초기 미국소설에 나타난 파행적 가정성: 『샬롯 템플』에 그려진 유혹과 좌절된 결혼

초록

Given that ideal marriage and home were represented as a trope for the ideal state of the nation in the early American Republic, it is notable that three representative early American novels, The Power of Sympathy, Charlotte Temple, and The Coquette, dramatize a frustrating process in which the heroine is seduced, betrayed, deserted and finally dies, her marriage thwarted and unconsummated. This paper attempts to locate the symbolic function of seduction, incest and thwarted marriages in view of the paradox underlying the Republican Ideology of the nation in its nascent phase, focusing on Charlotte Temple. Apparently, Charlotte Temple dramatizes a tragic story of seduction in which a helplessly victimized heroine is to be punished for her desertion from parental guidance and familial nexus. As such, it functions as a cautionary tale for young female readers who will be Republican wives and mothers in the next generation. On the other hand, the work emphasizes the limitations of the role prescribed for women by the dominant discourse in the new nation. Yet the story reinforces the need for sealing the ruptures caused by Charlotte's unwarranted rebellion against familial system, with the help of a narrator who evokes and entreats sympathy from readers. Therefore, the novel symbolically emphasize the need to harmonize conflicting and often opposite concerns embedded in the post-Revolutionary America, through sympathy and mourning.

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