제이콥스의 『어느 노예 소녀의 삶에서 있었던 일들』 고딕으로 읽기

The Gothic Reading of Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Traditionally speaking, gothic literature has a very narrow definition. It refers to a distinctive group of works that were produced from the late eighteenth century till the end of the nineteenth century by an equally distinctive group of writers ranging from Horace Walpole to Bram Stoker. It also has a distinctive set of characters, settings, and events that are designed to create a blood-chilling and sensational effect. This narrow definition of the genre has been recently questioned, challenged, and expanded by scholarly attempts to find thematic traces of terror and horror in formally non-gothic texts and to read those traces in light of historical and sociocultural repressions of the undesirable and the uncomfortable across time and space. This essay examines such attempts within the field of American literary studies, which in turn has been trying to (re)locate the basis of American literature in the nation's history of slavery. The essay especially observes how the genre of black women's slave narratives functions as a site where the unconscious yet persistent exclusion of America's dark side happens most thoroughly and where that exclusion is exposed to view most clearly. For this purpose, the essay discusses Harriet Jacobs's modes of representing Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that aim to allow the audience to experience vividly the gothic realities of Southern slaves.