자민족중심주의에서 문화적 혼종으로: 조지 엘리엇의 『미들마치』와 영국성의 재구성

초록

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Englishness and English culture seem to be disparaged by the miscegenation of Dorothea Brook, an English lady, and Will Ladislaw, “a dangerously mixed blood” of Englishman and Pole, and rumored to be of Jew and Gypsy, and, as a result, branded as “a queer genealogy” by ethnocentric “Middlemarch tribes.” But Dorothea revolts against English ethnocentrism represented by her first husband Edward Casaubon, a dark, sick, incommunicable, insular, and narrow-minded English scholar and embraces cultural hybridity represented by her second husband Will, a bright, vital, open, and sympathetic cosmopolitan bohemian. Eliot’s dealing of Will is different from that of other Victorian writers’ racial others such as Brontë’s Bertha, a Creole, Dickens’s Fagin, a Jew, and Thackeray’s Rhoda, a mulatto, who are eliminated or excluded in the texts to reestablish superior Englishness and English culture. Nonetheless, Eliot doesn’t negate Englishness. Rather, by embracing cultural hybridity, she proposes her grand vision to expand and reconstruct Englishness in the age of English reform around 1830s.

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