Otherness, Sexuality, and Space: Affiliations between Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples
1
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
While the influence of Virginia Woolf’s writing on Eudora Welty’s fiction has been touched upon briefly, and occasionally fully examined, by several critics, no critical attention has been drawn to the two writers’ highly similar creation of outsider characters. This essay proposes that Welty’s portrayal of Miss Eckhart in her short story cycle The Golden Apples (1949) can be read as a response to Woolf’s depiction of Miss Kilman in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Both characters are depicted as German spinster tutors who have an intense homoerotic desire for their pupils and are ostracized by society. Against the backdrop of the early 1920s, both texts let us take a glance at how an interwar society marginalizes an outsider in tandem with the rise of anti-German sentiment in England and the United States. Particularly, by comparing the two characters’ outsiderness marked by their class, gender, sexuality, physicality, and ethnicity/nationality, this essay attempts to show how the two writers’ treatment of them helps us configure the ways in which space intervenes in the (re)production of individual identities. While Miss Kilman’s shopping excursion designates her as a lesbian flâneur and epitomizes the department store’s function as a heterosexing, pseudo-public space, Miss Eckhart’s piano recital represents her agency as an artist who works to transform domestic space into an alternative public sphere for children and women in a small town in rural Mississippi. A kinship between Woolf and Welty established through their similar characters encourages us not only to interrogate the position of outsiderness predicated upon the dialectics between difference and sameness, but to problematize normative, exclusive, and heterogeneous locales functioning in society.
Abstract
While the influence of Virginia Woolf’s writing on Eudora Welty’s fiction has been touched upon briefly, and occasionally fully examined, by several critics, no critical attention has been drawn to the two writers’ highly similar creation of outsider characters. This essay proposes that Welty’s portrayal of Miss Eckhart in her short story cycle The Golden Apples (1949) can be read as a response to Woolf’s depiction of Miss Kilman in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Both characters are depicted as German spinster tutors who have an intense homoerotic desire for their pupils and are ostracized by society. Against the backdrop of the early 1920s, both texts let us take a glance at how an interwar society marginalizes an outsider in tandem with the rise of anti-German sentiment in England and the United States. Particularly, by comparing the two characters’ outsiderness marked by their class, gender, sexuality, physicality, and ethnicity/nationality, this essay attempts to show how the two writers’ treatment of them helps us configure the ways in which space intervenes in the (re)production of individual identities. While Miss Kilman’s shopping excursion designates her as a lesbian flâneur and epitomizes the department store’s function as a heterosexing, pseudo-public space, Miss Eckhart’s piano recital represents her agency as an artist who works to transform domestic space into an alternative public sphere for children and women in a small town in rural Mississippi. A kinship between Woolf and Welty established through their similar characters encourages us not only to interrogate the position of outsiderness predicated upon the dialectics between difference and sameness, but to problematize normative, exclusive, and heterogeneous locales functioning in society.
참고문헌 (35)
- Abbott, Richard, "What Miss Kilman’s Petticoat Means: Virginia Woolf, Shopping, and Spectacle", Modern Fiction Studies, 38(1), pp.193~214 (1992)
- Berlant, Lauren, "Sex in Public", Critical Inquiry, 24(2), pp.547~566 (1998)
- Black, Shameen, "Homoerotics of Influence: Eudora Welty Romances Virginia Woolf", Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22(1), pp.149~171 (2003)
- Bowlby, Rachel, "Just Looking : Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola" (1985), Methuen
- Bouton, Reine Dugas, "Literature and the Writer", pp.175~190 (2004), Rodopi
- Dainotto, Roberto M, "Place in Literature : Regions, Cultures, Communities" (2000), Cornell UP
- Donaldson, Susan, "Recovering Otherness in The Golden Apples", American Literature, 63(3), pp.489~506 (1991)
- Felski, Rita, "The Gender of Modernity" (1995), Harvard UP
- C. L. Carissa Foo, "Finding a Place of One's Own: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway", 영미문학페미니즘, 21(3), pp.5~35 (2013), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회[DOI]
- Foucault, Michel, "Of Other Spaces", Diacritics, 16(1), pp.22~27 (1986)
- Out : Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, "Inside", pp.1991, Fuss, Diana
- Garrity, Jane, "Step-daughters of England : British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary" (2003), Manchester UP
- Handley, George B, "New World Poetics : Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott" (2010), U of Georgia P
- Hansen, Miriam, "Babel and Babylon : Spectatorship in American Silent Film" (1991), Harvard UP
- Harrison, Suzan, "Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf : Gender, Genre, and Influence" (1997), Louisiana State UP
- Harrison, Suzan, "Playing with Fire: Women’s Sexuality and Artistry in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples", Mississippi Quarterly, 56(2), pp.289~313 (2003)
- Hindrichs, Cheryl, "Eleanor McNees and Sara Veglahn", pp.96~103 (2009), Clemson U Digital
- Leach, William R., "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption:Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925", Journal of American History, 71(2), pp.319~342 (1984)
- Levenback, Karen L., "Clarissa Dalloway, Doris Kilman and the Great War", Virginia Woolf Miscellany, 91(37), pp.3~4 (1991)
- Lysack, Krista, "Come Buy, Come Buy : Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing" (2009), Ohio UP
- Magruder, Emily Daniell, "Critical Insights: Virginia Woolf & 20th Century Women Writers", pp.167~187 (2015), Salem Press
- Mark, Rebecca, "The Dragon’s Blood : Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty’s ‘The Golden Apples" (2013), UP of Mississippi
- Munt, Sally, "Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities", pp.114~125 (1995), Routledge
- 백진, "버지니아 울프의 『델러웨이 부인』과 존 쿳시의 『포』에 나타난 침묵하는 작가와 타자", 영미문학페미니즘, 23(2), pp.29~56 (2015), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회[DOI]
- Primamore, Elizabeth, "A Don, Virginia Woolf, the Masses, and the Case of Miss Kilman", Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 9(2), pp.121~137 (2008)
- Rappaport, Erika D., "Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life", pp.130~155 (1996), U of California P
- Rushbrook, Dereka, "Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8(1-2), pp.183~206 (2002)
- Smith, Patricia Juliana, "Lesbian Panic : Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction" (1997), Columbia UP
- Welty, Eudora, "The Eye of the Story : Selected Essays and Reviews" (1978), Virago
- "Interview by Linda Kuehl" (1972)[URL]
- Welty, Eudora, "Interview by Clyde S. White. More Conversations with Eudora Welty", pp.231~242 (1996), UP of Mississippi
- Welty, Eudora, "Stories, Essays, and Memoir" (1998), Library of America
- Welty, Eudora, "A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews" (1994), UP of Mississippi
- Woolf, Virginia, "A Room of One’s Own" (1989), Harcourt
- Woolf, Virginia, "Mrs Dalloway" (2000), Oxford UP