셰익스피어의 「겨울 이야기」에 나타난 낭만적 사랑의 이데올로기

Abstract

Mi Young LeeThis paper is based on two assumptions. One is that romantic love, one of the main motifs of Shakespeare's, has been appropriated in various ways through his canon according to the particular needs of genre, date, and other political and social contexts. The other is that romantic love as we know it is not a natural and inherent feeling but a historical construct, which emerged in the early modern age with its glorification of family as a basic unit of economy and control. In Winter's Tale, Leontes's binary and limited conception of woman and his fear and anxiety of sex, especially on female sex, triggered the tragedy which ended in the crisis of patriarchy and even the possible extinction of the royal family. What redeems and saves this endangered patriarchy is the romantic love of the younger generation. At first presented as dangerous to the social order and patriarchy, which is based on the hierarchy of class and gender, their romantic love seems to be antisocial. The immaturity of Florizel, brave as he was, also makes their love precarious. But with the revelation of Perdita's true identity, all these problems are drastically solved, naturalizing the social order, reinstating the patriarchy, and perpetuating the royal family line : romantic love is appropriated to justify the ideology of patriarchy. The Winter's Tale, written in the early reign of James I, who forced the ideology of patriarchy as the ruling ideology of his regime, is another example of how the conception of love, marriage and sexuality is produced, circulated, and appropriated in and out of the theater in the early modern period.