earticle

영어

This paper explores the role of the trickster in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Toad among the main characters plays a role as a trickster who engages in trickery, deceives and violates the moral code of the community, and who at the same time conveys moral lessons within a society, allowing him to mock and subvert the existing system. This trickster is usually humorous and the tales generally combine both comical and satirical elements. On this account, the trickster is essential in literary fairy tales, where writers reflect their need for escape from necessity, conflict, or compromise. In The Wind in the Willows, after stealing one of the finest cars to drive down a dirt road, Toad is an infamous outlaw, hopping trains and river rafts and trying to play a trick on officials at every turn. But while he finds pleasure in doing these things, his friends, Rat, Mole and Badger, fret over him as time goes by. What is worse, without Toad around, his friends have not been able to defend themselves against the scheming Weasels that have overthrown the Toad Hall. After retaking the house, Toad decides to lead a quiet, steady, respectable life, looking after and improving his property, and moreover doing a little gardening. Accordingly, I argue that this work is about a tale of the aesthetic of domestic life of the middle class in the Victorian Age, and that Grahame looks back to a Victorian imagination that holds deeply to ideals of pastoral and quiet life through the trickster Toad.