「ウィリアム・ウィルソン」における奴隷制表象と1830年代政治言説
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概要
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This essay aims to examine the racial implications of "William Wilson" (1839) by scrutinizing the tale's representation of slavery within the context of the 1830s discourse on Abolition. The master-slave relationship has been the central concern of those scholars who have attempted to historicize Poe as an antebellum Southerner haunted by racial anxiety. Strangely, however, Poe's most representative story of doppelgiinger has hitherto escaped concerted critical attention and is still regarded as a comparatively "clean" text despite its explicitly racial rhetoric of subversion. As "the master of [his] own actions," William Wilson establishes his voice as "a household law"; after being challenged by the "rebellion" of his double/conscience, he resolves in vain that he "would submit no longer to be enslaved" only to miserably confess that he has been "the slave of circumstances." The tale's peculiar subversiveness is carried out through gradual nullification of a despotic law/will by the constant interposition of an admonishing conscience. From this perspective Wilson's internal dissension may be read, allegorically, as a parallel to the 1830s arguments over slavery that came to assume an unequivocally moralistic tone. According to historian Gerald Sorin, until about 1837, abolitionists agreed that "moral suasion" in the form of powerful appeals to conscience was the best avenue to bring about the destruction of what they called the South's "legalized system of licentiousness." Forcing his schoolmates into submission to his "arbitrary dictation," Wilson brags about having "the despotism of a master mind"; he relishes "a profligacy that set at defiance the laws" while it "elud[es] the vigilance of the institution." Wilson, in short, not only "embodies the ferocity and chaos of popular sensationalism" as David S. Reynolds suggests in Beneath the American Renaissance (1988), but also evinces the "licentious" traits of the sensationalistic stereotype of the Southern master that was prevailing in the antislavery discourse of the decade. The nightmarish rebellion of the conscience is performed through "sarcastic imitation" of Wilson's dress, gait, manner, and voice solely to demonstrate his "equality" with the latter along with "the masterly air of the copyist." It should be noted, as Debbie Lee demonstrates in Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (2002), that in colonial discourse the revolting monkey/slave's subversive gesture of "mock-mimicry" not only often triggers the white master's arbitrary violence but also at times spasmodically exposes his repressed racial guilt. Technically, it is quite reasonable that Wilson's "singular namesake" holds an inalienable right to become the master of his own actions; since Wilson had been, from his earliest childhood, the master "in all but name," By the same token, the double's voice assumes the legal authority of "a household law" the moment Wilson recognizes the way in which it has completely merged with his own. The story's idiosyncratic subversion of the master-slave relationship epitomizes the slave's gradual acquisition of personal autonomy by means of "the voice of conscience" that validates the claim of legal equality between master and slave. Duff Green, editor of the United States Telegraph, wrote in 1836: "It is only by alarming the consciences of the weak and feeble, and diffusing among our own people a morbid sensibility on the question of slavery, that the abolitionists can accomplish their object." If, as Joan Dayan maintains in "Poe, Persons, and Property" (1999), Poe was "ultimately concerned with the law," and the black slave was virtually a "creature of law," the legitimacy and legality of Wilson's conscience's "rebellion" can be reconsidered within the historical context of Abolitionism along with Poe's own apocalyptic vision of democratic history as likely to culminate in an overwhelming victory of, and consequent retribution by, the black people over their white masters.
- 日本アメリカ文学会の論文
- 2011-03-31