사라 워터스의 『 핑거스미스』와 네오 빅토리안 상상력
Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and the Neo-Victorian Imagination
0
조회
0
다운로드
1
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
One of the most widely read Neo-Victorian novels published in the twenty-first century, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith displays an intriguing rendition of nineteenth-century British novels. In the effectively created setting à la The Woman in White and Oliver Twist, the novel’s two female protagonists Maud and Sue are cast as a darker Laura Fairlie and a female Oliver Twist, enacting their roles both within and against the plot of Jane Eyre. As the genre’s description, “Neo-Victorian,” clearly indicates the both influences of the new and the Victorian, this essay seeks to outline ways in which those Victorian texts are imitated and revised with a postmodern sensibility, utilizing the trope of “Madwoman in the Attic.” Inspired by Jane Eyre and extensively circulated after the seminal work by Gilbert and Gubar, the figure of madwoman most acutely personifies the conflict between a strictly male-dominated social norm and female resistance and desire for subjectivity in the literary imagination of the nineteenth century and thereafter. Placed on the opposite ends of the spectrum regarding literacy, Maud and Sue are figuratively incarcerated in a male literary system of one’s uncle’s library and in illiteracy nurtured by the other’s surrogate mother respectively. Reading the mutually intertwined plots of Maud, Sue, and their biological and symbolic mothers, this essay discusses the power of women’s literacy in association with the fear and stigma of madness, material reality, and women’s homoerotic desire, while exploring the influences of Neo-Victorian imaginations and revisions of Victorian novels. Although the trope of madwoman is used to suppress the female desire for agency, Sue and Maud’s separate adventures ultimately debunk the fiction of women’s madness. As female homosexuals born illegitimately, they are at the margins of Victorian history but become subjects of a novel in the genre that valorizes difference and diversity.
Abstract
One of the most widely read Neo-Victorian novels published in the twenty-first century, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith displays an intriguing rendition of nineteenth-century British novels. In the effectively created setting à la The Woman in White and Oliver Twist, the novel’s two female protagonists Maud and Sue are cast as a darker Laura Fairlie and a female Oliver Twist, enacting their roles both within and against the plot of Jane Eyre. As the genre’s description, “Neo-Victorian,” clearly indicates the both influences of the new and the Victorian, this essay seeks to outline ways in which those Victorian texts are imitated and revised with a postmodern sensibility, utilizing the trope of “Madwoman in the Attic.” Inspired by Jane Eyre and extensively circulated after the seminal work by Gilbert and Gubar, the figure of madwoman most acutely personifies the conflict between a strictly male-dominated social norm and female resistance and desire for subjectivity in the literary imagination of the nineteenth century and thereafter. Placed on the opposite ends of the spectrum regarding literacy, Maud and Sue are figuratively incarcerated in a male literary system of one’s uncle’s library and in illiteracy nurtured by the other’s surrogate mother respectively. Reading the mutually intertwined plots of Maud, Sue, and their biological and symbolic mothers, this essay discusses the power of women’s literacy in association with the fear and stigma of madness, material reality, and women’s homoerotic desire, while exploring the influences of Neo-Victorian imaginations and revisions of Victorian novels. Although the trope of madwoman is used to suppress the female desire for agency, Sue and Maud’s separate adventures ultimately debunk the fiction of women’s madness. As female homosexuals born illegitimately, they are at the margins of Victorian history but become subjects of a novel in the genre that valorizes difference and diversity.
참고문헌 (21)
- Auerbach, Nina, "Incarnations of the Orphan", ELH, 42(3), pp.395~419 (1975)
- Boehm, Katharina, "Historiography and the Material Imagination in the Novels of Sarah Waters", Studies in the Novel, 43(2), pp.237~257 (2011)
- Carroll, Samantha J., "Putting the ‘Neo’ Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction", Neo-Victorian Studies, 3(2), pp.172~205 (2010)
- Ciocia, Stefania, "Queer and Verdant : The Textual Politics of Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Novels", Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, 5(2) (2007)
- Costantini, Mariaconcetta, "'Faux-Victorian Melodrama' in the New Millennium: The Case of Sarah Waters", Critical Survey, 18(1), pp.17~39 (2006)
- Dennis, Abigail, "Ladies in Peril : Sarah Waters on Neo-Victorian Narrative Celebrations and Why She Stopped Writing About the Victorian Era", Neo-Victorian Studies, 1(1), pp.41~52 (2008)
- Gaylin, Ann, "The Madwoman Outside the Attic: Eavesdropping and Narrative Agency in The Woman in White", Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 43(3), pp.303~333 (2001)
- Gilbert, Sandra M., "The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination" (2000), Yale UP
- Hallum, Kirby-Jane, "Collecting Men: Masculinity and Cultural Capital in The Woman in White", Victorian Network, 4(1), pp.27~47 (2012)
- Johns, Christine, "Unconventional Uncles: Queer Father Figures and Avuncular Relationships in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith", The Victorian, 2(2) (2014)
- Kaplan, Cora, "Fingersmith’s Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies", Journal of Victorian Culture, 13(1), pp.42~55 (2008)
- Kapurch, Katie, "Why Can’t You Love Me The Way I Am? : Fairy Tales, Girlhood, and Agency in Neo-Victorian Visions of Jane Eyre", Neo-Victorian Studies, 5(1), pp.89~116 (2012)
- Lai-Ming, Tammy Ho, "Cannibalised Girlhood in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting", Neo-Victorian Studies, 5(1), pp.14~37 (2012)
- Llewellyn, Mark, "What is Neo-Victorian Studies?", Neo-Victorian Studies, 1(1), pp.164~185 (2008)
- McKelvy, William R., "‘The Woman in White’ and Graphic Sex", Victorian Literature and Culture, 35(1), pp.287~308 (2007)
- Miller, Kathleen A., "Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith: Leaving Women’s Fingerprints on Victorian Pornography", Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 4(1) (2008)
- Morey, Anne, "The Secret Sharer: The Child in Neo-Victorian Fiction", Neo-Victorian Studies, 5(1), pp.1~13 (2012)
- Palmer, Beth, "Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century", Victorian Studies, 52(1), pp.86~94 (2009)
- Saxey, Esther, "Lesbian Bastard Heroes: The Uses of Illegitimacy for Modern Lesbian Fiction and Identity", Women: A Cultural Review, 16(1), pp.33~51 (2005)
- Shiller, Dana, "The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel", Studies in the Novel, 29(4), pp.538~560 (1997)
- Waters, Sarah, "Fingersmith" (2002), Riverhead Books