도리스 레싱의 『풀잎은 노래한다』에서의 메리: 고뇌하는 영혼

Abstract

This paper examines Mary in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing as William James’s concept of the Sick Soul. James’s Sick Soul possesses a pessimistic worldview, perceiving everything as a negative reality. As the Sick Soul, Mary perceives everything she experiences in her life as unfortunate events, and furthermore, she views human existence itself pessimistically, inevitably leading to a pessimistic outlook on life. Mary displays a bewildering range of emotions, at times temporarily experiencing self-satisfaction and happiness and at others gripped by irritation, anger, self-abandonment, suspicion, disgust, and even fear. What is worse, she falls into “positive and active anguish” when she cannot avoid and get out of the unchangeable situation. The researches in Korea regarding Mary in The Grass is Singing has primarily focused on post/colonial and in-depth perspectives. From a post/colonial perspective, Mary is understood as a victim of the black-white conflict and an individual scapegoat isolated and ignored from the colonial white community. Some in-depth researches have focused on the relationship between Mary and Moses, highlighting the issue of incest, or interpreting Moses as a liberator who frees Mary from oppression. Meanwhile, this study counters the view that Mary is a helpless victim, emphasizing her attempts at deliverance to escape her anguish and fear. While she receives various offers of deliverance, she recognizes that, as a fundamentally Sick Soul, she should rely on a supernatural means of deliverance, such as death. Thus, this study attempts to understand Mary’s complicated situation and character in connection with the aspects of James’s Sick Soul, and to suggest another way to figure out Mary without being biased towards either of the two studies mentioned above.