「바라죠프 백작부인」 속 올컷이 재건한 미국 재건시대

초록

Louisa May Alcott’s literary life is one very exciting and thrilling suspense of its own. Her initial reputation as ‘the children’s friend’ came from one of the all-time favorites in English literature, Little Women. That reputation underwent a surprisingly shocking turn when her anonymous and pseudonymous publication of blood-and-thunder stories were discovered by Leona Rostenberg. The discovery soon paved the ground for rediscovering Alcott as one of the leading feminist writers of 19th-century America. Though a huge contribution to enriching Alcott studies as well as women’s studies, her rediscovery as such has seriously thwarted many other non-feminist approaches to her stories. This essay intends to widen the ground in Alcott scholarship by proposing to read her stories in a historicized way and tracing her unconventional view of the most influential event that happened in her life and career: the Civil War followed by Reconstruction. As much as critical were gender issues at the time, mid- and late-19th-century America was literally and figuratively overwhelmed by the conflict and reunion of the North and the South over slavery. So far, the history of the war and reconciliation has been recorded in favor of the North, who were to abolish racial discrimination in opposition of anachronistic Southern planters. Yet a recent generation of historians launched on rewriting it with equal consideration of the Southern causes while decentralizing racial issues from the position of the primary reason of the war as the North used to insist. This essay places Alcott’s much-overlooked story, “Countess Varazoff,” in relation with that rewriting and shows how Alcott the Northerner tries to look at the American policies of Reconstruction as a set of the North-directing imperialist projects of colonizing the South in that story. Alcott’s representation of the Polish countess’s persisting resistance to the despotic possessiveness of the Russian prince in “Countess Varazoff” turns out to be a call for unbiased and objective acceptance of differences within one nation of ‘democratic’ America.

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