리퍼: 노동자와 여성으로서 쓰는 시

Abstract

Despite the lack of critical attention to her poetry, Leapor is important in that she presents new possibilities for working-class woman’s poetry. Leapor writes from a dual perspective as a manual laborer and woman, who was considered in the eighteenth-century Britain as being unfit for writing poetry. Like other working-class poets of her time, she adopts the literary forms of middle or upper class writers, but she brings in new contents to their conventional forms. For example, instead of focusing on the idealized world of the pastoral, Leapor fills the pastoral with repugnant female body and dismal but realistic images of rural life. More importantly, Leapor follows the poetic tradition of Sappo. She makes a sharp critique of contemporary male-oriented sexual ideologies. She condemns the kind of love that only treats woman as an object of man’s desire for domination, and also the institution of marriage that relegates women to a state of slavery to men. As an alternative to these, Leapor suggests Sappic love and female friendship. Leapor is one of the earliest feminist working-class poets in the sense that her poems offer an important critique of the unequal sexual relationship in her time, though it may not be a solution to it.