거리의 공동체: 호레이쇼 앨저의 『래기드 딕』에 나타난 사기적 자본주의와 공동체적 비전

A Community on the Street: Fraudulent Capitalism and Communal Vision in Horatio Alger Jr. s Ragged Dick

This paper reads Horatio Alger s Ragged Dick as a tale of community. The mid-nineteenth-century America was plagued by emerging multitudes of confidence men, who prowled the city streets to allure and ruin innocent young men from the country. Far from a marginal figure, however, the confidence man constituted the occluded kernel of plundering capitalism. My first claim is that Ragged Dick aims to recover the centrality of confidence in the moral desert of urban capitalism. My second, and much more important, claim is that Alger presents a sentimental vision of city community, which guarantees secure shelter, emotional stability, and sympathetic altruism, off the trouble of looking sharp to survive in the cut-throat capitalist society, although Alger s community is neither against capitalist protocols nor infinitely inclusive and expansive. In that community, all members are bound less by immanent homogeneity and restrictive collectivity than by the reciprocal obligation to care and the flexible openness to alterity on the anonymous street of New York, even as each strives hard to climb up the precarious social ladder of American capitalism.