“가장 행복한 여성은 역사가 없다”: 영국 여성작가들의 여성적 글쓰기와 죠지 엘리엇
“The happiest women have no history”: ‘Women’s Writing’ of the British Women Writers and George Eliot
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The essay presents a recuperative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a controversial feminist text for its heroine’s renunciation buttressed by the author’s deterministic outlook. The novel’s fatalistic drive, the essay discovers, is an illuminating outcome of Eliot’s complex engagement with the notion of women’s place in history. With her strategic appropriation of the comprehensive, indiscriminating, all-encompassing capacity of ‘History,’ Eliot regards it as a sort of ultimate horizon to which every single life and every single meaning must surrender itself. History requires her female characters to be absorbed eventually into the stream of time, which is poetically metaphorized in the novel through the overwhelming image of the Floss river. The essay begins with a dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s thoughtprovoking idea of ‘integrity’ of women’s writing; Woolf’s thesis that women writers should transcend their sexuality in order to command artistic control over their writing resonates with Eliot’s deeply sensitive treatment of distance from female characters she creates. Then the essay analyzes how Eliot formulates realism as an important and enabling principle to embody the vision of History. Eliot’s devotion to detached and realistic representation of women’s lives, a quintessential hallmark of her writing, signifies her desire to position herself as a decent figure of letters distinguished from ‘lady novelists’ whose writing can be easily branded as simply female writing. And the essay goes on to argue that Eliot, in her stark refusal to write ‘as a woman,’ explores women’s writing that cannot be reduced to some type of gender-specific mode of writing which is customary and definable. To sum up, in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot attempts to ‘place’ women ‘in’ History, paradoxically enough, by erasing women from so-called natural history; such a poignant paradox of women’s writing is well captured in one of the most impressive quotes from the novel, “The happiest women have no history.”
Abstract
The essay presents a recuperative reading of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, a controversial feminist text for its heroine’s renunciation buttressed by the author’s deterministic outlook. The novel’s fatalistic drive, the essay discovers, is an illuminating outcome of Eliot’s complex engagement with the notion of women’s place in history. With her strategic appropriation of the comprehensive, indiscriminating, all-encompassing capacity of ‘History,’ Eliot regards it as a sort of ultimate horizon to which every single life and every single meaning must surrender itself. History requires her female characters to be absorbed eventually into the stream of time, which is poetically metaphorized in the novel through the overwhelming image of the Floss river. The essay begins with a dialogue with Virginia Woolf’s thoughtprovoking idea of ‘integrity’ of women’s writing; Woolf’s thesis that women writers should transcend their sexuality in order to command artistic control over their writing resonates with Eliot’s deeply sensitive treatment of distance from female characters she creates. Then the essay analyzes how Eliot formulates realism as an important and enabling principle to embody the vision of History. Eliot’s devotion to detached and realistic representation of women’s lives, a quintessential hallmark of her writing, signifies her desire to position herself as a decent figure of letters distinguished from ‘lady novelists’ whose writing can be easily branded as simply female writing. And the essay goes on to argue that Eliot, in her stark refusal to write ‘as a woman,’ explores women’s writing that cannot be reduced to some type of gender-specific mode of writing which is customary and definable. To sum up, in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot attempts to ‘place’ women ‘in’ History, paradoxically enough, by erasing women from so-called natural history; such a poignant paradox of women’s writing is well captured in one of the most impressive quotes from the novel, “The happiest women have no history.”
참고문헌 (38)
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