「축혼가」를 통해서 본 G. M. 홉킨스의 성(sexuality)과 빅토리아시대 소년기

Victorian Boyhood and G. M. Hopkins’s Sexuality in “Epithalamion”

This paper analyzes Hopkins’s sexuality in “Epithalamion,” a wedding song, in the context of the Victorian discourse of boyhood. The main imagery in this text, presents a man, secretly watching naked, bathing boys, and those boys, innocently enjoying their bathing. Not appropriate for a celebration of conjugal love, this poem has often been regarded as revealing his repressed homosexual or even pedophilic desires. Hopkins makes no poetic attempt to blur the boundary between his world and that of the boys while invoking nostalgia in his portrayals of healthy boys in “Epithalamion.” Firmly ingrained in Victorian ideas of boyish innocence and health, he presents a text in which boys are understood as active, courageous, and good at sports. In this context, this paper argues that Hopkins’s voyeurism revealed in his poems is not a mark of scandalous desire for boys, but an acceptable Victorian view of boyhood.