『비밀요원』의 멜로드라마 실험
The Secret Agent: An Experiment on Melodrama
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This paper proposes to read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) as an experiment on melodrama and to place Conrad as a successor of Charles Dickens in that both of them appropriate the melodramatic elements and incorporate them into their social criticism. As Conrad refers his first major novel set in London as “Winnie’s story” in his “Author’s Note”, it’s not with a ground to read The Secret Agent as a story of an unhappy woman who sacrifices her feeling for the sake of her family’s security. Winnie’s inner tumults are not portrayed as such, but only through her mother’s deep policy learned through her own experience as a widowed woman. As Winnie is seen as impenetrable, indifferent and mysterious, she distances herself from the typical heroine of the Victorian melodrama. By making Winnie an unknown, even absent center, Conrad evades melodramatic over-simplification of his female character and intensifies the conflict between Winnie and Verloc. Conrad gives Winnie’s tragic life its social and historical significance as he makes Winne’s family get involved in the bombing of Greenwich Observatory, one of the most unsettling terrorist attacks which forced the British to fear that nobody is safe in the modern metropolis. He uses Winnie’s melodrama as a catalyst to reveal the hidden agendas and underlying mechanisms in which everyday lives of ordinary people meet the most terrible and violent events in modern history. Another twist Conrad gives to melodrama is that he transcend the typical melodramatic categories of good and evil, and by doing so, obfuscates the boundaries of melodramatic schema. In The Secret Agent, Conrad introduces and deconstructs the popular elements of melodrama, which makes him a timely critic and re-creator of the most well known genre in the Victorian Era.
Abstract
This paper proposes to read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) as an experiment on melodrama and to place Conrad as a successor of Charles Dickens in that both of them appropriate the melodramatic elements and incorporate them into their social criticism. As Conrad refers his first major novel set in London as “Winnie’s story” in his “Author’s Note”, it’s not with a ground to read The Secret Agent as a story of an unhappy woman who sacrifices her feeling for the sake of her family’s security. Winnie’s inner tumults are not portrayed as such, but only through her mother’s deep policy learned through her own experience as a widowed woman. As Winnie is seen as impenetrable, indifferent and mysterious, she distances herself from the typical heroine of the Victorian melodrama. By making Winnie an unknown, even absent center, Conrad evades melodramatic over-simplification of his female character and intensifies the conflict between Winnie and Verloc. Conrad gives Winnie’s tragic life its social and historical significance as he makes Winne’s family get involved in the bombing of Greenwich Observatory, one of the most unsettling terrorist attacks which forced the British to fear that nobody is safe in the modern metropolis. He uses Winnie’s melodrama as a catalyst to reveal the hidden agendas and underlying mechanisms in which everyday lives of ordinary people meet the most terrible and violent events in modern history. Another twist Conrad gives to melodrama is that he transcend the typical melodramatic categories of good and evil, and by doing so, obfuscates the boundaries of melodramatic schema. In The Secret Agent, Conrad introduces and deconstructs the popular elements of melodrama, which makes him a timely critic and re-creator of the most well known genre in the Victorian Era.
참고문헌 (26)
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