우리는 언제나 성에서 살았다와 가소성의 문제
We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the Question of Plasticity
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The ambiguous conclusion of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has garnered such bleak commentaries as “retreat into insanity,” “intomb[ment]” in domesticity, “fantasy more probable in fiction than in reality,” etc.; even an attempt to find in it “an alternative to conventionally happy endings” ends up getting the short shrift, since “Merricat’s madness” must be admitted however “oddly empowering” in effect. From the perspective of Catherine Malabou’s ontology of plasticity, however, the novel’s ending acquires a new light. Not only exists no ‘outside’ to the oppressive patriarchal system of which Merricat constitutes a part, but it becomes clear by the story’s end that the perimeters of her worldly interaction have changed. By juxtaposing the narrative progress of Jackson’s novel with the transformative evolution of Malabou’s concept of plasticity, my essay traces how the fiction and the philosopher’s key concept illuminate each other. If my “cross-cutting” comparison bears out its metaphoric capacity and shows that both Malabou and Jackson succeed, in the respective realm of philosophy and literature, in intimating the vision of woman as a new subject to come, the result owes to the unrelenting commitment with which the two figures pushed their creative work to its limit.
Abstract
The ambiguous conclusion of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has garnered such bleak commentaries as “retreat into insanity,” “intomb[ment]” in domesticity, “fantasy more probable in fiction than in reality,” etc.; even an attempt to find in it “an alternative to conventionally happy endings” ends up getting the short shrift, since “Merricat’s madness” must be admitted however “oddly empowering” in effect. From the perspective of Catherine Malabou’s ontology of plasticity, however, the novel’s ending acquires a new light. Not only exists no ‘outside’ to the oppressive patriarchal system of which Merricat constitutes a part, but it becomes clear by the story’s end that the perimeters of her worldly interaction have changed. By juxtaposing the narrative progress of Jackson’s novel with the transformative evolution of Malabou’s concept of plasticity, my essay traces how the fiction and the philosopher’s key concept illuminate each other. If my “cross-cutting” comparison bears out its metaphoric capacity and shows that both Malabou and Jackson succeed, in the respective realm of philosophy and literature, in intimating the vision of woman as a new subject to come, the result owes to the unrelenting commitment with which the two figures pushed their creative work to its limit.
참고문헌 (18)
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- Wallace, Honor McKitrick, "‘The Hero Is Married and Ascends the Throne’: The Economics of Narrative End in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle", Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22(1), pp.173~191 (2003)
- 황은주, "“Writing is the way out”: Shirley Jackson’s Domestic Stories and We Have Always Lived in the Castle", 영미문학페미니즘, 17(2), pp.103~129 (2009), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회[DOI]