20세기 초 미국소설에 나타난 자본과 폭력의 양상(I):『맥티그와 메뚜기의 하루 비교 연구

Abstract

This article studies the aspects of social absurdities in American novels of the early 20th century, in relation with capitalism and its effects on human nature as degeneration by the distorted desire, as violence for their result, and as madness that resists against the capitalist-leading culture. American dream of success is a kind of optimistic value, but in the society where systemized capitalism exists, it also effects the lives and the minds of the individuals. People in this system naively bows to it, but in their minds there also exists a sort of conflict between the inner nature like desire and the oppressive system of capitalism. So the aim of this article is to find out their traces from the beginning of the 20th century, the era when the American capitalist culture began in earnest, and their aspects of transformations in the place where all the capitalist rendezvous meet. In Frank Norris’ McTeague we may find the aspects of conflicts between the distorted desire for success and their instinctive brute within, and the negative aspects of excessive desire for the material sense, which is the basic form of capitalism, resulting in its bursting out as a violent murder. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, we may find the ungrounded desire in the systemized capitalist culture, Hollywood. characters in this work search for their way of success, but they are frustrated in the horrible emptiness of massive, systemized capitalist culture, and it bursts out in a form of massive madness and riot in the central place of systemized materialist culture.