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영어

Contending that the popularity of the marriage plot is a symptom of cultural compulsion to fill up the lack that is figured in and by ‘woman’ in the collective imaginary of modern bourgeois society, this essay critiques the gender politics of conventional marriage plot structured by the myth of the phallus. Placing Henry James’s novels against this problematics, this study analyzes two of James’s novels as narratives that appropriate the conventional marriage plot to critique its fundamental premises. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) begins by borrowing some shared premises of the marriage plot but end up creating a female protagonist who, dislocated from the course of a woman becoming a subject through a phallic union with a man, becomes a “Subject” instead through a profound post-marital disillusionment with phallic masculinity. The Wings of the Dove (1902) dismantles the conventional marriage plot by highlighting the impossibility of the hegemonic formula—i.e., that of translating desire into heterosexual love and love into heteronormative marriage. Because the normatizing narrative of marriage heavily rests on the man’s phallic performance, the conventional marriage plot also ironically creates a crisis for the male subject. James points to the abjection of love, as a possibility of the subject’s emptying itself out in the abyss of desire and thus of wresting itself away from the phallic narrative that anchors desire to the telos of marriage. James’s most radical critique of the marriage narrative, as seen in The Wings of the Dove, may be found in his poignant representation of masculine subjectivity undoing its own phallic notion of self in the abyss of intersecting desires that cannot be contained in the marriage plot.

목차

I. 결혼 : 결핍과 욕망의 서사
 II. 환멸의 윤리학 : '그녀는 무엇을 할 것인가'
 III. 언어의 이면, 주체의 분열
 IV. 사랑의 비루함 : '그는 무엇을 할 것인가'
 V. 욕망의 심연 : 선택과 필연
 인용문헌
 Abstract

키워드

Henry James The Portrait of a Lady The Wings of the Dove marriage plot marriage love gender femininity masculinity desire phallus lack subjectivity

저자

• 윤조원 [ Joewon Yoon | 고려대학교 ]

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