“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)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 서울대학교 인문학연구원
· 수록지 정보 : 인문논총 / 59호 / 147 ~ 175페이지
· 저자명 : 조선정

초록

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.”

영어초록

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.”

참고자료

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