감성적 개인주의와 가정의 정치학

• 영문명: Affective Individualism and the Politics of Domesticity:On Harriet Beecher Stow's Uncle Tom's Cabin
• 발행기관: 한국비평이론학회
• 저자명: 이명호(Myungho Lee)
• 간행물 정보: 『비평과 이론』제14권 1호, 103~135쪽, 전체 33쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2009.06.30

영문 초록

This paper attempts to read Harriet Beecher Stow's Uncle Tom's Cabin in the context of the domestic discourse in the early and mis-nineteenth century America. Critically reviewing the famous 'Tompkins-Douglass debate' and its revision by recent feminist scholars such as Laura Wexler, Amy Caplan, Gillian Brown, and Elizabeth Barnes, I attempt to make a more complex and balanced evaluation of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the domestic ideology on which the novel is based. Drawing on Nancy Armstrong's claim that the middle-class domestic woman in modern western society contributed to constructing a modern subject who represents an individual's values in terms of its inner emotional qualities rather than outer economic and status system, I argue that the domestic women in Uncle Tom's cabin demand their right "to feel right" and succeed in changing the unjust social system of slavery. They develop a maternal ethics in which motherly love and sympathy for others are the guiding principle for social as well as family relationship. The idea of "sentimental possession" in which the subject's emotional intimacy and sympathetic identification with objects are important functions as a powerful morality for criticizing slavery based on the masculine and capitalistic idea of "market possession" Despite its positive role in abolitionist movement, however, I conclude, the ethics of sympathy fails to provide a convincing ethical ground that the subject is responsible for racial others because it is trapped in the identificatory logic in which others are assimilated into the subject.

키워드

가정성 개인주의 윤리 동일시 모성적 사랑 시장경제 인종주의 감정적 소유 공감 domesticity individualism ethics identification maternal love market economy racism sentimental possession sympathy