정상성의 생명정치 : 윌리엄 워즈워스의 『서곡』 다시 읽기 = Reimagining Natural Man: The Biopolitics of Normativity in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines William Wordsworth’s critique of normativity in the context of emerging biopolitics in Romantic-era Britain. In The Prelude, Wordsworth criticizes what can be called a “biopolitical” attempt to normalize the able body by investigating the problems of embodied subjectivity. If emerging biopower in the late eighteenth century operates to control populations to maximize their labor force, as Michel Foucault suggests, it does so by distinguishing between those who can perform simple, mechanical labor and those who cannot, and by defining the former (so-called the “able-bodied”) as normal and the latter (the “disabled-bodied”) as abnormal. I argue that Wordsworth’s The Prelude provides critical insights into the bodily subject that biopower seeks to normalize, demonstrating its potentials and limits through his depiction of natural man. In this autobiographical poem, Wordsworth portrays above all the poet himself as a natural man in an ambivalent or “paradoxical” sense: he is described to oscillate between two contrary states, between a simple natural creature reduced to its physicality and a full-fledged, human subject capable of thinking. Wordsworth registers this ambivalence of the natural man as such when he describes his alter-ego, the Boy of Winander, in Book 5. This wild boy running around in the mountains appears to be an animalistic existence like Wordsworth’s own childhood self, and yet he somehow develops self-consciousness, albeit only temporarily. Moreover, Wordsworth attributes the natural man’s self-transformative power to his body, especially to its affective capacity. As he traces the “growth of the poet’s mind,” Wordsworth becomes the Poet, an individual with exceptional sensibility and intelligence, by readjusting his relationship to his own body. He illustrates this corporeal aspect of his “growth”in his visions after the ascent of Mount Snowdon in Book 13. Once the “naked savage,” Wordsworth now (re)gains a capacity for thinking by reinforcing the body’s affective capacity, or what he terms Imagination: a power for producing a self-reflective feeling. In portraying natural man in The Prelude, Wordsworth then rethinks the normative body in the age of biopolitics: it resides within a spectrum that oscillates between a living body and a thinking body.

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