Robert Browning의 The Return of the Druses 연구 : Djabal의 성격 분석을 중심으로 = A Study on Robert Browning's The Return of the Druses

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

With the beginning of the 19th century the world became modern at a high speed, and the concept of society based on the common value and faith began to fade away. This affected artists like Browning in two ways. One was that they tried to recover a new order and value system by individual efforts, and Browning did this in his early years. But the search for the ideal is bound to fail without taking account of reality, and it was also true in Browning's experiments in drama: a new concept of drama, new principles of composition, and a new narrative structure. The other was that artists recognized the wide gap between the real and the ideal, and they interpreted the world with this knowledge. This was irony essential in Browning's dramatic monologues.
Browning's drama was a transitional stage between the individual's search for the absolute in his early nears and irony in his dramatic monologues. The Primary reason for the failure of his drama was his pursuit of the ideal drama ignoring the contemporary theatrical norms and taste ; but more importantly, it failed because of the unstable dramatic structure caused by the unstable aesthetics. Instead of the plot, character was at the center of his plays; and because Browning was mainly concerned with the internal changes and development of his characters, his plays was centered not on action but on dialogue which could show those internal changes and development. Because of this difference between his and the conventional drama, contemporary audience and readers could not understand or appreciate his plays. In this light The Return of the Druses might be boring and strange, even unpresentable on the stage. But if we focus on what he tried to do in his works, we can see in this play what he wanted to do and what he was concerned about. With his main character Djabal Browning showed in ironic way the self-deception necessarily involved in the search for the absolute. But at the same time Browning was experimenting how it would be possible for the finite human being to reach for God in the world where all became subjective and relative. Browning eventually gave up his intention to be a subjective poet and went on to become the master of dramatic monologues; but his primal poetic aim, 'the development of a soul', continued under the surface.
Inspite of all the evidences and his admission that he deceived his people assuming God, or rather because of these evidences, Djabal cannot be swept away as a typical character in the style of the dramatic monologue. He must be seen in the context of Browning's lifelong yearning to present the pursuit for the absolute truth. Only in this light we can see in the play how sincerely Browning tried to do his task by portraying a human soul reaching for the absolute, defying the inevitable doom.