여성신화에서 탈주하기: 도리스 레씽의 『황금색 공책』

Abstract

The Golden Notebook emphasizes that women's oppression is rooted in all kinds of exclusive attitudes toward difference. So the novel uncovers that even the intellectuals who resisted the Nazi's emphasis on racial hierarchy came to discriminate black Africans in World War II. In case of sexual difference, male intellectuals often do not recognize their egoistic attitude toward women. Because the relationship between woman and man becomes mystified by the male-centered heterosexuality, woman's desire is exploited by man's desire in a daily life and woman herself internalizes the myth of woman. Although economically independent and self-styled free woman like Anna wants to separate herself from the old and recurring myth, she eventually discovers she also clings to the myth of real woman. Anna can be liberated from all fixed and discriminating patterns, and create new way of life permitting difference as she gradually realizes the meaning of "joy-in-spite" or "the principle of joy-in-destruction" represented in her dream through her close relationship with Saul. Finally she comes to understand that the cruelty and the spite, and Saul and Anna, herself are part of logic of war. Through this realization Anna is able to take flight from binary and fixed code and thought. So she practices a sort of Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming" by forming a block of becoming with Saul, and the process of alliance, symbiosis, contagion, and change. Like Deleuzian becoming, which is the affirmation of a multiple and constant process of transformation, Anna's four notebooks, "free women" and The Golden Notebook itself are the practice to relinquish a teleological order and fixed patterns including the myth of woman in favor of multiple becoming.