19세기 미국 여성문학에 나타난 여성 예술가의 초상

Abstract

Unlike most nineteenth-century women's texts which faithfully follow and even deepen the dominant male-centered culture and ideology, there are a few texts which women writers have voices and opinions of their own. In the texts I've chosen here, there have appeared a few women artists who are independent, liberated, and resistant enough to question long-standing institutions and conventions that have controlled women's lives for a long time. I will mainly focus on women artist figures that the three most disobedient and opinionated nineteenth century women writers such as Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Payson), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin had created. In comparison with the women artist images such as spinsters, mad women, widows, social outcasts that male writers created in their literary texts, women writers created women artists in terms of showing an independent role model, becoming a subject of her life, and crossing the irrationally restricted lines. The woman writer, Ruth Hall from Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855) is the first woman artist figure who reaches economic independence through her creative writing and proves herself to be a woman artist model. The nameless woman artist narrator of Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper”(1898) tries to resist against the male-dominated textual space to make herself as well as other artists more unique and of her own element. Edna Pontellier and many other women artists that Kate Chopin created in her texts, including The Awakening (1899), challenge all kinds of then-current barriers such as gender, hetero-sexuality, christianity, marriage institution, and motherhood. In all, images of women artists presented in the above nineteenth-century women writers' texts seem to be much more independent, strong-willed, and challenged than most images presented in the male writers' texts of that age. Although they couldn't reach the aesthetic level and quality of male writers, they needed to build their own subjective space and status in an unfavored society toward women. They needed to establish their own original and independent texts and defy the conventional barrier rather than simply mimic the aesthetics or artistic styles that the male writers had established.