무분별한 혐오에서 분별하는 연민으로: 샬롯 스미스의 『망명자들 』에 나타난 자유의 정동 정치

초록

This essay argues that Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793) attempts to reshape British readers’ emotional responses to French émigrés and liberty in the early 1790s. By the time Smith published the poem, French émigrés were increasingly associated with political danger, disorder, and national hostility in Britain. At the same time, the language of liberty, which had once carried positive associations with constitutional freedom and moral progress, had become closely connected with revolutionary violence and anarchy. This essay discusses the ways in which Smith responds to this changed political and emotional situation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s theory of affect, it explores how emotions such as fear, aversion, pity, and sympathy become attached to political signs and social bodies in the poem. Focusing on Book I, this essay argues that Smith does not present the émigrés as innocent victims, nor does she ignore their connection with the ancien régime. Instead, she carefully distinguishes between different kinds of suffering among the clergy and aristocracy, showing how their identities and values have been formed by history, class, religion, and political circumstance. Through this process, Smith challenges indiscriminate national hatred and directs the reader toward a more discriminating form of compassion. This essay also examines how Smith separates the ideal of liberty from the violence committed in its name during the Revolution. It argues that The Emigrants is not only a poem of sympathy for refugees, but also a poem about the affective struggle over how liberty, exile, and human suffering should be understood.

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