A Female Déclassé’s Dislocation: After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie
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After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Jean Rhys’s novel of 1930, is concerned with the dislocation or “placelessness” of Julia Martin, an ageing prostitute, in an organised society where there is little available space for a liminal woman who stands outside conventional social structures. As a sexual worker, she is in conflict with the family, the couple and the institutions of patriarchal capitalism. Consequently she is bound to drift incessantly from place to place, never mooring at one site. The numerous place-names in the novel, which serve as the subtitles of each section, not only document the heroine’s restless itinerary, but elucidate her desperate quest for a place in a given society that she could be possibly fit into and claim as her own. Yet the prevailing social dictates are determined to ostracize her out to the fringes of society where she is to stand on the precarious borderline, suspended in “the hour between dog and wolf.” In this context, the seemingly subdued narrative of a social outcast’s career proves to be a highly charged text with a sharp edge to it, critically touching upon the issue of prostitution. The novel suggests that the institution of prostitution is inextricably linked with capitalist social arrangements and bourgeois double standards as to female sexuality, calling into question the legitimate, sanctioned expressions of dominant social values and ideas. The novel thus gives a lie to the mystified aura of family and mounts a critique of the hypocrisy and philistinism of the middle classes and their moral bankruptcy.
Abstract
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Jean Rhys’s novel of 1930, is concerned with the dislocation or “placelessness” of Julia Martin, an ageing prostitute, in an organised society where there is little available space for a liminal woman who stands outside conventional social structures. As a sexual worker, she is in conflict with the family, the couple and the institutions of patriarchal capitalism. Consequently she is bound to drift incessantly from place to place, never mooring at one site. The numerous place-names in the novel, which serve as the subtitles of each section, not only document the heroine’s restless itinerary, but elucidate her desperate quest for a place in a given society that she could be possibly fit into and claim as her own. Yet the prevailing social dictates are determined to ostracize her out to the fringes of society where she is to stand on the precarious borderline, suspended in “the hour between dog and wolf.” In this context, the seemingly subdued narrative of a social outcast’s career proves to be a highly charged text with a sharp edge to it, critically touching upon the issue of prostitution. The novel suggests that the institution of prostitution is inextricably linked with capitalist social arrangements and bourgeois double standards as to female sexuality, calling into question the legitimate, sanctioned expressions of dominant social values and ideas. The novel thus gives a lie to the mystified aura of family and mounts a critique of the hypocrisy and philistinism of the middle classes and their moral bankruptcy.
참고문헌 (20)
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