Earticle

초록

영어

Gwendolyn Brooks’s sole novel, Maud Martha, had not been recognized as a serious work of African American Women’s literature until Mary Helen Washington and Barbara Christian in the early 1980s stressed its importance and connection to the tradition examining its subtle but in-depth exploration into an African American woman’s psyche and individuality. Elaine Showalter also presents the work as a representative work of the 1950s in her 2009 historical overview of American women writers. Due to the focus of the work on the personal experience of the main character and her preoccupation with domesticity, the implication of Maud Martha in African American women’s individuality and subjectivity is not fully recognized. Showalter reads the work as representing the split and division in the psyche and in the life of the women of the 1950s. However, Maud Martha’s emotional reaction to the racist violence and contempt should be examined in its subtlety. Maud Martha is a subject who recognizes, shows, and controls her anger at the violence, not a passive one with split psyche or bitter irony. In fact, Maud Martha controls her rage against the violence as a way of maintaining the radius of her will and her search for self-worth. As she grows into adulthood and enters into motherhood, she experiences more of the harsh reality of racism, and finds the scope of her will become smaller in protecting the sense of self-worth and her individuality. However, she does not succumb to the realization, but renews her hope and determination in different phases and episodes of her life. As Aristotle sees the feeling of rage as a way of ensuring the sense of justice on the personal level and recognizing one’s subjectivity, Maud Martha, expressing her anger at the contempt from the society and the self-hatred of the black community, brings the sense of justice to her pursuit of happiness in motherhood and her search for self-worth within the small but intimate circle of family and personal life. Brooks’s representation of a black woman with conscious anger shows that the feeling of anger is recognized and expressed with the understanding of the social conditions and interacting with the changes in political and social ideologies. Maud Martha’s anger heralds the African American women writers’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s in asserting the women’s individuality and subjectivity and building the social agreement on the justice of the movement.

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 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 김미현 [ Miehyeon Kim | 아주대 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813