『뉴 아틀란티스』와『로빈슨 크루소』에 나타난 신대륙에 대한 상상력: 식민주의와 유토피아 사용법
The New World Imagined: Colonialism and the Use of Utopia in The New Atlantis and Robinson Crusoe
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I examine in this paper how early modern utopian literature involved European colonial imagination for the New World, and how it has historically evolved into a modern utopian novel by reading Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The New World plays a great role in these texts, which take the South America and the Caribbean Coast as the background of each narrative. The New Atlantis presents the South America, the neighbor country of Bacon's utopian society of Bensalem, as Plato's “great Atlantis.” Notably, however, even though the image of the South America in The New Atlantis is partly overlapped with a legendary continent and that it obliquely reflects European admiration for the newly discovered land, the South America is to be conquered by Bensalem and eventually would degenerate into a land of “simple and savage people.” For Bacon's utopian project embodied in Bensalem lies in building a NEW Atlantis, where formidable and merciless science rules over knowledge, religion, and politics. The purpose of Salomon's House (an authoritative science research institute in Bensalem) to “enlarg[e] the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible” also shows how Bacon's scheme for the predomination of science over humanities, like Thomas More's Utopia is closely related to the imperial conquest of the nature and natives of the New World. While there is a mixture of attraction and contempt about the New World in The New Atlantis and in Robinson Crusoe, a transitional work from utopian literature into the novel, the New World is imagined and represented as an almost entirely naked and savage Other that functions as a sheer object of conquest and transplantation of European culture. The Caribbean desert island in which Crusoe stays for twenty eight years essentially functions as an ‘individual utopia', a space that an individual's desire is met with no rivalry. Even when another human being comes to his ‘individual utopia', the man who is a Caribbean native and would be called Friday would exist only as an extension of Crusoe's aggrandized self. In other words, an individual utopia becomes a ‘colonial utopia' in Defoe's text. Robinson Crusoe manifests how utopian literature, which was initially propelled by a longing for a better community, has been twisted and displaced into an imagination focusing on an individual in the early novel.
Abstract
I examine in this paper how early modern utopian literature involved European colonial imagination for the New World, and how it has historically evolved into a modern utopian novel by reading Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The New World plays a great role in these texts, which take the South America and the Caribbean Coast as the background of each narrative. The New Atlantis presents the South America, the neighbor country of Bacon's utopian society of Bensalem, as Plato's “great Atlantis.” Notably, however, even though the image of the South America in The New Atlantis is partly overlapped with a legendary continent and that it obliquely reflects European admiration for the newly discovered land, the South America is to be conquered by Bensalem and eventually would degenerate into a land of “simple and savage people.” For Bacon's utopian project embodied in Bensalem lies in building a NEW Atlantis, where formidable and merciless science rules over knowledge, religion, and politics. The purpose of Salomon's House (an authoritative science research institute in Bensalem) to “enlarg[e] the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible” also shows how Bacon's scheme for the predomination of science over humanities, like Thomas More's Utopia is closely related to the imperial conquest of the nature and natives of the New World. While there is a mixture of attraction and contempt about the New World in The New Atlantis and in Robinson Crusoe, a transitional work from utopian literature into the novel, the New World is imagined and represented as an almost entirely naked and savage Other that functions as a sheer object of conquest and transplantation of European culture. The Caribbean desert island in which Crusoe stays for twenty eight years essentially functions as an ‘individual utopia', a space that an individual's desire is met with no rivalry. Even when another human being comes to his ‘individual utopia', the man who is a Caribbean native and would be called Friday would exist only as an extension of Crusoe's aggrandized self. In other words, an individual utopia becomes a ‘colonial utopia' in Defoe's text. Robinson Crusoe manifests how utopian literature, which was initially propelled by a longing for a better community, has been twisted and displaced into an imagination focusing on an individual in the early novel.
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