선정소설과 빅토리아시대 여성교육: 메리 엘리자베스 브래던의 『의사의 아내』 = Sensation Novel and Victorian Women`s Education: Mary Elizabeth Braddon`s The Doctor`s Wife

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The tropes of consumption and addiction were used as the warning against the women readers in the Victorian period. To maintain the ideology of the middle-class, reading with discrimination was strongly recommended and reading the popular text such as romance, melodrama and sensation novel was compared to the addiction to narcotics. This paper examines the relation between sensation novel and Victorian women`s education focusing on Mary Elizabeth Braddon`s The Doctor`s Wife. Braddon explores the middle-class woman`s dissatisfaction with the conditions of her life, her sense of entrapment in the marriage and escape into her world of books through Isabel Gilbert. While the tropes of consumption and addiction can be seen through Isabel, these tropes found in anti-sensation novel criticism are challenged in the text. Braddon shows that reading sensation novel does not necessarily have bad effects on women. She presents Isabel`s addiction to a circulating library as problematic, but in her case reading is also associated with her development and education. Reading opens her up to productive as well as dangerous form of imagination, which leads to her self-education. The text ends with an accommodation between aristocratic and middle class values, and Isabel is transformed by her reading process which had hitherto led her astray. Braddon highlights the positive aspects of women`s reading, as Isabel begins as a bad reader but improves herself as a respectable and charitable member of society. She is transformed into a refined and mature reader whose life is far from sensational. In the end, Braddon tones down the rhetoric of anxiety about women readers, and she redefines the relationship between sensationalism and women`s education.

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