『나는 전설이다』속 ‘명백한 가정성’의 전설화

초록

This essay reads Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend anew in light of what Amy Kaplan terms “Manifest Domesticity” in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. It departs significantly from previous criticisms by rejecting their interpretation of Robert Neville’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world as an effort to preserve his status as the last man on earth—an interpretation largely driven by the cinematic adaptations of the novel. The essay instead proposes reconsidering this struggle as a striving not just for self-preservation but also for self-extension. To validate this proposal, it explores how Neville’s manner of keeping his ‘house’ reflects the persistence of the 19th-century American view of the house as a ‘home’ designed to generate power to tame and regulate the alien, thereby expanding the nation’s borders and realizing Manifest Destiny. Close attention is given to the ways Neville’s obsession with homemaking aligns with his endeavor to cure and normalize vampires—rather than simply antagonizing and killing them—so as to further expand his domain. Such attention in turn explains why Neville’s domesticity-reliant self-extension is destined to fail by the end of the novel. His imprisonment and execution by a society of self-cured vampires, and his subsequent subsumption into that society’s “legend,” reveal the existence of competing versions of domesticity pursuing one and the same goal of self-extension. That revelation at last sheds light on Matheson’s forewarning of a future in which the United States in particular, and the contemporary world under the sway of its perpetual imperialist expansionism as a whole, are unable to settle down in any home but are doomed to wander in search of one in vain.

키워드