“모계사회”의 한 초상, 「엄마와 딸」(“Mother and Daughter”): 엄마와의 결혼, 혹은 아버지의 복수

Abstract

A Portrait of Matriarchy, “Mother and Daughter”: Marriage with Mother, or Revenge of Father Sun Ryoung Choi (Dongguk U) The purpose of this paper is to analyse the mother-daughter relationship in Lawrence’s “Mother and Daughter” as a portrait of modern matriarchy. The mother, Mrs Bodoin is represented as a typical modern strong woman or a “no-man woman”, and the daughter, Virginia is a ‘career’ woman heroine who has rarely presented in Lawrence’s other works. Yet Virginia never gets any real satisfaction in her life at work and leads a passive and exhausted life under the devastating influence that her dominant mother has on her. This story makes an impressive presentation with irony and satire of how Mrs. Bodoin’s power over Virginia which is more female possessiveness rather than parental authority inevitably causes the disruptive result in their relationship. A piquant double irony is crossing in the dialogue between the mother and the daughter in the final scene. The first major irony is that the raison d’être of Mrs. Bodoin is painfully negated by Virginia’s decision on the marriage with an old Armenian man, Arnault because Virginia is Mrs. Bodoin’s “alter ego” and Arnault stands for both primitive patriarchy and coarse masculinity. In a sense, Mrs. Bodoin is revenged from the returned father having haunted his daughter’s unconsciousness and “everything male” that she has tried to get rid of. The secondary irony comes from the fact that as her mother’s sarcastic final retort implies, Virginia’s decision may cost her a precarious future of her own life.