『사랑의 바보짓』의 여성공간-침묵에서 발화로

Abstract

Offering a layered reading of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, this essay investigates the politics of space embodied in patriarchical dominance and that of female challenge against it. Instead of attempting to analyze Fool for Love in terms of the relationship between fantasy and reality, this reading confronts the patriarchical strategies for female oppression that are embodied in the facades of real and fantastical sites in terms of spatial division, distance, and place. Although physical space in this play functions as an “emotional signifier,” it also works as a means of controlling women in conjunction with the male idea of space. Fool for Love’s representation of space foregrounds Eddie and Old Man's politics of space for female oppression, as exemplified both in their creation of the distance between female lovers and in the attempt to contain them within the patriarchical space. This politics of space functions as a strategy for perpetuating male dominance over women by framing their specific images. Old Man's daughter and Eddie's sister and lover, May, attempts to deconstruct their concept of space by pointing out the falsity of their masculine discourse. While exposing the mechanism of patriarchical dominance, this reading therefore explores May’s “talking back” as a positive activity for freedom in which she can be reborn as an autonomous subject, rather than remain as the silent object of male desire.