영국인 정체성 형성 기제에 드러난 민족주의의 증상과 불안

The Impossibility of the British Identity Formation Mechanism in The Secret Agent and The Thirty-Nine Steps

This article examines how the anxiety and symptom of the British imperial century are exposed in the early spy novels published in Britain during the early 1900's. In The Secret Agent (1907) and The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Joseph Conrad and John Buchan describe a defense of the British society to counter the invasion of 'the Other' and foreign enemies. To be specific, both spy novels doubt with paranoia on the contamination of 'Englishness' by depicting the enemies as monstrous figures. However, a defense enervates and turns out an impossible project since it is difficult to set up a boundary which distinguishes between the British self and the Other. Thus, the anxiety that haunts both texts is not a fear of the Other but a fear of the same; and these espionage activities between the First World countries actually connect rather than divide Britain and its rival Europe. The European male rivals cause a fear to a British male protagonist with camouflages in both spy novels. The class, gender, racial Other who can not be identified with the British male counterpart in both texts are erased and silenced in the other dark side of the texts, exposing the impossibility of British identity formation mechanism.