『인간의 오점』에 나타난 정화의 의미

Abstract

The Human Stain by Philip Roth begins with the conversation between Oedipus in Oedipus the King and Creon. Oedipus is the cause of the plague that afflicts the city of Thebes. His inadvertent murder of a man, who was his father Laius, is the reason for the pestilence. After wandering around the land with his daughter, Oedipus suffers a miserable death which then purifies the city of Thebes. Setting the novel in 1998, at the time of the presidential sex scandal, Roth compares and contrasts the Puritanism of the prejudiced American politicians with narrow-mindedness and self-righteousness of the faculty at Athena college. Congress enacted the astringent rituals of purification by charging president Clinton of adultery and perjury, but even didn't make America safe and cozy enough to watch TV with ten-year-old daughter. Coleman Silk, the protagonist of the novel, is a classics professor who teaches Greek literature at Athena College. He is denounced as a racist for inadvertently calling two absent students “spooks” and is forced to retire. The crisis kills his wife Iris, causing him to lead a lonely life. Finally he dies along side the woman in love, Faunia Farley. His death, to my regret, contributes almost nothing to purity the conformities of Athena College and the city, in contrast to the purification brought by Oedipus's death. The Human Stain, criticizes the American persecuting spirit through Oedipus, Coleman and Clinton. Roth compares this spirit to the germs of disease that exert a fatal influence upon human life. He seems to maintain that the human stain is an attribute, an inherent property of humankind, not easily removed. Most likely he believes that a blind belief in the purity of human nature is nothing but a sweet illusion, a manifestation of folly.