모성 이데올로기와 돌봄의 재의미화: 도리스 레씽의 사대문의 도시

Abstract

Motherhood has functioned as a source of women's oppression in patriarchal society. Oppressed mothers have often used mothering as a channel for their will to power, and daughters in turn have rebelled against their mothers' oppression. In Doris Lessing's The Children of Violence, Mrs. Quest is a prototypical bad mother. Her daughter, Martha Quest, fights against her mother for her survival as an autonomous self, and tries to escape from the nightmarish repetition of women's destiny. However, she becomes a matron at once feared and hated in The Four-Gated City, the final volume of The Children of Violence. Lessing's novel reveals that women's emancipation will not occur without an assault on the established symbolic order and the change of the social system. And it suggests that the drive for this change can come from a new appreciation of caring as the source of human solidarity. In The Four-Gated City, caring is undertaken by male characters as well as by Martha, and the boundary of the sexual division of labor begins to disappear. This does not merely mean that men can share women's traditional social role. Caring is presented as a kind of practice of the ecofeminist ethics that life in nature is maintained by means of co-operation, mutual care and love. In this new community, caring is resignified as a public good and a cross-gender activity.