실패한 서사인가, 실패의 서사인가?: 『피에르』와 남성성의 수행
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Dislocating Herman Melville and his Pierre, or the Ambiguities from the critical tradition based on the gendered division of the popular literary market of Melville’s time and transcendental aesthetic values of the “American Renaissance,” this study suggests that Pierre reveals, through its multi-layered split of the narrative, the author’s critical understanding of the often contradictory imperatives for normalized gender positions at work in mid-nineteenth century America. Such a critical understanding enables him to represent in Pierre the male subject's inevitable failure in fully embodying the prescribed norms for idealized gender identity. The story of Pierre Glendinning’s aspirations to ideal masculinity is shot through with conflicts caused by opposing yet complicitous influences of his doting, overbearing mother and his dead, sinful father. Torn between their commands, Pierre chooses to radically remove himself from the implications of the past; but his rush toward a new possibility of masculine performance only embroils him further into the contradictions of his familial history which belies the complicitous operations of the seemingly contending ideological forces. This ironic failure of Pierre’s masculine performance is brilliantly represented in the multiple layers of the narrative, which intricately embody the numerous pairs of opposing forces that eventually contribute to the splitting of Pierre’s gendered subjectivity that cannot be sutured: romantic sentimentality and the Gothic elements; privatized transcendental faith and the nationalistic ideology of the republic; feminizing impulses of domesticity and Jacksonian drives for masculine aggression; an aversion of the sinful past and a nostalgic return to the glorified past; the impulse to break away from the conventional family and the regressive desire for bourgeois endogamy, and so forth. In that sense, Pierre, despite its notorious oddness, is far from the author’s own failure to produce a coherent narrative. On the contrary, it is the contention of this paper that by superbly textualizing the chiasmic interrelation of normalizing imperatives for conflicting gender ideals which beset masculine subjects of the era, it exquisitely represents the failure of such performances which, as Melville saw in his own life, those contradicting imperatives necessarily entail.
Abstract
Dislocating Herman Melville and his Pierre, or the Ambiguities from the critical tradition based on the gendered division of the popular literary market of Melville’s time and transcendental aesthetic values of the “American Renaissance,” this study suggests that Pierre reveals, through its multi-layered split of the narrative, the author’s critical understanding of the often contradictory imperatives for normalized gender positions at work in mid-nineteenth century America. Such a critical understanding enables him to represent in Pierre the male subject's inevitable failure in fully embodying the prescribed norms for idealized gender identity. The story of Pierre Glendinning’s aspirations to ideal masculinity is shot through with conflicts caused by opposing yet complicitous influences of his doting, overbearing mother and his dead, sinful father. Torn between their commands, Pierre chooses to radically remove himself from the implications of the past; but his rush toward a new possibility of masculine performance only embroils him further into the contradictions of his familial history which belies the complicitous operations of the seemingly contending ideological forces. This ironic failure of Pierre’s masculine performance is brilliantly represented in the multiple layers of the narrative, which intricately embody the numerous pairs of opposing forces that eventually contribute to the splitting of Pierre’s gendered subjectivity that cannot be sutured: romantic sentimentality and the Gothic elements; privatized transcendental faith and the nationalistic ideology of the republic; feminizing impulses of domesticity and Jacksonian drives for masculine aggression; an aversion of the sinful past and a nostalgic return to the glorified past; the impulse to break away from the conventional family and the regressive desire for bourgeois endogamy, and so forth. In that sense, Pierre, despite its notorious oddness, is far from the author’s own failure to produce a coherent narrative. On the contrary, it is the contention of this paper that by superbly textualizing the chiasmic interrelation of normalizing imperatives for conflicting gender ideals which beset masculine subjects of the era, it exquisitely represents the failure of such performances which, as Melville saw in his own life, those contradicting imperatives necessarily entail.
참고문헌 (24)
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