미국 르네쌍스 내러티브의 변증법―'대리석 목신'과 '로드릭 허드슨'의 충돌을 중심으로―

Abstract

It is not difficult to find out that American Renaissance literature gives a glimpse into the process by which pasts get recreated and publicly realized; its past is not settled but in the process of becoming. Henry James invokes the earlier presence of Hawthorne to emphasize both his continuation and his independence from him to declare, in effect, that he takes up where Hawthorne left off.The Marble Faun is essential to James's conception of Roderick Hudson in its subject matter of American artists in Rome; its theme of American innocence implicated in old-world corruption; its highly suggestive patterning of a Fall. James, however, has improved upon Hawthorne by providing plausible and realistic specification that makes his conception socially lucid. Hawthorne's fable of the Fall is still discernible in Roderick Hudson, but it has receded into the background as poetic and moral suggestion, while the foreground is occupied by James's precise notation of manners. In his apprenticeship stories James sometimes referred to Hawthorne for insights into the nature of American experience; in certain cases, he shaped his realistic characters from Hawthorne's romance models. But in Roderick Hudson James takes leave of his old master and arrives as a novelist in full possession of his own world.Roderick Hudson asserts a conspicuous relation to late Hawthorne as if to announce that its author begins where Hawthorne ends. The complex relation James establishes in which he simultaneously receives materials from Hawthorne, continues, and completes what he began, and departs from him to move in directions of his own is based upon a sort of dialectic transformation.