영화에 나타난 여성작가의 심리와 치유적 글쓰기: 영화 <디 아워즈>, <실비아>, <조용한 열정>을 중심으로

Abstract

Women writers’ writing in a male-centered patriarchal system has been a struggle in itself. However, women writers could not do anything but write because writing was a tool for their own psychological survival. This paper analyzes, from a cinematic perspective, the oppressed psychology of women writers with many difficulties in a male-dominated society and the ways in which they sustain and heal themselves through writing. The Hours (2002), Sylvia (2003), and A Quiet Passion (2016) recreate cinematically and respectively the lives of women writers, specifically Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson. These films commonly focus on psychological factors such as identity, confusion and agony as women writers, not their life events specifically. This study examines how women writers’ psychological states are commonly imaged in three movies. For the three women writers in the films, writing is a double-edged sword: the cause of their suffering as well as the tool for their survival. This study examines the ways in which the movies represent the common psychology of writing of the three women writers under four categories: Space of women writers, Identity of female artists, Ambivalence over fathers, and Death. These four elements are proved to be connected to each other. Three women writers were greatly influenced by their fathers, each one of the greatest intellectuals of their time. Unfortunately, these conservative and authoritative fathers caused their daughters’ identity as women writers to be confused and brought about their sense of loss. Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath committed suicide. Emily Dickson died of illness, but most of her poetry was about death. Their writings show that each writer believes her death does not mean escaping from reality but entering another life.