手術で蒙を啓く : チャールズ・ブロックデン・ブラウン『オーモンド』における「旅する目医者」のパフォーマンス(関東英文学研究)

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  • Curing Blindness by Surgical Operation : The Performance of a 'Traveling Oculist' in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond(Kanto Review of English Literature)
  • 手術で蒙を啓く--チャールズ・ブロックデン・ブラウン『オーモンド』における「旅する目医者」のパフォーマンス
  • シュジュツ デ モウ オ ヒラク チャールズ ブロックデン ブラウン オーモンド ニ オケル タビ スル メイシャ ノ パフォーマンス

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This paper is an attempt at rereading Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond as a political allegory. It focuses on the loss and recovery of the sight of Stephen Dudley, the father of the novel's heroine Constantia. Though overlooked by former critics, Stephen Dudley's blindness and subsequent recovery by surgical operation provokes political significance in Ormond, which up to now has been frequently referred to as simply a "Bildungsroman" of the novel's heroine Constantia. After briefly reviewing the history of treatment for cataracts, the paper first confirms Stephen's cure is clearly informed by Enlightenment medicine. Various contemporary documents show the radical cure of the blind is promoted most by the Enlightenment. The notion of radical cure was first prevailed in France and then in Britain by the promotion of scientific academies. In this process, curing the blind became one of the most important issues in the Enlightenment medicine. In view of this intellectual tradition, Ormond can be read as a novel, though partly, but clearly informed by the Enlightenment. Indeed, detailed comparison of the texts of Ormond and of contemporary reference sources on the treatment of cataracts proves that Stephen is cured through the method of extraction, which was invented and promoted by Enlightenment medicine. The next point to be observed is the problem of who operates on Stephen's cataract. The text of Ormond tells us that the doctor who treats Stephen is not a native of the United States but a traveling oculist from Europe. And contemporary advertisements in local newspapers tell us that the situation described in the novel is quite similar to the circumstances of cataract surgery in the United States around 1800. In Ormond, the traveling oculist radically extracts Stephen's 'evil' cataract. And the doctor, 'one of the numerous agents and dependants of Ormond,' is supposed to be a member of the Illuminati, a politically radical secret society that was a menace to social order in Europe and the United States. Here, a politically radical thus performs medically radical treatment. But, ironically enough, in respect of the policy of the Federalist Party, the doctor can be the very 'evil' who should be extracted from the body politic of the United States. Considering the fact that Federalists enforced the notorious Alien Acts to deport 'evil' foreigners such as the Illuminati out of the nation, we can safely say the performance of the traveling oculist is self-contradictory. He is at once a subject involved in extraction in a surgical operation and is an object of extraction by Federalist politics. In this sense, his performance accuses the Federalist policy of setting xenophobic laws in the nation framed mainly and invariably by immigration. Thus the pro-Federalist performance by the Illuminati doctor reveals the emptiness of the laws and their meaninglessness in setting binary opposition between inside/outside, foreign/native, good/evil at the first stage of nation-building. In this sense the performance of the doctor has the potential to be a counter-discourse against the Federalists by deconstructing their xenophobic policy. The cataract that invades Stephen's eye and makes him unable to see is a metaphor for the early Republic susceptible to 'internal invasion,' and his cure is a Federalist way of dealing with the matter. Performing the invasion and the treatment on it at once, the traveling oculist in Ormond illuminates the limit of the Federalist politics of the day. In short, he claims there can be no Americans without aliens. Detailed consideration of Stephen's cataract operation thus opens the possibility of reading Ormond as a political allegory.

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