비너스를 위한 변론: ꡔ비너스와 아도니스ꡕ 다시 읽기

Abstract

Kyung Jin Bae"What am I that thou shouldst condemn me this?" This complaint of Venus in fact summarizes the history of evaluation of Venus herself ranging from a misogynist view to a moralist perspective. Even though Venus and Adonis was a great success and served as a textbook for rhetoric of courtship, Venus's physicality at the same time arouses a detached and repulsive response from male readers. By reversing the female and male roles, thus transforming Venus from a pursued beloved lady into the forceful suitor, Shakespeare destabilized the Petrarchan boundaries of Elizabethan lovers. At worst, she is represented as a violent rapist who aspires pleasure and desire of sensual love. However, just as Shakespeare's first published poetical work defies a clear generic definition between an erotic narrative poem and a comedy or a tragedy, the heroine of the work also resists a restricted appreciation of her character, especially when she embodies the very complex and sometimes conflicting qualities of love and desire. This study aims to restore Venus's rightful position as the Goddess of Love by examining her complicated representations in the work. Half sympathetically and half mockingly, Venus is represented as both a sensual lover and an object of sympathetic irony. She is by turns and simultaneously comic, pathetic, ridiculous, humiliated, exulting, self-deceiving, playful, devious, repulsive, aggressive, sensitive to pain, and helpless because all these possibilities are contained in the experience of Love. Venus is not Love in an abstract way, but she is Love in its contradictory way that it is experienced. Admitting Venus's limits is a part of appreciating her vitality. With her vital intensity, Venus is represented in all the moods and passions of Love. When the identification of Venus and Love lies at the heart of Shakespeare's conception of the poem, to mock Venus is in some sense to mock Love.