가십하는 여자들: 다니엘 드포의 『록사나』에 나타난 여성 가십, 출산, 비밀의 문화 (Gossip Girls: Female Gossips, Labor, and Secrecy in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국영미문학페미니즘학회
· 수록지 정보 : 영미문학페미니즘 / 25권 / 2호 / 119 ~ 149페이지
· 저자명 : 임재인

초록

This article analyzes the ways in which women control their bodies, intelligence, and subjectivity by employing a network of female gossips in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724). Specifically, I focus on Amy’s role as a female “gossip”—one who attends a mother at child birth, according to its early modern etymology, and hence someone who colludes in establishing a collective female knowledge and experience that men are excluded from. Amy also spreads rumors, through “gossiping,” to corroborate Roxana’s multiple social performances, guises, and masquerades. The power of Roxana’s transformation, after all, lies in her ability to control and “reproduce” knowledge about her sexual history. Critics have paid scant attention to how Roxana and Amy manipulate the culture of childbirth to produce a body of secrecy. As gossips, they invent false stories and lies about their sexual past to navigate a male-centered political and economic nexus. Yet conscious that such a network is a turbulent one susceptible to surveillance, Roxana searches for new ways to refashion herself through imaginary gossip with the Quaker. By attending to scenes of labor and lying-in, I argue that the circulation of knowledge about women’s reproduction and the maternal body serves as a potent tool to construct female subjectivity.

영어초록

This article analyzes the ways in which women control their bodies, intelligence, and subjectivity by employing a network of female gossips in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724). Specifically, I focus on Amy’s role as a female “gossip”—one who attends a mother at child birth, according to its early modern etymology, and hence someone who colludes in establishing a collective female knowledge and experience that men are excluded from. Amy also spreads rumors, through “gossiping,” to corroborate Roxana’s multiple social performances, guises, and masquerades. The power of Roxana’s transformation, after all, lies in her ability to control and “reproduce” knowledge about her sexual history. Critics have paid scant attention to how Roxana and Amy manipulate the culture of childbirth to produce a body of secrecy. As gossips, they invent false stories and lies about their sexual past to navigate a male-centered political and economic nexus. Yet conscious that such a network is a turbulent one susceptible to surveillance, Roxana searches for new ways to refashion herself through imaginary gossip with the Quaker. By attending to scenes of labor and lying-in, I argue that the circulation of knowledge about women’s reproduction and the maternal body serves as a potent tool to construct female subjectivity.

참고자료

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