earticle

영어

Psychological journeys surface as geographical explorations in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) and C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952). Hitherto, the racial topography across the Atlantic in the two books has not received full attention. Instead, critics have focused on apocalyptic complexities because of ambiguous references to subliminal encounters with redemptive values at the ends of the two stories. Those conclusions culminate in a form of regressive returning to the comfort zone of whiteness. Nonetheless, underneath their voyage narratives, Poe and Lewis center upon the struggles of the human psyche due to racial anxieties. They further illustrate the main characters’ agitation aroused by the terror of darkness. This article uncovers the two authors’ transatlantic perceptions and the popular culture perceptions of the British and northern American imperial territories. These perceptions parallel the moral dilemmas between liberating other races and suppressing the insurgent Other. Thus, the article examines Lewis’s and Poe’s growing awareness of threatened nationhood in the mixtures of Romanticism and racial tensions, mixtures that preface the anti-colonial outbreaks of violence in both 19th and 20th centuries.