린다 호건의 『야비한 정신』에 재현된 민족 정체성과 그에 따른 역사적 인식의 한계

Abstract

Linda Hogan has been criticized for having woven Mean Spirit through the distorted and fictionalized stories of the Osage tribe. However, Hogan should have been criticized, not because she transformed a few historical facts into fictional ones, but because she loosely represented the historical experiences that the Osages endured. In this paper, I will explore the reason Hogan fails to portray the true picture of them for; it is thus impossible to argue that Hogan embodies the complex situations of the time, which the Native Americans faced, throughly enough to properly be the stories of the Native Americans. It is the case, insofar as she concentrates all the attention on depicting two diametrically opposing world views, intentionally placing the novel on the subversive movement of the white world to attach much importance to the traditional way of the Osage life. As such, much obsessed with decentering the hierarchical structure of the Western world, Hogan does nothing but reformulate a move away from the white dominating world with an overemphasized concern about the Native traditions or perhaps ‘indigenousness,’ inadvertently asserting the specific, regional, and fictional place ‘the Hill’ as the center of the Osage tribe. In the process, she cannot extend her intense concern about the hideous feeling ‘fear’ that haunted the Osage people; she cannot mobilize the emotions of the characters sufficiently, which lead to the hidden meanings of racialism. It shows that Hogan is unable to interrogate the inter-dependant relations between the Osage and the white society, and more importantly between the past cultural construct and the ongoing process of creating culture in the present. Hogan’s novel needs to become the stories of Americans including hyphenated ones by questioning the pastness of the historical narrative and bringing their silenced voices to the present. Observed in this view, the scale of past and future possibilities for the creation of interrelated stories cannot be brought out on the basis of a single modality of discourses. Rather, it is the interactions of the stories that enable the readers to see the constant discursive acts as what are themselves dependent on others. However, Mean Spirit is still in a trap of binary opposition, which manifests itself through its failure to make the personal story and history of the Osages the part of their ordinary life, rather romanticized and mystified in the ‘Hill.’