실버포크 소설의 젠더적 기능—여성 재현을 중심으로

Function of Gender in Silver Fork Fiction: Focusing on the Representation of Women

Silver Fork novels achieved enormous popularity in the 1820s and 30s, providing a view into what the aristocracy really did with their time and money and thus correcting the deficiency in knowledge of the upper-class lifestyle among the middle class. This paper examines the representation of women in Silver Fork novels by Theodore Hook, Robert Plumer Ward, Lady Blessington, Frances Gore and aims to explore the function of gender in this particular genre. It argues that, despite their contribution to the opening and extending a new territory for women to write and publish novels, the Silver Fork novels support and reinforce established gender norms rather than challenge and question them. Silver Fork fiction reveals gender submission and regression by associating femininity with vanity, jealousy, and greed, and representing women as contesters in conspicuous consumption and then executors of the mechanism of hierarchy and exclusion.