Earticle

초록

영어

The physical and psychological landscape of the home portrayed in Eugene O'Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is similar to the landscape that Harold Pinter places the heroin Deborah in his play, A Kind of Alaska. Pinter’s Deborah functions as the object of the male look and desire, and her true nature is denied. Deborah lives in “a kind of Alaska” where she is more like an ice marble, a voiceless sculpture in a patriarch world. Likewise, in Desire Under the Elms, the dead wife of Cabot, whose name we never know, is also oppressed in a patriarchal home. The namelessness of the unnamed woman is a symbol of denying her identity. In life and even in death, she was/is only Cabot’s wife or Eben’s mother. She is located off stage, already dead from the beginning of the play. She too once lived in the frozen landscape of the law of father, the law of patriarchy that the icy man Cabot backed up. She is given no voice of her own, and is heard only through the false and distorted utterances of the male characters. Her absence and silence force her into a position of the insignificant Other in patriarchal space, never allowed to express any of her desires and sufferings. If the unnamed woman were to awake from her sleeping－death like Deborah, she would also cry out for her own voice and identity, denying the place of the Other in “a kind of Alaska,” and shattering the false male mirror. Therefore, the reader/audience must reread/re-see the female characters represented in male authors’ works with the attitude of the “resisting reader/audience.” If one uses the method of a feminine reading, new voice, where no voice was present before, will emerge: the voice of women oppression and awakening.

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 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 채수경 [ Chae, Su-gyung | 강릉대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810