우울과 여성의 저항: 로울랜슨의 『억류와 귀환』

Abstract

This essay tries to re-read female narratives of the 17th century Puritan society in terms of their strategy of melancholic resistance. Focusing on the way the Puritan women upheld their identity as a woman in contradistinction from the patriarchal system of religious community, I would like to elaborate how the Puritan women’s writings are much more literary than those of their male counterparts. Especially, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative subtly but effectively deconstructs the Puritan taboo of blood mixing. Offering as it does what the Puritan patriarch wants to hear from her captivity and allowing their meta-narrative intervention, Rowlandson performs the role of a gentle woman, which revolves around the doubt about her chastity. Deliberately debasing herself below the human being and effacing her femininity, she succeeds dismantling the Purtian reader’s expectation of her womanhood. Far too excessive descriptions of her disgraceful sufferings as a survivor, who pushes herself into the extreme of instinctive animality, strangely disarm the ideological structure of the Puritan idea of modest femininity and sacrificial motherhood. In this sense, her narrative is not only the record of her realistic experience per se but also a counter-narrative against the 17th century American Puritan society. Rowlandson’s self-presentation as a melancholic, who displaces her denouncing gesture into a disguised self-debasement, aptly resists the time old contradiction in the Purtain patriarchy. Neither a scapegoat of motherhood nor a hero of the Puritan femininity, Rowlandson’s narrator simply justifies her survival as a woman.