Earticle

초록

영어

This essay tries to re-read female narratives of the 17th century Puritan society in terms of their strategy of melancholic resistance. Focusing on the way the Puritan women upheld their identity as a woman in contradistinction from the patriarchal system of religious community, I would like to elaborate how the Puritan women’s writings are much more literary than those of their male counterparts. Especially, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative subtly but effectively deconstructs the Puritan taboo of blood mixing. Offering as it does what the Puritan patriarch wants to hear from her captivity and allowing their meta-narrative intervention, Rowlandson performs the role of a gentle woman, which revolves around the doubt about her chastity. Deliberately debasing herself below the human being and effacing her femininity, she succeeds dismantling the Purtian reader’s expectation of her womanhood. Far too excessive descriptions of her disgraceful sufferings as a survivor, who pushes herself into the extreme of instinctive animality, strangely disarm the ideological structure of the Puritan idea of modest femininity and sacrificial motherhood. In this sense, her narrative is not only the record of her realistic experience per se but also a counter-narrative against the 17th century American Puritan society. Rowlandson’s self-presentation as a melancholic, who displaces her denouncing gesture into a disguised self-debasement, aptly resists the time old contradiction in the Purtain patriarchy. Neither a scapegoat of motherhood nor a hero of the Puritan femininity, Rowlandson’s narrator simply justifies her survival as a woman.

목차

I. 청교도 서사의 ‘문학적 가치’
II. 청교도 여성서사의 사실성
III. 『억류와 귀환』의 사실주의
IV. 귀환의 논리
인용문헌
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 강우성 [ Woosung Kang | 서울대, 교수 ]

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