Sugar, Fantasy, and Construction of Self in George Eliot`s “Brother Jacob”

( Younghee Kho ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2016 근대 영미소설 Vol.23 No.2

This essay examines the ways in which the colonial fantasies evoked by sugar help construct British selves in the mid-nineteenth-century Britain portrayed in “Brother Jacob.” As a precious item only the privileged had access to, sugar was one of the Empire’s major motivations for expanding and maintaining its colonies. As its price dropped over time, however, this commodity became much more common. Such a tendency reached a climax in 1850 when the lower classes began to consume more sugar than the higher classes did. Attached to the growing consumption of the lower class were colonial fantasies that by consuming this food item, one could raise one’s social status to that of a colonial hero. Once inspired by this fantasy but failing to realize it in the West Indies, David Faux induces and spreads similar fantasies through his confectionery shop. The sugar products he sells influence Grimworth’s people in their imaginative formation of selves. When they encounter the colonial realities, however, they expel David from the community. This is their psychic strategy in the hope of maintaining their fantasies and protecting their selves. The didactic and all-is-well ending of “Brother Jacob” conceals a capitalist desire of the people, a desire that has already become part of their selves.

Life Under Fetters: Trevor’s “The Potato Dealer” and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”

Younghee Kho 한국동서비교문학학회 2020 동서 비교문학저널 Vol.0 No.54

This paper attempts to read William Trevor’s contemporary story “The Potato Dealer” historically. In particular, this paper argues that Trevor develops his story with the Great Famine and its repercussion in mind, and that it presents its protagonist Mulreavy as a modern-day Irish peasant, participating in the long history of literary and cultural representation of the peasant. For the job, the paper resorts to Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “The Great Hunger,” as its hero Maguire’s unheroic single life helps explain Mulreavy’s inexplicable renunciation of his sexual desire in marriage. Kavanagh’s poem shows the gradual process of his protagonist’s acceptance of celibacy due to overwhelming poverty and religious doctrine, circumstances under which Trevor’s protagonist is also victimized. Indeed, Mulreavy’s chronic helplessness attests to his traumatized condition as the one unable to escape from the aftermath of the Famine. In fact, Trevor makes it clear that Mulreavy is not an impassive character. When Eliie’s child’s real fatherhood is publicly spread, he suffers from the strong sense of disgrace. However, the marriage he contracted becomes the fetters under which he has to live a sexually and emotionally denied life.

“Your leg will stand it?”: One-legged Man`s Transgression in Treasure Island and The Sign of Four

( Younghee Kho ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2015 근대 영미소설 Vol.22 No.3

This paper explores the ways in which transgressive masculinity is represented in the damaged male bodies of Long John Silver in Robert Lois Stevenson`s Treasure Island and of Jonathan Small in Arthur Conan Doyle`s The Sign of Four. Doyle, who evidently had the crippled Silver in his mind when he created Jonathan Small, used him to rearticulate and elaborate the degenerated morality and masculinity. Among Britons, there was increasing concern about degeneration, an upshot of the military and economic difficulties the British Empire experienced in the mid-nineteenth century. The nation felt that its power ought to be reasserted, a project that inevitably attends a recuperating morality and masculinity. Out of such a milieu, Doyle and Stevenson create not only morally sound characters, such as Sherlock Holmes who represents the ideal of Victorian masculinity, but also their antitheses such as Silver and Small. The latters` lameness signifies more than a lack of morality; it embodies criminality itself. Silver and Small`s villainy and its inevitable outcome are expressed through their prostheses. A symbol of their failed masculinity, the artificial leg turns into a murderous tool, and ultimately, ensures their defeat. Tracking down these criminals thus coincides with the project of rehabilitating masculinity in Treasure Island and The Sign of Four. Even when Silver and Small are captured and the treasure found, however, the problem of masculinity remains unresolved. The problem is, like the disappeared Silver or Watson`s free-floating wound, always there to reappear and trouble what is imagined to be normative masculinity of the times.

“her figure defined by light”: An Analysis of Light and Music in James Joyce’s “Araby” and Dennis Courtney’s Araby

( Younghee Kho ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2020 제임스조이스저널 Vol.26 No.1

This essay explores how light and music are deployed in Joyce’s “Araby” and its film adaptation Araby by Dennis Courtney. In Joyce’s short story, both light and music are utilized in order to heighten the boy’s enchantment with Mangan’s sister and his subsequent disillusion. The lights that illuminate her on the stairs, for example, blind the boy to her real person and desire, causing him to perceive her only as an object for his own desire. Meanwhile, references to music in “Araby” reveal how the boy interacts with the world. According to Hass, music in Dubliners not only helps define the reality, but also has the characters transcend reality and reveal themselves. Jok, on the other hand, explores music and musicality within Joyce’s language. In adapting “Araby” into his short film, Courtney seems to be aware of the role of light and music. This essay thus argues that he skillfully adopts such cinematic techniques as lighting, music, and other sound effects in order to deliver and enhance the theme of the story, thereby narrating how the boy romanticizes his love, experiences discord with reality, and ultimately faces the moment of disillusionment more effectively than any storytelling does.

Challenging Conventions

Younghee Kho 19세기영어권문학회 2015 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.19 No.2

Focusing on the character of Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy`s The Return of the Native, I trace the ways in trace the ways in which the author explores visual potentials of cinema in order to move beyond the limits of the social and literary conventions of his days. More specifically, I argue Eustacia`s attempt to escape from the oppressive reality to women parallels with her creator`s attempt to overcome the established convention and aesthetics of Victorian novel construction, Along with the crities who dub Hardy a cinematic novelist, I see cinematic techniques and experiments as a core quality that defines the novelist and his works. Embodying such a quality, Eustacia is at the center of Hardy`s visual experiment. Unlike other characters, she is introduced as a film actress and remains the main object of gaze throughout the novel. That unequal power relationship, implied in the term gaze, is mostly felt in the form of the primitiveness of the Egdon Heath to Eustacia. Being a woman, she is not able to move out from the heath unless she finds a man who can take her to another place. Believing Clym is such a man, Eustacia disguises herself as Turkish Knight for a murmur and attempts to take a glimpse at Clym, an attempt to steal male gaze and assume its symbolical power. Yet, as the role of the Turkish Knight (the one that was ultimately defeated by St. George) illuminates, her attempt ultimately fails, and Eustacia helplessly remains in the same social structure. Though succeeding in marrying Clym, the marriage further mires her into the oppressive reality as she is tied to the man half-blinded and unable to move anywhere. Her revolt is further punished as she meets death in the end. Hardy`s revolt to the literary convention, however, receives not the same result; his cinematic experiments become a source for the enduring power of the novel.

Representations of Criminality in the Opening Mise-en-Scenes of Great Expectations

Younghee Kho 19세기영어권문학회 2019 19세기 영어권 문학 Vol.23 No.1

This paper attempts to compare and contrast the opening chapters of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) with the mise-en-scènes of its recent film adaptations, Mike Newell’s BBC version (2012) and Alfonso Cuarón’s American version (1998). The paper chooses the opening scenes, assuming that Pip’s encounter with Magwitch in these scenes reveal crime and criminality as an inevitable condition for human existence. Because of this encounter, Pip is forced not only to commit misdemeanors that continually rouse his feeling of guilt, but also to accept Magwitch as his father figure. Against his or her intention or will, Dickens seems to suggest, one cannot avoid being criminalized as long as one is born and lives. However, this idea is lost in adapting the novel into both films. In order to understand how the idea is vanished and what its consequence are, this paper attempts to take a close look at the mise-en-scènes of each work. Mise-en-scène, signifying anything put into a camera frame to produce particular impressions, is a useful means to trace the differences the films make. The combined use of Dickens’s autodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives in the early chapters is reformulated in the cinematic techniques the directors employ: while Newell’s film restrains itself adopting Pip’s autodiegetic view and tries to establish its own heterodiegetic one, Cuarón’s film makes it explicit that the audience sees the world through Finn’s subjective viewpoint. Paying attention to such difference helps us see how the directors builds their works upon the original or diverts from it. The comparison of the mise-en-scènes produces a new perspective from which we can appreciate Dickens’s novel and re-evaluate the adaptations.

The Reclamation of Body in Beloved

Kho, Younghee(고영희) 새한영어영문학회 2016 새한영어영문학 Vol.58 No.4

This paper explores the ways in which reclaiming body is central for former African American slaves to achieve their freedom from the haunting past of slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The subject of motherhood under slavery Morrison chose, in which mother-child relationship deteriorates into the possessive one of slavery, helps us see how serious and ongoing the problem of slavery is. When slave catchers find Sethe and her children, she attempts to kill all of them as if their bodies were owned by her, a consequence of her unconscious internalization of the slave owner’s logic. Morrison reveals the problem of such internalization through Beloved’s claim of her mother’s body. When she returns in the form of a young woman, Sethe becomes almost enslaved by Beloved and her insatiable demands. Their relationship soon degenerates into violence, testifying that they have not yet escaped out of their slaved past, a past thriving and waiting to overwhelm African American lives like “jungle” at any time. The real escape from the past comes when they acknowledge the necessary separation of their bodies. Only with such acknowledgement, Sethe is able to overcome the trauma of the past experiences and to recover from the fragmented body parts to the whole self.

Teleological Narrative and Silence: Anglo-Irish Perception of History in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September

( Younghee Kho ) 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.2

This essay explores the complicated working of silence in the narrative temporality of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. In particular, this essay argues that the moments of Anglo-Irish silence, despite their attempt to freeze real time and suppress the movement of history, syncopate the novel’s ending - the demise of the Anglo-Irish visualized in the conflagration of the Big Houses. Looking back on the tumultuous period of Ireland in the early 1920s, Bowen writes her novel such that the past-ness of the events is self-evident. She could not free herself from the notion of linear and progressive history, as observed in Bowen’s Court as well as The Last September. The novel is thus designed to move toward the anticipated conflagration of the Big Houses in the ending. Such teleological narrative movement, however, is impeded by silence imposed by the Anglo-Irish whenever they need to articulate their identity and political position. The moments of silence in The Last September are those of Anglo-Irish equivocation and evasion, reflecting their deep-seated anxiety and fear of exposing themselves to the outside world. Wrapped in the illusion created by the Big House and living according to the tempo it generates, the Anglo-Irish have, at their peril, remained blind and deaf to the historical reality outside the Big House. This essay traces such social and psychological deadlock Bowen recorded and especially marked through their silence in The Last September. Only with such acknowledgement, she could restore and preserve their way of life in her art.

Capitalism without Brake: Automobilism and Agency in The Great Gatsby

( Younghee Kho ) 한국현대영미소설학회 2018 현대영미소설 Vol.25 No.3

One of the most powerful and enduring symbols of American capitalism is automobile. It transforms the economic and cultural landscape of America in the early twentieth century. It is no coincidence that the narrative of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is closely tied to automobilism, as the narrative depicts a particular phase of capitalism―that of the 1920s. This essay, which examines automobilism in the novel, attempts to reconsider its major topic of human subjectivity. I argue that human agency is limited, if not impossible, under the automotive capitalist system of America. The inability to handle the capitalist system is revealed in the scene where Gatsby and Daisy are unable to stop the car before hitting Myrtle. Myrtle’s death may be seen as an inevitable consequence of America’s capitalist development at breakneck speed. In the novel, the individual attempt to claim human subjectivity is doomed to be futile. All the more so for women, as the crash reveals the circumscribed nature of female subjectivity, for the crash is a culmination of both Daisy and Myrtle’s attempted escapes from patriarchal control. This essay traces such futility by examining characters’ illusory sense of empowerment that is aroused by driving fast, while their identities and their relationships are mediated through cars in consumer society.

Life Under Fetters: Trevor’s “The Potato Dealer” and Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger”

Kho, Younghee 미래영어영문학회 2020 미래영어영문학회 학술대회 자료집 Vol.2020 No.12