영어로 읽는 고전 _ 그레이스 리빙스턴 힐의 율법아래 있지 아니하니
그레이스 리빙스턴 힐의 『율법 아래 있지 아니하니(Not Under the Law)』는 20세기 초에 쓰인 장편 소설이다. 작품은 자신을 길러 준 이모를 잃은 뒤 어디에도 마음을 둘 곳을 찾지 못해 흔들리는 한 젊은 여성, 조이스 래드웨이(Joyce Radway)의 이야기를 풀어 놓는다. 우리는 교사가 되어 자기 두 발로 서고 싶다는 그녀의 소박한 꿈을, 코웃음과 무시로 짓밟아 버리는 사촌들 곁에서 그녀가 견뎌 내야 했던 유난히 고된 어느 하루를 따라가며, 조이스라는 한 사람의 인생이 어떤 자리에 놓여 있는지를 차분히 들여다보게 된다.소설의 도입부는 사촌들이 만들어 놓은 어수선한 분위기 한가운데서 묵묵히 식사를 준비하고 있는 부엌 안의 조이스로부터 시작된다. 사촌 유진(Eugene)과 내넷(Nannette)은 그녀의 꿈을 비웃고 그녀가 어떤 감정을 호소해도 마치 들리지 않는다는 듯 외면해 버리는데, 그 차가운 무관심과 노골적인 멸시가 차곡차곡 쌓여 마침내 조이스의 마음을 한계점까지 밀어붙인다. 그러나 결정적인 순간, 그녀는 무너지는 대신 다가오는 시험을 반드시 치르겠다는 결심을 굳히고, 마침내 자신을 짓누르던 그 집을 떠나기로 한다. 손에는 그저 자신에게 소중한 몇 가지 물건을 담은 작은 가방 하나뿐, 발끝은 어디로 향할지조차 분명치 않은 미지의 길 위에 놓이지만, 그녀는 망설임 없이 그 어둠 속으로 첫발을 내딛는다. 이 장면은 앞으로 그녀가 걸어갈 독립과 자립의 여정을 미리 비춰 보이는 한편, 가족이라는 이름의 적의와 자기 자신을 향한 내면의 의문 사이에서 한 여성이 어떻게 자기 가치와 소속감을 다시 세워 가는지를 작품 전체의 큰 흐름으로 자연스럽게 끌어올린다.
Classics Read in English _ Not Under the Law by Grace Livingston Hill
Not Under the Law, an early twentieth-century novel by Grace Livingston Hill, opens upon the unsettled life of Joyce Radway, a young woman left without bearings after the death of the aunt who had raised her. With unhurried attentiveness, the novel walks the reader through a single particularly trying day, during which Joyce must hold her small but cherished dream of becoming a teacher against the cold scorn of the cousins among whom she has been left to live — relations who treat her ambitions and even her feelings as if they were of no consequence at all.
The opening scene places Joyce in the cluttered, ill-tempered kitchen of her cousins' household, where she quietly prepares a meal amid the disorder her cousins Eugene and Nannette so thoughtlessly create around her. Their petty mockeries and their stubborn refusal to hear anything she says accumulate one after another like small, deliberate cruelties, slowly pressing Joyce closer and closer to the limit of what she can bear. And yet, at the very moment when she might be expected to give way, something else stirs within her: a clear and steadying resolve to sit her coming examinations whatever the cost, and to leave behind, at last, the house in which she has been so quietly diminished. Carrying only a small bag of her most treasured belongings — and with no certain road yet open before her — she walks out into the unknown with a courage all her own. In that single, decisive departure, the novel foreshadows the long journey of independence that lies ahead, while gathering up into its larger narrative the question that will sound through everything to come: how a young woman, caught between familial hostility and her own halting inward doubts, may yet find her way back to a sense of belonging and her own quiet worth.
Among the contents
The kitchen door stood open wide, and the breath from the meadow blew freshly across Joyce Radway’s hot cheeks and forehead as she passed hurriedly back and forth from the kitchen stove to the diningroom table preparing the evening meal.
It had been a long, hard day and she was very tired. The tears seemed to have been scorching her eyelids since early morning, and because her spirit would not let them out they seemed to have been flowing back into her heart till its beating was almost stopped by the deluge. Somehow it had been the hardest day in all the two weeks since her aunt died; the culmination of all the hard times since Aunt Mary had been taken sick and her son Eugene Massey brought his wife and two children home to live.
To begin with, at the breakfast table Eugene had snarled at Joyce for keeping her light burning so long the night before.
