사라 워터스의 『 핑거스미스』와 네오 빅토리안 상상력

Abstract

One of the most widely read Neo-Victorian novels published in the twenty-first century, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith displays an intriguing rendition of nineteenth-century British novels. In the effectively created setting à la The Woman in White and Oliver Twist, the novel’s two female protagonists Maud and Sue are cast as a darker Laura Fairlie and a female Oliver Twist, enacting their roles both within and against the plot of Jane Eyre. As the genre’s description, “Neo-Victorian,” clearly indicates the both influences of the new and the Victorian, this essay seeks to outline ways in which those Victorian texts are imitated and revised with a postmodern sensibility, utilizing the trope of “Madwoman in the Attic.” Inspired by Jane Eyre and extensively circulated after the seminal work by Gilbert and Gubar, the figure of madwoman most acutely personifies the conflict between a strictly male-dominated social norm and female resistance and desire for subjectivity in the literary imagination of the nineteenth century and thereafter. Placed on the opposite ends of the spectrum regarding literacy, Maud and Sue are figuratively incarcerated in a male literary system of one’s uncle’s library and in illiteracy nurtured by the other’s surrogate mother respectively. Reading the mutually intertwined plots of Maud, Sue, and their biological and symbolic mothers, this essay discusses the power of women’s literacy in association with the fear and stigma of madness, material reality, and women’s homoerotic desire, while exploring the influences of Neo-Victorian imaginations and revisions of Victorian novels. Although the trope of madwoman is used to suppress the female desire for agency, Sue and Maud’s separate adventures ultimately debunk the fiction of women’s madness. As female homosexuals born illegitimately, they are at the margins of Victorian history but become subjects of a novel in the genre that valorizes difference and diversity.