This essay aims to examine the racial implications of "William Wilson" (1839) by scrutinizing the tale's representation of slavery within the context of the 1830s discourse on Abolition. The master-slave relationship has been the central concern of those scholars who have attempted to historicize Poe as an antebellum Southerner haunted by racial anxiety. Strangely, however, Poe's most representative story of doppelgiinger has hitherto escaped concerted critical attention and is still regarded as a comparatively "clean" text despite its explicitly racial rhetoric of subversion. As "the master of [his] own actions," William Wilson establishes his voice as "a household law"; after being challenged by the "rebellion" of his double/conscience, he resolves in vain that he "would submit no longer to be enslaved" only to miserably confess that he has been "the slave of circumstances." The tale's peculiar subversiveness is carried out through gradual nullification of a despotic law/will by the constant interposition of an admonishing conscience. From this perspective Wilson's internal dissension may be read, allegorically, as a parallel to the 1830s arguments over slavery that came to assume an unequivocally moralistic tone. According to historian Gerald Sorin, until about 1837, abolitionists agreed that "moral suasion" in the form of powerful appeals to conscience was the best avenue to bring about the destruction of what they called the South's "legalized system of licentiousness." Forcing his schoolmates into submission to his "arbitrary dictation," Wilson brags about having "the despotism of a master mind"; he relishes "a profligacy that set at defiance the laws" while it "elud[es] the vigilance of the institution." Wilson, in short, not only "embodies the ferocity and chaos of popular sensationalism" as David S. Reynolds suggests in Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), but also evinces the "licentious" traits of the sensationalistic stereotype of the Southern master that was prevailing in the antislavery discourse of the decade. The nightmarish rebellion of the conscience is performed through "sarcastic imitation" of Wilson's dress, gait, manner, and voice solely to demonstrate his "equality" with the latter along with "the masterly air of the copyist." It should be noted, as Debbie Lee demonstrates in Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002), that in colonial discourse the revolting monkey/slave's subversive gesture of "mock-mimicry" not only often triggers the white master's arbitrary violence but also at times spasmodically exposes his repressed racial guilt. Technically, it is quite reasonable that Wilson's "singular namesake" holds an inalienable right to become the master of his own actions; since Wilson had been, from his earliest childhood, the master "in all but name," By the same token, the double's voice assumes the legal authority of "a household law" the moment Wilson recognizes the way in which it has completely merged with his own. The story's idiosyncratic subversion of the master-slave relationship epitomizes the slave's gradual acquisition of personal autonomy by means of "the voice of conscience" that validates the claim of legal equality between master and slave. Duff Green, editor of the United States Telegraph, wrote in 1836: "It is only by alarming the consciences of the weak and feeble, and diffusing among our own people a morbid sensibility on the question of slavery, that the abolitionists can accomplish their object." If, as Joan Dayan maintains in "Poe, Persons, and Property" (1999), Poe was "ultimately concerned with the law,"

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

抄録全体を表示

In his theory of fiction, Henry James claims that the artist must draw the material from what he/she sees in "life." As is clarified in his literary quarrel with H. G. Wells, James employs the term "art" to refer to "every conscious human activity." Since life itself is nothing more than "all inclusion and confusion" and art is re/presentation of "life," art is derived from the most fundamental conscious activity, which is, according to James, seeing. James, however, cannot be regarded as a subjectivist, like his contemporary aesthetes. Rather, as his metaphor of "the house of fiction" clearly shows, he is an intersubjectivist, who assumes that others see the world in their subjective ways. Seeing is the essential subject of James's works. In his "international" works, the protagonist who sees the world subjectively collides with others who see the world differently. He/she learns that the world is not as it seems to him/her and that he/she is also seen by others. The typical plot of these tales centers on the story of "how one cannot see." James's "supernatural" tales also narrate the story of "how one can see." In these tales, the ghosts bear a similarity in a way to those who see and look back at them. They appear as the alter egos of those who see, and they suggest an alternative way of seeing the world. Most of James's "supernatural" tales are written after 1890, when supernatural fictions achieved certain popularity against the background of flourishing spiritualism. Since spiritualism can be related to colonies under the circumstance of imperialism-as we find out the prominent example of Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society-supernatural tales in the late Victorian period have an affinity with colonies. Fredric Jameson argues that the spatial disjunction between the home country and the colonies invests the latter with otherness within the empire, and in consequence of a representational strategy, the colonized otherness becomes invisible. The colonized other, then, easily transgresses the boundary between the home country and the colony as invisible "ghosts." Their apparition in "Imperial Gothic" stories, following Patrick Brantlinger's categorization, expresses anxieties about weakening of imperial hegemony. The ghosts in "Imperial Gothic" represent the colonized otherness and seeing the ghosts symbolically implies the disruption of imperial order. "The Turn of the Screw" epitomizes imperial order and the disruption of it. There is a hierarchy in the household in Bly, and the distance and indifference of Harley Street transforms it into an approximation of imperial order, where the governess by proxy for the employer dominates everyone else as the governor of their "small colony." The ghosts disrupt her governance by transgressing class boundary. It should not be overlooked that what the governess is afraid of is not the ghosts themselves but their incitement of Miles to claim the "title for independence" and to "strike for freedom," which is unmistakably followed by "the revolution." While the ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw" thus represent the colonized otherness, they are the alter egos of the governess. They embody the way of seeing the world differently from the imperialistic view, and she is disturbed not only as an imperial subject but also as an epistemological subject. It is fruitful to consider the connection between these two kinds of subject in order to see what is not seen in James's works.

抄録全体を表示

The question of racial blackness in white writers' works, which is still a moot point in the field of literary studies, arises when we consider William Faulkner's description of Reverend Shegog's sermon in The Sound and the Fury. Though some critics argue that the representation of black speech and accent assumes the character of Afro-American traditional counter-culture, it holds the possibility of arousing criticism for the white artist's appropriation of black linguistics. With this problem in mind, John N. Duvall evaluates Faulkner's use of the figures of racial blackness as markers of white writers' embodiment of "blackness" that afford a critical clue to the question of whiteness. According to Duvall, Faulkner figuratively becomes black in search for his artistic identity as he writes his main male characters as "black Caucasians," men who are racially white but embody the quality of racial blackness. In this view, Shegog, as well as Faulkner's "black" white men, figures the possibility of "an artistic identity that is black." This paper aims to examine the question of these conflicting critical attitudes toward Faulkner's "blackness" by reading racial connotations into Benjy Compson and his inability to speak. In the first section of the novel, Benjy assumes the image of black masculinity when his yearning for Caddy is implied with the episodes concerning his verbal difficulties. When he remembers the day of his sister's loss of virginity, Benjy tries to avoid the anguishing memory by performing the imaginary play of incestuous miscegenation. The association between the white man-child and the black conjurer is established by the fact that Benjy is mentally handicapped and unable to speak. His verbal inability and incestual yearning for Caddy take another shape of racial blackness when he is castrated after he was "trying to say." Suspected of sexual assault, the white man with the mental age of a three-years-old child embodies the racial stereotypes of "black rapist" and submissive and childish "Sambo." In addition, castration serves to elicit the patriarchal nature of the white South that caused feminization of black male southerners. What allows us to read Benjy as a "black Caucasian," however, turns into markers of his whiteness when he is juxtaposed with black characters in the fourth section. A conversation between Dilsey and Frony indicates that Benjy is alienated from the white community due to his "black" qualities but cannot wholly assimilate into the black community due to the fact that he is a white. The vague description of Benjy's response to Shegog's sermon makes it ambiguous how deeply he gets immersed in both the power of his linguistic performance and the wordless communication to which it leads the black congregation. The nature of Benjy's whiteness can be also found in his final cry, which represents the difficulties of articulating the inbetween character of his racial status. Benjy's inbetween whiteness leads us to examine the racial aspect of Faulkner's artistry that is neither appropriation of racial blackness nor dependence on ambiguous blackness. It is based on the history of racial division and his creative imagination with self-critical reference to its own whiteness.

抄録全体を表示