여성들의 유토피아 크리스띤 드삐장의 『여성들의 도시』와 마거릿 캐번디시의 『숙녀학교』 (Women’s Utopias: Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 영미문학연구회
· 수록지 정보 : 안과밖:영미문학연구 / 46호 / 14 ~ 38페이지
· 저자명 : 정희원

초록

This essay reads Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy as texts of women’s utopias. A medieval literature in French and an English drama after the Interregnum respectively, they have not gathered much critical attention as female utopia. Defining de Pizan as the forerunner of women’s separatist utopias, this essay offers a comparative reading of Christine’s female version of civitas dei and Cavendish’s female academic society. In both works, the education of women is the major issue that the two authors address by demonstrating the process of building (and unbuilding) feminotopias. While discussing Christine’s and Cavendish’s works as female utopian texts, the essay questions and demonstrates how each author critically appropriates the malecentered utopian tradition that existed from the premodern utopia of St. Augustine’s to the modern academic utopia of the Royal Society. If Cavendish’s female academy can be defined as a failed utopian experiment, this study suggests that the writer’s ambivalent attitude towards the female academic society reflects historical conditions under which female subjects could become the ‘legitimate’ parts of the society only by marriage and for the sake of their husbands.

영어초록

This essay reads Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy as texts of women’s utopias. A medieval literature in French and an English drama after the Interregnum respectively, they have not gathered much critical attention as female utopia. Defining de Pizan as the forerunner of women’s separatist utopias, this essay offers a comparative reading of Christine’s female version of civitas dei and Cavendish’s female academic society. In both works, the education of women is the major issue that the two authors address by demonstrating the process of building (and unbuilding) feminotopias. While discussing Christine’s and Cavendish’s works as female utopian texts, the essay questions and demonstrates how each author critically appropriates the malecentered utopian tradition that existed from the premodern utopia of St. Augustine’s to the modern academic utopia of the Royal Society. If Cavendish’s female academy can be defined as a failed utopian experiment, this study suggests that the writer’s ambivalent attitude towards the female academic society reflects historical conditions under which female subjects could become the ‘legitimate’ parts of the society only by marriage and for the sake of their husbands.

참고자료

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