『마사 퀘스트』의 곤경: 1차 대전의 상처와 “분리 원칙”에 사로잡힌 현대적 공동체의 위기

Abstract

This paper studies Martha Quest focusing on the heroine’s desperate struggle for a new community. Martha is a sensitive and precocious English girl growing in a southern African country. With a painful sense of estrangement and frustration, she finds herself and the world only through books. To begin with, this paper defenses the heroine’s strange passivity and inertia that have frequently been criticized as a flaw in characterization since the publication of this novel, and explains how deeply it is influenced by her father’s “fatal lethargy”. He left England with a trauma from the participation in World War I and came to Africa, but he was still fettered by the old European ideologies. In a sense, Martha takes over her father’s failure in the reconciliation between self and society, as well as “the morbid strain”. But by virtue of her imaginative and intelligent power, Martha catches an impressive vision of “a noble city” where people live harmoniously with no discrimination. It may be regarded as an idealistic innocent vision of a teenage girl. Nevertheless, by intuitively reflecting that there can exist no community without a mechanism of exclusion, Martha’s vision has something more than just a sheer ideal. Of course, the accomplishment of her vision is another question not only because she lives in a split community where “the principle of separateness” dominates, but because she cannot easily overcome her own inveterate inertia. Thus Martha Quest presents the passionate vision of an ideal community and leaves it rarely accomplished or even attempted; however, this unique balance between vision and anti-vision is more convincing and persuasive in the whole context of this novel.