원주민 소녀, 백인 소년을 만나다: 해체적 상상력으로 로이드 존스의 『미스터 핍』 읽기

Abstract

This paper explores New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones‘s Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Overall Prize for Best Book, in terms of a coming-of-age story and a subversive allegory. The novel weaves the developmental process which through 13-year-old Matilda Laimo went with rebellions and disillusionment on a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war in the early 1990s. In such the ravaged place, all whites have fled, and all native villagers including children are unified in their efforts for daily survival. Only one white staying behind with his native wife Grace is the eccentric Mr. Watts who is asked to fill in as the children's schoolteacher. He (re)reads to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. The precocious Matilda and her peers, even though stuck in the ruined schoolhouse, are fascinated by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip which takes them to the 19th century London. Mr. Watts and the children deconstruct and reconstruct the western classic as their own story. On one hand, indeed, literary imagination empowers the children to escape their own blighted landscape and subversively transform their lives against an ominous backdrop of war. On the other hand, the novel illustrates that amid the chaos and extreme violence, imagination can be dangerous. Matilda witnesses and graphically remembers her mother and teacher being brutally murdered. While on the island, Mr. Watts claims Pip's identity as his own, later on, in Australia, Matilda reclaims emigrant Pip's story as her own. After all, throughout the tense interactions between Matilda, her mother Dolores, and Mr. Watts, while criticizing a catastrophic and split world by colonial legacy and neocolonial economic hegemony, Jones's Mister Pip in the intertextual relation to Dickens's Great Expectations comes to celebrate the meaning of pure sacrifice for others and the resilience of the human spirit as well as the power of literary imagination.