주디스 라이트의 시에 나타난 여성 이미지

Abstract

Judith Wright is one of the few outstanding Australian poets. Her poetical words are so intense with metaphors and symbols that readers feel tension in searching for the exact meaning. She even said in one of her poems, "I'd give these heavy words away". It is the purpose of this study to examine the images of women in her poems firstly as a lover in her love poems and secondly as a married woman in other poems. In the love poems, the women speakers are passionate and at the same time intellectual, and they can quickly approach the essence of core matters. In the latter poems, the women are intelligent enough to care for their families as well as be involved in outside matters. They realize how destructive their own generation was and worry about worldly affairs unlike the traditional housewives. In one of her poems, we can meet a woman who sacrificed her artistic talents to be an ordinary housewife to meet societal conventions. Wright reveals the problems of prejudice and oppression on women through the women images and the voices they portray. In contemporary society, it is inevitable not to consider any women writers in the view of feminism. However, Wright hesitated to join the feminist movement even in the 1970s. She assumed a high value on the mother, and she is much more interested in defining the essential and universal principles of feminity than in defining the historical situation of a particular women. Wright occupied the important position as a predecessor in the establishment of the traditional woman literature.