여성과 성스러움: 토니 모리슨의 『솔로몬의 노래』연구

Abstract

This essay attempts to articulate how Toni Morrison shapes the sacred in her third novel Song of Solomon. It claims that her concept of the sacred is deliberately at odds with the patriarchal Christian deity who keeps a distance and even transcends the world and humanity. It is rather embodied in a woman character, Pilate in this specific novel, as something immanent, deconstructing the traditional boundary between the sacred and the secular. All critical attention about the novel has been paid to the identity formation of Milkman who is the only male character throughout Morrison's novels. However, this essay turns its critical focus onto a female character Pilate whose presence evokes the sacred in terms of her mysterious, messianic, and connecting features. It is specially her connecting feature above all that characterizes the feminine sacred. Instead of distancing or transcending, such a mysterious and messianic figure Pilate connects the present with the past by carrying her father's bone with her, here with there by carrying rocks and geography, and the torn and the separated with her thread. What is interesting is that Milkman's transformation is marked by the scene where a bobcat's genital is cut off, the castration signifying a symbolic acquisition of femininity. Milkman becomes sacred when he symbolically turns into a woman. It is also claimed that the feminine sacred, which is conceptualized in Pilate and later Milkman rather feminized, could be an alternative to the masculine or patriarchal religions of today where the boundary between the sacred and the secular is more rigid than any other times.