계급의 여성화?: 『마그렛 하우스』와 『명목상의 동업자』에 나타나는 소외와 개혁

초록

This paper attempts to examine how the issue of class, intermixed with the issue of gender and race, is represented in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Margret Howth(1862) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner(1871). As middle-class woman writer, Davis and Phelps delineate how excruciating the conditions of lower-class factory workers were in the age of industrialization in 19th-century America, and grapples with the issue of how to resolve and reform the problems caused by alienated labor and class antagonisms. Both writers dramatize a story in which the middle-class female protagonist gets involved with the life of lower-class factory workers. Margret Howth in Margret Howth is forced to work in the factory in order to support herself and her family, while Perley Kelso in The Silent Partner is motivated to participate in the factory management after her father's sudden decease. The ending in which Margret does not take the job of a social reformer but chooses to become a wife has invoked critics to conclude that the work is “feminized.” However, the ironic stance of the narrator distorts the effect of the seemingly happy ending. Also, Davis provides Lois Yare, a mulatto factory worker who victimizes herself for others, as a true type of a reformer who envisions a better world. Yet this only emphasizes how the issue of class cannot be easily resolved by a sentimental solution. In contrast, the ending in which Perley rejects two marriage proposals to continue her works shows a thorough reversal of a traditional ending held for women. Phelps opens up a possibility that a woman, as an independent being, can play a major role in reforming social problems caused by class differences. She also suggests that there is potential for female bonding based on a sensible awareness of class differences. Davis and Phelps are significant in emphasizing woman's part in resolving the serious issue of class, earlier and more forcibly than other writers of their day.

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