「한 시간 동안의 이야기」와 「영 굿맨 브라운」에 나타난 원형적 영웅의 이미지

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze “The Story of an Hour” and “Young Goodman Brown” according to the pattern of the archetypal hero's adventure in Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. According to Campbell, there is but one archetypal hero whose life has been replicated at different times of human history, and whose pattern of adventure can be found in every mythology that can be called “vision quest”. In this respect, the inner journeys of Mrs. Mallard and Mr. Brown can be traced to be analyzed in the light of typical hero act described by Campbell. Three stages of the typical pattern in the hero's adventure—departure, fulfillment, and return—were applied to the episodes experienced by heroine and hero of these two stories in the three chapters of this paper, under the titles of “From the Known to the Unknown”, “From the Darkness to the Light or From the Light to the Darkness”, and “The Gold Turned into Ashes”. Mr. Mallard sets out her journey to her own room in the second floor triggered by the news of her husband's sudden death, during which she experiences the ultimate sense of freedom, consummating the heroine's adventure. In Brown's case, he voluntarily chooses to begin his journey into the darkness of forest for one night to participate in the communion of Satan, which forever changes him into a dark figure with the secret knowledge of ‘universal sin’. The supernatural experiences of Mrs. Mallard and Mr. Brown during their journeys can not be understood and welcome by their communities, which symbolically reenacts the mythological motif of ‘gold tuned into ashes’. According to Campbell, this motif explains the tragic result when vision attained by the hero can not be shared with his neighbors who do not know how to receive it and how to institutionalize it.