「어떤 오래된 옷의 로맨스」에 나타난 헨리 제임스의 미국 남북 서사

초록

Henry James is reputed for his career-long dedication to the so-called ‘international theme.’ Such reputation has obscured many other sides of James’s literary performance, among which his interest in, and concern about, Americanness per se should be counted. That obscuring is most patent when it comes to his earliest short stories. Unlike his cosmopolitan and even transnational novels in the later phases of his career, James’s short stories in the 1860s have long been neglected for featuring too narrowly American subjects like the Civil War and devalued as immature novelistic attempts. Rejecting that neglect and devaluing, this paper proposes to reconsider James’s attention to the Civil War as the groundwork for his much bigger and deeper vision of the history of America as a whole. The paper examines one of his earliest works, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” as a historical allegory of how America had repeated the same mistake of overlooking irreconcilable differences within the nation, that is, between the North and the South, from the Colonial era till the postbellum period. The paper in fine argues for James’s genuine and serious caring about America as a truly unique polity full of disparate diversities.

키워드