정치적 오디세이로서의 『서곡』

Abstract

This paper surveys William Wordsworth's political conservativeness revealed in 1850 The Prelude, through the analysis of The Prelude's assimilative epic pattern with that of The Odyssey. Wordsworth is often considered as a political apostate who abandoned the ideals of the French Revolution; however, in The Prelude, he himself tried to reconcile his own radical past with his more conservative age. The model of Odysseus quite successfully offers a consistency in his history of shifting ideas; Wordsworth presents himself as a kind of epic hero, who makes homecoming journey with basic loyalty to his native land. He idealizes the mother tongue and English nature and suggests them as the true foundations of an ideal community. The metaphor of a martial hero to describe his refutation of French royalists serves the same ends; with the inversed metaphor of Odysseus' string of a bow which is compared to the performance of a bard, Wordsworth presents English tradition and custom as the underpinning in the embodiment of ideal republicanism into the world. Deriving and suggesting the one and the only political principle in his retrospective narration of his own life, Wordsworth presents his radical past as a wandering journey of romance and makes them to converge on a single triumphant epic narrative. Wordsworth's authentic political conservativeness in his later age reveals itself in his life-writing along with the pattern of Odysseus' return and slaying of Penelope's suitors.