캐슬린 톰슨 노리스의 토요일의 아이

영어로 읽는 고전 _ 캐슬린 톰슨 노리스의 토요일의 아이
캐슬린 톰프슨 노리스의 『Saturday's Child』는 20세기 초에 쓰인 소설이다. 이야기는 샌프란시스코의 한 약품 도매상에서 일하는 젊은 여성들의 삶과 분투를 중심으로 펼쳐진다. 주인공 수전 브라운은 매일의 고단함과 자신과 동료들의 야망 사이를 헤쳐 나가면서, 성 역할과 사회적 기대에 갇힌 세계 속에서 더 나은 기회와 인정을 갈망한다.
소설의 첫머리에서 독자는 음울한 사무실 풍경과, 단조로운 업무에도 불구하고 그 여자들 사이에 흐르는 동료애를 마주하게 된다. 이야기의 중심에 선 수전은 붙임성 있는 성품과 함께 서서히 자라나는 야심을 지닌 인물이다. 서사가 진행되면서 사무실 사람들 사이의 역학이 뚜렷해지는데, 특히 경험 많은 선배 사무원 손턴 양의 존재가 수전을 비롯한 젊은 직원들에게 적잖은 영향을 미친다. 그러던 중 승진 기회에 관한 소식이 들려오고, 잘생긴 신입 동료 피터 콜먼이 등장하면서 수전의 마음을 사로잡는다. 이로써 열망과 우정, 그리고 제약 많은 사회 구조 안에서 일과 사랑 양쪽의 야심을 감당해야 하는 어려움이라는 주제가 본격적으로 모습을 드러낸다.

Classics Read in English _ Saturday's Child by Kathleen Thompson Norris
Saturday's Child, by Kathleen Thompson Norris, comes from the early years of the twentieth century. It follows a group of young women employed at a wholesale drug house in San Francisco — women who arrive each morning to work that asks little of them and offers less in return. Susan Brown is the one we follow most closely. She gets through her days on friendliness and quick wits, and beneath both runs a hunger for something larger: better work, better prospects, some acknowledgment from a world that has already decided what a woman in her position may reasonably expect.
The novel opens in the office itself — poor light, stale air, ledgers, and the particular warmth that grows among people who are bored together. Norris is very good on this: the jokes, the shared lunches, the small loyalties that make the hours pass. Among the older hands is Miss Thornton, a clerk of long experience whose opinions carry weight with the younger women, Susan included, and whose example is not entirely encouraging.
Then two things happen at once. Word circulates that a promotion may be available, and a new colleague appears — Peter Coleman, handsome and easy in a way that makes the office feel briefly like a more interesting place. Susan's imagination takes hold of him immediately. From here the book's real subject emerges: what it costs a young woman to want a career and a life at the same time, in a world arranged to grant her only one.

In the body of the text
Not the place in which to look for the Great Adventure, the dingy, narrow office on the mezzanine floor of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's great wholesale drug establishment, in San Francisco city, at the beginning of the present century. Nothing could have seemed more monotonous, more grimy, less interesting, to the outsider's eye at least, than life as it presented itself to the twelve women who were employed in bookkeeping there. Yet, being young, as they all were, each of these girls was an adventuress, in a quiet way, and each one dreamed bright dreams in the dreary place, and waited, as youth must wait, for fortune, or fame, or position, love or power, to evolve itself somehow from the dulness of her days, and give her the key that should open--and shut--the doors of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's offices to her forever.
And, while they waited, working over the unvaried, stupid columns of the company's books, they talked, confided, became friends, and exchanged shy hints of ambition. The ill-ventilated, neglected room was a little world, and rarely, in a larger world, do women come to know each other as intimately as these women did.