워즈워스와 어머니에 대한 욕망 - 주체성의 전략으로 읽기 = William Wordsworth and the Desire for the Mother as a Strategy of Subjectivity

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this article I aim to re-evaluate in a feministic view the desire for the Mother some critics consistently found in the poetry of William Wordsworth. Referring to the Lacanian account of it, I mainly discuss the characteristic way that the desire for the Mother, the primodial Other, works as a strategy by which a subject constitutes its sense of wholeness. What is unique with Wordsworth is that the poet overcomes the Castration Complex by imagining the Mother`s obedience to the Law of the Father. Thus, allotting to the Mother some of the symbolic power as a signifier of love, I try to argue against the dogmatic reading of woman in Romanticism just as victimized. Reading such poems as The Thorn and The Mad Mother, I first explain that the Mother is desired only as a medium of love through which the poet finds his name as a subject. Denying the common interpretation of those poems that the Mother is very seductive with her Phallic power, I emphasize her unwillingness to transgress the Law of the Father. Focusing on the `stolen boat episode` in The Prelude, next, I trace the psychological process in which, resolving the oedipal crisis, the poet grows up to the point where he can meet the law of subjectivity and the desire for the Mother at the same time, thus magnifying himself as a whole self. The poet realizes this impossible project in the misrecognition that he is always in the bosom of the Mother who works in both ways of castration and healing love. Finally I demonstrate in Tintern Abbey how the poet aesthetically succeeds in maintaining the tension of being a subject, but in perfect union with the Mother simultaneously. Thus I conclude this reading with three feministic interpretations. First, a subject`s mastery over the other is unavoidable by the nature of subjectivity, so that female subjectivity would be either impossible or similarly victimizing. Second, woman is rather split in dual identities of denied body and idealized soul of love. Third, woman in the poetry of Wordsworth is not an object to be appropriated, but is allotted relative autonomy because the poet`s strategy of subjectivity is to sustain subjectivity in lack itself ever to be filled up by something greater than himself.