Willa Cather 의 The Professor's House 연구 : 성공의 Paradox 와 현실의 수용 The Paradox fo Success and the Acceptance and the Acceptance of Reality = A Study of Willa Cather's The Professor's House

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The objective of this paper is to look at some of $quot;the paradoxes of success$quot; experienced by Professor St. Peter, the hero in Willa Lather's The Professor's House, and to examine his change of attitude about the realities of life after a near-death experience.
In this paper, the meaning of $quot;the paradox of success$quot; is that success, which is usually believed to bring comfort and prosperity, often causes mental depression, familial conflicts, failing relationships, and so forth. The case of Professor St. Peter is no exception. He has achieved success but derives no particular pleasure from it. With the money he has won for a monumental historical work, Spanish Adventures in North America, he has built, mainly on his wife's suggestion, a fine new house. However he prefers to remain in his rented house because the new house, in his opinion, is overcrowded with $quot;showy American properties, petty ambitions, and bitter jealousies.$quot;
The familial conflict centers around the fact that the professor's elder daughter, Rosamond, and her promoter husband, Louie Marsellus, have converted the scientific discoveries of Rosamond's late fiance Tom Outland, into a considerable personal fortune. In contrast, the professor's younger daughter and her husband have relatively few possessions, and this disparity of wealth arouses their jealousies against the Marselluses. In addition to this conflict, Mrs. Crane, the wife of a fellow professor, wants a share of the Outland money, since she is convinced that her husband's connection with the inventor entitiles him to it; she is prepared to institute a bitter and sordid court trial. In consequence, the exploitation of Tom Outland's invention wreaks havoc among the St. Peter family and the university faculty.
While his wife and the Marselluses are travelling in Europe, one night, on awakening, the professor discovers the room is filled with fumes from the stove, but he is incapable of making the effort to arouse himself and to throw open the window. He has lost the active will to live - a kind of passive suicide. He is narrowly saved by the sewing woman, Augusta, a devout Catholic, and gradually comes to accept her view of life because it is founded on hard truth. He has at last accepted the brutal facts of life with an open mind, and finally feels he has found $quot;ground under his feet$quot; and can service.
With an easy style and a bold design of structure, Cather realistically portrays the paradoxes of success, the process of the hero's attitude change, and Tom's rare and mysterious experiences at Blue Mesa, while severely criticizing the greed and materialism of modem American society during the 1920's.