거울 속의 이방인 —버지니아 울프의 일기에서 만나는 ‘낯선’ 자아

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to measure how Woolf deals with the foreignness of the self in the diary. Kept over a long period of time without a master plan for the work as a whole, the diary has no governing structure. It is permanently under construction and is open without conclusion. As a result, the self being constructed in the diary is rather fragmentary and many-faceted than united. The images of the self offered in the diary may sometimes be unfamiliar or even foreign to the diarist. Then what shall we do with those foreign images of the self? Julia Kristeva elaborates the concept of the foreigner(etrangere) as the other side of our self identity, which cannot be assimilated into our ‘selves'. The foreigner may roughly be construed as a social equivalent to the abject, which is the remnant of the self but cannot be pushed away as the other. The foreigner is exotic, unknown, and suspicious and could be a threat to our society. However, the foreigner is, Kristeva argues, actually someone who dwells in ourselves but we do not want to recognize as part of us. In her diary, Woolf tried to keep track of the changes of her self according to the situations of life and to her mental and physical conditions due to the illnesses she had suffered throughout her life. She was interested in finding the other side of the self, its foreignness and attempted to describe it. By writing about it, she tried to push to the limit the boundary of the self and writing. It may be frightening to find a foreign face in the mirror where one expected to see one's own. However, it could also be fascinating to the extent that Narcissus fell in love with his image in the pool. To explore how Woolf dealt with the foreignness of her self, this paper will read her diary along with the tale of Narcissus and Sylvia Plath's poem, “Mirror,” in which the poet analyses the monstrous vision of the self reflected in the mirror. Such reading will help illuminate how the attempt to incorporate the foreignness of the self affected Woolf's writing and life when she endeavors to find her own gendered voice and the place for the female self in the Symbolic.