Reviving the Ruined Manliness:The Tomb-Finding Narrative in Tom Brown’s Schooldays
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By examining the narrator’s digressional observations on ancient ruins, tombs, and battlefields in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this essay identifies Thomas Hughes’s narrative drive as the revival of ancient manliness, which was believed to have been lost in, or not fully inherited by, “modern” men of the nineteenth century. As a fictional embodiment as well as successful promoter of Charles Kingsley’s reformist doctrine of manhood, “Muscular Christianity,” this novel is known for its blended formula for the ideal boy: his two-part regiment for the boy’s physical as well as religious maturation in the public-school environment. This essay relocates critical focus from the cultivation of the boy subject to its historical double-vision, which juxtaposes young boys in school with ancient warriors. By analyzing the first chapter’s extended description of the protagonist’s birthplace and his Saxon lineage, this essay finds how the narrator’s pseudo-archaeological attachment to pre-historic landmarks imaginatively resuscitates militant men of ancient Britain. This essay goes on to illustrate how the main chapters’ significant school scenes reenact ancient battlefields in the public school’s playground, sickroom, and classroom, employing the imagery of body remains and inherited relics as a bridging link. Hughes’s imagination narratively unearths and reconstructs the mythical lineage of English manhood and promises a symbolic unification between buried heroes of the past and public-school boys of the nineteenth century. The irony is that the mythic lineage served to uphold and justify the imperial needs of sending away young men’s bodies across the expanse of the British Empire to maintain itself.
Abstract
By examining the narrator’s digressional observations on ancient ruins, tombs, and battlefields in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this essay identifies Thomas Hughes’s narrative drive as the revival of ancient manliness, which was believed to have been lost in, or not fully inherited by, “modern” men of the nineteenth century. As a fictional embodiment as well as successful promoter of Charles Kingsley’s reformist doctrine of manhood, “Muscular Christianity,” this novel is known for its blended formula for the ideal boy: his two-part regiment for the boy’s physical as well as religious maturation in the public-school environment. This essay relocates critical focus from the cultivation of the boy subject to its historical double-vision, which juxtaposes young boys in school with ancient warriors. By analyzing the first chapter’s extended description of the protagonist’s birthplace and his Saxon lineage, this essay finds how the narrator’s pseudo-archaeological attachment to pre-historic landmarks imaginatively resuscitates militant men of ancient Britain. This essay goes on to illustrate how the main chapters’ significant school scenes reenact ancient battlefields in the public school’s playground, sickroom, and classroom, employing the imagery of body remains and inherited relics as a bridging link. Hughes’s imagination narratively unearths and reconstructs the mythical lineage of English manhood and promises a symbolic unification between buried heroes of the past and public-school boys of the nineteenth century. The irony is that the mythic lineage served to uphold and justify the imperial needs of sending away young men’s bodies across the expanse of the British Empire to maintain itself.
참고문헌 (18)
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