찰스 디킨즈의 『올리버 트위스트』와 빅토르 위고의 『레 미제라블』의 상호텍스트성 분석

Abstract

This article explores two nineteenth-century realistic writers, Charles Dickens from the United Kingdom and Victor Hugo from France and examines their representative works: Oliver Twist and Les Miserables in terms of intersexuality. This article exhibits that Dickens and Hugo knew each other, and Dickens once visited Hugo. In the early stage, Dickens was very interested in portraying a wide range of social problems originated from the industrialization and the modernization, and broadly influenced by Hugo in selecting main ideas and even stylizing his works. But later Dickens and Hugo seemed to influence each other, in particular, in the ways to depict the city life and its dark sides like the life of pauper children in the nineteenth century. Upon the basis of such viewpoints, this article considers that there exists a significant intertextual relationship between Oliver Twist and Les Miserables. Through children and other characters wondering around the City of London and Paris, the audience may compare and contrast one with the other in style and ideas. Dickens and Hugo raised social issues such as vagrant children in the city, and class and gender discriminations. There are however significant differences in the ways to make the audience perceive the needs of social reforms and mobilize them to realize the social reforms. Dickens considered that the gentry class or the bourgeoisie had taken the major role of politics and economy in the United Kingdom, and thus, he expected the top-down style reforms initiated by them. This made Dickens create the good gentry or the good bourgeoisie characters such as Mr. Brownlow and Mrs. Maylie in Oliver Twist. But, Hugo perceived that his mother country France had faced political hardships for almost 50 years, and the people of France had been broadly frustrated and partitioned in chaos. Thus, he created Les Miserables to reunify them from the bottom unlike Dickens.