월간지 소설 형식으로서의 증기선 여행: 헨리 제임스의 ｢파타고니아 호｣

Abstract

This paper offers a critical formalist reading of Henry James’s novella “The Patagonia” in order to emphasize the historical-formal condition that the magazine serialization exerted on certain late-nineteenth-century fiction, particularly that of Henry James. This condition allowed works of fiction in this period a unique type of “performative unity” in its construction of a new sociality, an act which the recent “New Formalists” would advocate. The steamship travel featured in “The Patagonia” works effectively as a formal trope for the monthly magazine fiction—especially for the cheaper monthlies that emerged in the 1880s—which sets a rhythm of reading in its monthly publication and has certain socioeconomic implications. “The Patagonia” appeared in two parts in the six-penny English Illustrated Magazine that was established in 1883 by the prestigious publisher Macmillan and Company in order to attract the expanding “mass” readership. In the novella, the transatlantic steamship Patagonia is presented as slow and spacious, like the old Shilling monthlies, but its time-space allows expectations for dramatic cross-class encounters and the more sensational events that result from them. Its heroine, who chooses to die by drowning herself in the sea, however, exposes the fact that the ship’s and the novella’s destined pace is the result of the contest only among the middle class, whose differentiation has created competing desires for different paces and types of leisure and storytelling. Those who are unable to afford that pace, or social time, are also excluded from its representation. The steamship travel in “The Patagonia” not only provides an instance for the spatiotemporal organization of the narrative but also does so in a way that reveals the external world of the time-space regime that the narrative constructs.