흑인 유령의 상품화

• 영문명: The Commodification of a Black Ghost: Reading King's Bag of Bones with Morrison's Beloved
• 발행기관: 한국아메리카학회
• 저자명: 박재영(Jai Young Park)
• 간행물 정보: 『미국학논집』제45집 1호, 59~77쪽, 전체 18쪽
• 주제분류: 인문학 > 기타인문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2013.05.31

영문 초록

In Bag of Bones, Stephen King creates a black ghost to unfold a provocative plot of revenge, horror, rape, and murder. Sara, a blues singer, is raped and murdered by a white racist gang in 1901, who also drowns her son to death at the same time. The ghost Sara possessed by "the Outsider" curses the rapists to kill their own children. However, King's creation of the black female ghost is problematic because it presents restrained and biased perspectives of black women and reiterates stereotypes of them in a society and culture where the inferiority of black people prevails. The Outsider proves to be a mere superficial label for the Other, subaltern, and the marginalized. The description of rape is too simple and monolithic and it fails to portray the complexity of the tragic incident of black women in context of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Worse, the rape is depicted sensually and voyeuristically enough to possibly hinder the manifestation of the victim's agony, pain, and trauma from the reader. As a result, the fiction becomes quite appealing to the reader while sacrificing the truth of racial conflict and simplifying the struggles of African Americans. It appears as if King used a racial subject for the popularity of his novel. In order to expose the commodification of a black ghost in Bag of Bones, this essay compares the novel with a traditional African American ghost story, Toni Morrison's Beloved. It investigates the dissimilarities in the presentation of ghosts in the two novels and explicates the significance of them.

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인용문헌

Abstract

키워드

Stephen King Bag of Bones Toni Morrison Beloved Ghost