ユートピア文学の二つのタイプ : TypeeとThe Crater

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タイトル別名
  • TWO UTOPIAN TYPES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE : Typee and The Crater
  • ユートピア ブンガク ノ フタツ ノ タイプ Typee ト The Crater

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抄録

The 1840's in the United States experienced various kinds of Utopian events and movements one after another, as shown in the appended chart prepared by me for this thesis. Among them the Brook Farm experiment was typical, but it failed in 1847, and in the following year the "gold rush" movement to the Far West began. It is at this juncture that Melville's Typee (1846) and J. F. Cooper's The Crater (1847) appeared. Cooper went to sea as a common sailor in 1806 and later was for a while in the navy. Melville too shipped on the whaling ship for the Pacific in 1841, and deserted in the year, next in the Morquesas Islands and lived for some time among the cannibals. In their books mentioned above they both dreamed the blessed isles in the Southern Pacific, talking more or less from their own nautical experiences, but Melville with wild, primitive fantasy, and Cooper with a social critic's irony. Tom in Typee escapes from his ship to the "Happy Valley" of innocent barbarians and is treated as a favorable prisoner, while Mark in The Crater concentrates the power of his family and friends to build up an ideal colony in a faraway island. Tom may be called a kind of guest who enjoys and views the life of tropical utopia from outside or sometimes from below, but Mark is a founder and governor of the new community and surveys the beautiful land made by himself from above. This difference is due to the character and career of these two authors-a maltreated, downtrodden, and poverty-stricken sea wanderer versus an aristocratic, boss-minded, somewhat domineering rich planter of "Cooperstown." The type of "the utopias of escape" as that of Typee is very common in the annals of the cultural history of Asia and Europe. We can cite many examples. But the type of "the utopias of reconstruction" as that of The Crater is rather rare except in the United States, which had long been regarded as a Promised Land for Europeans, and in which many a Utopian venture is done in the 1840's and thereabout. The spirit of the age is embodied in Cooper's writing; The Crater is at bottom religious and full of frontier mind. Therefore this work, though an unnoticed minor novel, is, it seems to me, more conspicuous as the manifestation of Americanism than Typee.

収録刊行物

  • 英文学研究

    英文学研究 40 (2), 199-214a, 1964

    一般財団法人 日本英文学会

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