영문학회[DOI]