『헨리 6세』 1, 2부에 나타난 여성 혐오 양상 = 마녀화와 극장성을 중심으로

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

I set out the argument with an already generalized premise that the battlefields and the history described in Shakespeare's history plays are exclusive of women characters. The presence of women in history plays, therefore, functions as an ideological menace to the construction of an emergent national identity as masculine England. The patriarchal order remaining in the early modern England was still simple: all women should be chaste, silent, and obedient. But the expectation of obedience and silence was virtually impossible to meet. The actual appearances of unruly women and relatively independent women who refused to have been controlled by any man brought forth men's anxiety about them, and they were about to invent numerous ways of attack on them. The present article traces the ways of such attack in the plays turning those disruptive women into witches and relating subversive theatricality with dangerous feminity. The women characters in Henry Ⅵ Parts Ⅰ and Ⅱ are to be blamed for their subversive practices of undermining patriarchal order by their witch-like activities and of increasing social instability by their adoption of theatricality. Pucelle, who is incessantly attacked for her witchcraft by English warrior nobles, renders the masculine England powerless before the feminized France. Her transvestism and assuming the role of military leader in the French camps is the visible emblem of her theatricality that belie both her true social rank and gender identity. Eleanor in Part Ⅱ is also an overreacher who imagines herself as an actor seizing whatever role Fortune would give for her to play and who is willing to subject her to the evil spirits' prophesies about male opponents' future. They are the female characters who seek to overturn the masculine order by adopting male prerogatives and thus destroying rank hierarchy and gender status as well. They should be subject to men's punishment that exposes who they really are and expels them out of men's exclusive battlefields and history. But the plays fail to restore the broken order because the historical and political arenas are absent of masculine heroes and are afflicted with domestic dissensions caused by noble's private desire for power.