Earticle

초록

영어

Fen is the most documentary play among Caryl Churchill’s feminist plays. The title of this play is historically and geographically related to “the Fens” in England, a place where the women labourers have been imprisoned under poor labour conditions and gender roles. Fen illuminates a capitalist and patriarchal social system that is oppressively closed by showing how labour and female gender role have exploited women. Without men's economic support and care, women labourers get involved in doubled labour conditions. One is the manual labour required for financially supporting a family, and the other is household labour that includes rearing children. Low wages, unpaid house chores, and gender roles which the women labourers have faced historically kept their lives confined. Psychological bonds to the absent husband and imposed motherhood derived from the gender roles of women prevent women labourers from escaping the community in Fen. The relationship between the residents in Fen is violently revealed due to anger and frustration derived from their powerless conditions from which they can not escape. The women labourers in particular are positioned at the lowest level in terms of class and gender, which makes them most oppressed; so much so that one of them chooses death as the only way to escape. Confined in the lowest class and oppressive gender roles, the female labourers’ painful experience can not be expressed without violence. In Fen Churchill tries to rewrite the history of women labourers—through the strategic theatrical technique of relating the ghost to capitalist and patriarchal oppression of women. A 19th century ghost functions as a representative explosion of the women labourers’ anger and frustration that has accumulated and oppressed them through time because it has not been expressed. Furthermore, the process of transformation from a woman labourer to a ghost creates a space of possibility by breaking the binary boundaries such as those that separate reality and surrealism, life and death, and materialistic limitation and transcendence. In this theatrical space it is possible to imagine that the women labourers can transcend the oppressive limitations of both class and gender roles. Therefore, the theatrical space of the ghost in Fen can show a new way to see the patriarchal and capitalist social system as a closed frame that has exploited the powerless like women labourers and should be overcome.

목차

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 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 박보영 [ Boyoung Park | Chonnam National University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820