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영어

In The Princess Casamassima, London is portrayed as a contradiction; on the bright side, it is a prosperous and splendid city, but on the dark side it is a hotbed of poverty and crime. The two sides of London are projected onto Hyacinth Robinson, who was born from a morganatic marriage between an aristocrat father and a lower-class criminal mother. Hyacinth, who has a dual identity as an aristocratic descendant and a member of the urban working class, experiences two worlds without fully belonging to either of them. Through the eyes of Hyacinth, who inherited an aesthetic sensibility from his father, the crowding and deindividuation of the urban mob are captured as a sign of vulgarity, lacking taste or culture. He fails to understand the vulgarity of the two worlds, and the nature of beauty and ugliness by associating vulgarity only with lower-class and idealizing the aristocracy as an absolute beauty, which indicates his dichotomous preconceptions about the two classes. However, later he realizes and accepts that vulgarity or ugliness coexists with culture or beauty in human life, and the coexistence rather enhances the values of beauty.