윌리엄 포크너의『내가 죽어 누워 있을 때』와 토니 모리슨의 『빌러비드』에 나타난 모성과 자크 데리다의 “책임”
Motherhood in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Responsibility in Jacques Derrida
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William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, are about mothers who prolong their relationship with children even after death. Addie, in As I Lay Dying, speaks as she lies dead in her coffin. Sethe, in Beloved, kills her two-year-old daughter so as not to send her back into slavery, and reenacts the mother-daughter relationship with a ghost daughter, Beloved. The two mothers’ views of their children and motherhood stem from the recognition of what Jacques Derrida calls "singularity" and "responsibility." While psychoanalytic theories' complementary dual unity in their conception of the psychic world from a subject's relation to its object explains the mother-child relationship in a structure of domination, Derrida's concept of responsibility and singularity offers a different frame of interpretation for these two mothers' radical views of their motherhood. For Derrida, responsibility means involvement in action or a decision that exceeds simple conscience or theoretical understanding. The relationship with an other based on responsibility demands an individual’s singularity. Only when the identity of oneself is possible as irreducible singularity, then, the death of the other can make sense. Addie loves her children as they are products of her action, and refuses to define her motherhood in relation to her children's fathers. Addie is the impetus behind the funeral trip to Jefferson, and through the trip, she takes revenge upon her husband, Anse, who sees her and the children as resources in economic exchange and for profit. As a literal presence for the entire length of the novel and speaking even after death, Addie asserts her singularity refusing to be replaced as an object of mourning and defies any symbolic substitution. Sethe takes the matter of life and death of her children in her own hands and kills one as she sees the slave master is right behind them. Instead of letting them return to slavery, a fate worse than death, she makes an ethical decision to kill her child, which is also unethical as it is murder. As the death of the daughter is hers and cannot be reversed, Sethe’s act of responsibility entails the sacrifice of her daughter’s life. While Derrida sees responsibility as an individual decision and maintains that the absolute responsibility sacrifices ethics and generality while placing the absolute other in the area of a future or as a possibility, the two mothers’ decisions can be understood in a social and political context as their actions can be seen as resistance to the reality of American southern patriarchy and slavery.
Abstract
William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, are about mothers who prolong their relationship with children even after death. Addie, in As I Lay Dying, speaks as she lies dead in her coffin. Sethe, in Beloved, kills her two-year-old daughter so as not to send her back into slavery, and reenacts the mother-daughter relationship with a ghost daughter, Beloved. The two mothers’ views of their children and motherhood stem from the recognition of what Jacques Derrida calls "singularity" and "responsibility." While psychoanalytic theories' complementary dual unity in their conception of the psychic world from a subject's relation to its object explains the mother-child relationship in a structure of domination, Derrida's concept of responsibility and singularity offers a different frame of interpretation for these two mothers' radical views of their motherhood. For Derrida, responsibility means involvement in action or a decision that exceeds simple conscience or theoretical understanding. The relationship with an other based on responsibility demands an individual’s singularity. Only when the identity of oneself is possible as irreducible singularity, then, the death of the other can make sense. Addie loves her children as they are products of her action, and refuses to define her motherhood in relation to her children's fathers. Addie is the impetus behind the funeral trip to Jefferson, and through the trip, she takes revenge upon her husband, Anse, who sees her and the children as resources in economic exchange and for profit. As a literal presence for the entire length of the novel and speaking even after death, Addie asserts her singularity refusing to be replaced as an object of mourning and defies any symbolic substitution. Sethe takes the matter of life and death of her children in her own hands and kills one as she sees the slave master is right behind them. Instead of letting them return to slavery, a fate worse than death, she makes an ethical decision to kill her child, which is also unethical as it is murder. As the death of the daughter is hers and cannot be reversed, Sethe’s act of responsibility entails the sacrifice of her daughter’s life. While Derrida sees responsibility as an individual decision and maintains that the absolute responsibility sacrifices ethics and generality while placing the absolute other in the area of a future or as a possibility, the two mothers’ decisions can be understood in a social and political context as their actions can be seen as resistance to the reality of American southern patriarchy and slavery.
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