여성의 글쓰기에 대한 남성 작가들의 불안 : 19세기 미국소설 연구

Male Anxiety about Popular Female Writing : A Study of the 19th - Century American Novel

In the 1850s while Hawthorne and Melville were producing their best literary works, a number of women writers were also producing lots of novels. Although most of the latter writers were excluded from the literary criticisms of the canonical American novel that had been published between 1940 and 1970, those women writers had achieved both commercial and critical success by writing domestic or sentimental novels. But their works had been depreciated by the major male critics who had published their major criticisms in the 1950s and 1960s, for the 'sentimentality' of their works. Since 1970s, however, the appearance of such feminist critics as Nina Baym and Jane Tompkins who persuasively supported the women writers' writings by arguing that the domestic/sentimental novel in the mid-nineteenth century had "intellectual complexity" and "subversion" enough to be appreciated as a cultural genre, has divested the male-centered myth of the few canonical male writers. Built on this fact, in this paper I attempt to argue that Hawthorne and Melville were not like modernist artists who surpassed their period in their thinking and were aloof from literary popularity. That is, they were not free from the responses of the literary marketplace in their time as has been rendered in literary history, even though they wanted to appear as such. Rather, it will be shown that Hawthorne and Melville actively responded to receptions from the literary marketplace on their works; and furthermore, that they were awed by the popularity of the contemporary women writers' works and their threatening productivity, and reacted to them very sensitively. Thus, by analyzing the letters and works written by Hawthorne and Melville, I try to find out their sometimes jealous and sometimes overwhelmed responses to the women's writings and the literary marketplace.