『세월』: 울프의 페미니스트 소설미학 연구

진명희(Jin, Myung-hee) 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소 2006 외국문학연구 Vol.- No.24

The purpose of this paper is to study Virginia Woolf's feminist aesthetics in both narrative technique and its inseparably related thematic aspect in The Years, the last long novel published in her lifetime. Though Woolf originally planned and wrote an essay-novel called The Pargiters to convey everything including sex, education and life extending over fifty years, she had revised this work for six years, with the beginning essay part cut out and completed The Years as an excellent novel. In the fragmentary plotting of the family chronicle, Woolf deviated from traditional realistic novel form. Here she experimented such structural and other devices as the absence of central figure, consistent repetition of past scenes, collective memories, interruptions and cacophony. These structural and thematic innovations prove Woolf's intentional and indirect writing strategy to reflect the dissatisfied and fragmentary lives of the characters. Woolf also tried to depict the thoughts and emotions of her characters, often unexpressed in ordinary life. Woolf attempts to penetrate the real meaning of life and to expose male egoism and oppressive social conventions in a patriarchal society, and finally to build a new world in which her characters can live differently from the past in mutual understanding and peaceful liberty and justice. This wish-fulfillment might be achieved by admitting the 'otherness' of each individual and human equality beyond sexual, racial and hierarchical differences, with real human love just as shown by Antigone who proclaimed 'Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving'.

조이스와 동시대 작가들 : 가부장 사회 여성의식의 분열과 울프의 글쓰기: 『댈레웨이 부인』, 「소개」, 「조상들」, 「하나의 요약」을 중심으로

진명희 ( Myung Hee Jin ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2005 제임스조이스저널 Vol.11 No.1

존재의 순간들: 버지니아 울프의 『출항』

진명희 ( Myung Hee Jin ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2011 제임스조이스저널 Vol.17 No.2

Virginia Woolf`s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), is a kind of bildungsroman which depicts Rachel Vinrace`s voyage into her soul; it is simultaneously the writer`s launching into her professional career. Two excursions in the novel, one to the mountaintop, and the other along up the Amazon river, signify the exploration into the dark valleys, virgin forests and deep rivers of the human soul. Even though Woolf still borrows in this novel the narrative form of travelogues and the Victorian novel of manners culminating in a marriage, she is not interested in the plot development; rather her emphasis is on her heroine`s mental agony and her groping in the dark to experience the happy moment of communion. Love or true communion is, the author implies, only possible momentarily, like a thunderbolt in the dark whitely flashing out a moment and blinding our eyes by its brilliance. The happy and short moments of being that break out the barriers of solipsism are some epiphanic moments which impose on the shoulders of the writer the burden of finding out the language and grammar of the yet undiscovered country of human experience, especially of women`s experience. Hence one of the major concerns of the author in the novel is the problem of composing a true feminine experience in the still prevalent and powerful patriarchal language. Woolf`s frequent revisions of the novel reflect her frustration at expressing women`s repressed and silenced inner voice in a male language. Woolf experienced several mental breakdowns whenever she tried to rewrite her heroine`s comatose semi-consciousness of the typhoid fever. Rachel`s death before the ``happy`` marriage of communion implies the half failure of the author in inventing a language of feminine experiences or ``silences``. The three questions of communion, community, and communication in the novel converge into the problem of the marriage of true minds and of finding out a woman`s language to express it. The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf`s trial to burst out the traditional courtship and marriage novels, though she still borrows the ornamental garment of the traditional narrative form. Out of Rachel`s wreckage of the inner voyage, however, Woolf surfaces up with some buoying fragments of a language that will make her in her later major novels capable of expressing “the semi-transparent envelope” of women`s experience. Her first novel is a successful failure to interweave the moments of communion, community and communication in terms of her heroine`s searching for the true identity and pathetic death.

예술가 소설로 본 『바베트의 만찬』

진명희(Myung-Hee Jin) 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소 2011 영미연구 Vol.25 No.-

Babette's feast, one of Isak Dinesen's most deft and exquisite works, juxtaposes the self-sacrificing art of Babette's cooking with the health-harming art of the writer's creation. Babette's feast, in which theprotagonist invests all her lottery money, signifies a kind of communion and an Easter mass which transubstantiate the table guests into new beings of joy and bliss. At the feast every participant experiences, if temporarily, a happy communion of self-extension and ecstasy. Babette's self-consuming feast alludes implicitly to the ideal reading experience through which the possible reader eats up every letter and leave of a book and nourishes him/herself on them. In this story, Babette's dainties are transformed into the writer's creation. Babette is the mouthpiece and double of Dinesen's integral creation and devotion. Both Babette and Dinesen let themselves eaten up by their self-enjoying consumers. This feast of self-sacrifice is rather comic in that it enhances a sense of community based on communion. Through the feast every villager purges his/her repressed and silent past and comes into the light of talking and community. For this comic effect, the author employs such narrative techniques as fairy tales, fantasies and biblical allegories that transcend the boundary of verisimilitude. These narrative techniques provide the writer with a point of comic relief. So Babette's Feast , a fantastic product of Dinesen's imagination, is quite purely a comic and fanciful work, originally intended to be evanescently light as if played on a flute.

모더니즘 작가론 : 『올란도』: 울프의 양성성과 새로운 전기쓰기

진명희 ( Myung Hee Jin ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2004 제임스조이스저널 Vol.10 No.1

Virginia Woolf tried to revolutionize the genre of biography in Orlando, which is the outcome of a definite and overmastering impulse, planned as an escapade or a joke after serious experimental books, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Orlando runs the passage of centuries from the later of the sixteenth century, when Orlando is an aspiring aristocrat poet of sixteen, through a fantastic change of sex from male to female at the age of thirty, to October 1928, when the protagonist is now a mother and celebrated writer of thirty-six. Though Woolf thought the book was not important among her works, Orlando seems to be one of her most elusive but profound novels in that the careful balance between truth and fantasy for Orlando`s comic change of sex and long life span goes together with Woolf`s intention to give things their caricature value. In writing Orlando Woolf demonstrates that she is violating the traditional literary canons dominated by English men of letters and is criticising the ideology of patriarchal society through an androgynous character. With satiric and fantastic devices for a new biographical convention, she subverts the traditional genre of biography and biographical novels with chronological and causal plot developments. Orlando achieved her social and biological transformation by bearing a son and publishing her book of poems The Oak Tree which gave her / him a literary award. This stands for Woolf`s wish-fulfillment as an ideal artist toward the utopian vision of undivided wholesome consciousness transcending the repressive male / female opposition in an imaginary fictional novel.

『마음의 죽음』

진명희(Jin, Myung-hee) 한국외국어대학교 외국문학연구소 2010 외국문학연구 Vol.- No.37

본 논문에서는 세속적 삶의 입문에 있는 사춘기소녀 포셔가 홀로 낯선 세상에 나와 겪는 경험들로 인한 새로운 인식과 삶에 대적하는 의식적 태도를 보여주지만 결코 단순한 성장소설은 아닌 『마음의 죽음』에서 엘리자베스 보웬이 드러내는 진정성 있는 평범한 삶에 대한 비전을 살펴본다. 1930년 중반, 자신의 나이도 30대 중반에 이른 시기에, 보웬은 일찍이 부모와 떨어져 외국에서 홀로 지내야했던 자신의 개인적 생활양상과 전쟁이 연이어 발발하는 혼란스런 세상의 경험을 바탕으로, 어떻게든 세상에서 살아가야만 한다는 구실로 포셔 주변의 인물들이 드러내는 순수한 마음에 대한 비판적이며 결국은 배반의 상처를 안기는 말과 행동을, 실존적 삶의 거부할 수 없는 진실을, 신중하면서도 아이러니컬하게 묘사한다. 특히 인물들의 심리적 측면에 섬세한 관심을 집중시키는 이 작품에서, 보웬은 집이나 장소, 사물에도 심리적 특성을 부여하여 독해의 즐거움을 배가시키며, 일기쓰기와는 다른 소설쓰기 양식의 중요성을 강조하는 세인트 퀜틴처럼, 전통적 내러티브의 기대를 피하며 모호한 열린 결말을 맺음으로써 반전통적 서사기법을 구현하는 글쓰기 방식을 견지하였다. The purpose of this paper is to study a narrative vision of genuinely ordinary life in the Anglo-Irish woman writer Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. She was the heiress of ‘Bowen's Court’ in County Cork and one of novelists trying to write from outside her own nationalty, class or sex. Bowen showed the adult characters' attitudes and views on life, through their responses to one adolescent character, Portia. Portia experiences betrayal in life and suffers from ‘the death of the heart.’ She also loses her innocence, the loving nature in vacuo, in order to live in the real world, not to just stay in a dream wood. As Bowen mentioned in an essay, ‘Out of a Book,’ “it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” In The Death of the Heart, to live means to keep illusion as an art by which we live. And it also means to uphold a sort of lunatic giant which keeps our intercourse from utter banality, as well as specious wisdoms and bare facts as Portia's diary that gave Anna a rather more disagreeable feeling about being alive. The Death of the Heart, the finest of the Bowen novels, is not a mere bildungsroman of an adolescent girl, but a minutely well-plotted novel with so tight a patterning of characters, setting, and narrative organization, to investigate the reality of the adults more tragic than that of Portia, whose “function in the story is to be the awake one”, as indicated in Bowen's radio interview. Bowen made a significant achievement in modern fiction by writing techniques including dialogue “providing means for the psychological materialization of the characters”, diary writing in contrast to the style of novel writing, and elusive open-ending escaping an expected conclusion of traditional narrative. It is especially evident that she doubles the pleasure of reading the novel by endowing houses, places, and objects with psychological characters and human sensibility and perception.

여성의 욕망과 자아 표현: 엘리자베스 보웬의「행복한 가을들판」

진명희 ( Myung Hee Jin ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2013 제임스조이스저널 Vol.19 No.2

Elizabeth Bowen`s war-time story, “The Happy Autumn Fields” (1944), is a mysterious and ironic story of a waking dream in a bomb-out London flat. In this blitz-story where the wall between the living and the dead, the real and the fictional is broken down and blurred, the protagonist Mary returns in hallucination and telepathy to a Victorian family house and estate. In the dislocated, psychic London of the war time populated by the ‘unknown dead’, any solid idea of identity and materiality is dissolved into the telepathic and uncanny closeness between women. In the story Mary`s unspeakable desire for the same sex affinity is uncanny and spectral, and repeated in an occult manner. Mary finds an escape for her hidden desire of homoeroticism in the Sarah-Henrietta relationship, and in her hypnotic identification with them betrays a criticism of a Victorian patriarchal family and its values which express themselves later in the masculine violence of war. Mary`s blown-out London flat is emblematic of the collapse of the apparently solid patriarchal system, which is still held up by a Travis. This Henry-Jamesian ghost story offers Elizabeth Bowen her writing space for a female identification and illicit desire of subversion. In the titular ‘happy autumn fields’, Mary experiences the prelapsarian time and place of innocence and of no sexual difference. In her dreaming hallucination Mary undergoes a telepathic communion and spiritual closeness between women, which is common to modernist women writers, as is evident in Virginia Woolf. In this dream story Mary is the alter ego for Elizabeth Bowen, who tries to express her subversive desire of female spiritual contacts as a kind of challenge to the masculine values and their negative effects. Mary`s unstable and borderless identity offers an alternative to the solid material world of logic and instrumental reason initiated and dominated by the imperialistic and belligerent male world.

엘리자베스 보웬의 「여름밤」: 중립지대에서의 이중의식

진명희 ( Myung Hee Jin ) 한국제임스조이스학회 2012 제임스조이스저널 Vol.18 No.1

Elizabeth Bowen`s Summer Night is a short story controlled by a sense of place: every place has its own genius and fate. As an Anglo-Irish writer, Bowen is keenly conscious of her identity placed between England and Ireland. As she says, her stories are dominated by a sense of place, not by the faces of her characters. Summer Night is set in Robinson`s Bellevue, a neutral zone in World War II. Here the gray zone of Bellevue is a metaphor for the intersection of past and present, frustration and hope, romance and reality of the displaced characters. There is no neutral zone in a war time, safe from the pollution of past memories and noises of war. The dark night of the War intrudes into the recollections of Bowen`s characters and they pass through the crisis in survival in their lack of communications. Their mind is a neutral zone in the place which is torn open by the flashing light of war. That bright light shows us the dark night of split souls stuck in between illusion and crude reality, despair and desire, pollution and purity. In Bowen`s stories is hidden a childlike part of the heart that resurrects the death of the heart. Like Frederich Nietzsche`s idea of illusion that makes life endurable, Bowen`s illusion of art enables life to be kept on. Her characters` double consciousness reflects Bowen`s own ``displaced`` double consciousness between England and Ireland, and artistic illusion and polluted life. If a night is cold and dark, it turns into a bright heat of the day.

『제이콥의 방』에 나타난 애도와 치유의 서사

진명희(Jin Myung hee) 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소 2014 영미연구 Vol.32 No.-

Virginia Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room (1922), is an apparent Bildungsroman dealing with the titular hero's growth and death. However, in this novel of silence and death, nothing is definite and wholesome; everything is fragmentary and indeterminately murky. In this experimental novel Woolf leads us into the room of echoes and mirrors, blurring any clear demarcation between past and present, illusion and reality, certainty and contingency. Jacob's room itself is a metaphor for the novel's ventriloquistic voices only informing some part of Jacob's character: in this room of echoing voices and reflective mirrors the narrative development is circular and overlapping, not linear and progressive. It is quite significant that this fragmentary narrative of many gaps and flaws in the plot development reflects Woolf's dissatisfaction with the Victorian idea of a well-wrought plot and a fully drawn character development. With the World War I, everything traditional is brought to destruction, ruins and fragments, thereby putting our definite knowledge of things into indeterminacies and contingencies. Jacob's Room is the Woolfian elegy to Jacob's death in the World War I and to the traditional Victorian novel at once. In the novel Woolf performs the therapeutic ritual of mourning over the haunting past and the seemingly 'heroic' death of Jacob. Mourning means for Woolf not just the exorcism of separation from the past but also a compromise with the present, however incomplete it might be. In the figurative sense Jacob is the sacrifice on the altar of modernism, and Woolf breaks the new territory of modernistic writing in Jacob's Room. Woolf starts her career as an accomplished modernist writer by paying ritually her tribute and debt to the literary past in the genre of elegy in this novel.

『어둠속의 항해』

진명희(Myung-Hee Jin) 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소 2010 영미연구 Vol.23 No.-

The Dominican Creole novelist Jean Rhys developed her autobiographical novel Voyage in the Dark (1934) out of some early notebooks in which she wrote out her painful experiences of life and despair resulting from an affair in her youth with the much older and well-to-do Englishman Lancelot Smith in London. The novel came into the world by the experienced, skilled and mature novelist, in more than 20 years’ gestation time after a naive teenage girl wrote as a therapeutic pouring. The protagonist, Anna Morgan, white West Indian chorus girl, goes through a downward career to prostitution after the relationship with Walter Jeffries echoing Rhys’s own affair. She endures a mishandled dangerous abortion and comes to death in the original version. But in the published novel rewritten at the demand that the publisher’s editor should give the girl a chance, Anna is compelled to live in death like an abject slave in a world where nobody is, and no time remains, for her. Jean Rhys tried to describe the deathlike despair of a divided self by juxtaposing the present and the past repeatedly recurring in the first-person narrator’s memory, imagination, dream and desire. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Jean Rhys’s subversive writing strategy by following the fragmentary narrative of a bewildered and silenced subject which is configurated in various forms of metaphor, image and symbol such as masquerade, mirror, room, house, drowning, and black and white opposition. The modified open ending to accommodate the male editor’s demand ironically results in emphasizing Anna’s tragedy by making her start a new life without any autonomous reality. Consequently, Rhys sought to accomplish her freedom and renewal in her subversive and strategic writing by practising Carnival spirit of ridiculing satire, laughter and regenerative ritual, and established her identity as a Caribbean woman writer in an authoritative European literary tradition as well.