시장의 안과 밖: 윌리엄 새커리의 『허영의 시장』에 나타난 성과 문학의 상품화와 자율성

This article studies the way W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair foregrounds the commodification of femininity and literature in a market society. Vanity Fair has long been read as a novel which critically represents Victorian market society and addresses its issues of materialism and commodification. However, instead of the commodity culture in general my study focuses on the specific reason why Thackeray highlights the status of femininity and literature as the commodity. Within the Victorian cultural discourses both femininity and literature were imagined as the morally autonomous realms independent of and insulated from the corrupting effects of the market. Victorian society collectively imagined market defying virtues of femininity and art as the antidote to the corrosive power of the commercialism. Paying attention to this cultural expectation I argue that Thackeray questions the way Victorian society outsources the responsibility for the reformation of the market society to these two realms while keeping its capitalistic logic intact. Vanity Fair presents a reality in which femininity and literature are traded as commodities denying their status as the morally autonomous outside of the market. In a world of Vanity Fair where there is no outside of the market Thackeray confronts readers with the task of reflecting on the problems of the market society intrinsically.