매음녀와 결혼하기 : 토마스 미들턴의 『췹사이드의 정숙한 처녀』에 나타난 매음으로서의 결혼

지승아 21세기영어영문학회 2012 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2012 No.09

“’tis our best art to dissemble well”: Performed Chastity and Purloined Women in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters

지승아 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2016 중세근세영문학 Vol.26 No.1

Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters offers a kaleidoscopic view of tricksters who constantly dissemble for their economic and sexual profits. A prodigal Dick Follywit cheats his rich grandfather Sir Bounteous Progress, a seemingly chaste wife Mrs. Harebrain commits adultery, and Sir Bounteous’ kept-mistress Frank Gullman passes as a virgin. The expansion of market economy in early modern England that established social relations via economic transactions set a stage for these tricksters to dissemble. In particular, women’s dissembling is worthy of notice in this play. The courtesan launches herself into a marriage market by performing virginity, and Mrs. Harebrain cuckolds her jealous husband by feigning her fidelity. Both women’s theatricality makes sexually anxious men deceived by their own follies. The outstanding trickster Follywit is ironically tricked into a marriage to the courtesan, and Harebrain inadvertently gives his wife a chance to cuckold him. Examining the way in which dissembling works in the play, I will argue that women’s performances function as a double-edged sword. Performed chastity intensifies male antipathy towards desiring women but mocks imprudent husbands whose sexual fantasy of virginity make them blind to the fact that chastity can be performed. Men’s efforts to regulate female sexuality turn out to be futile, and their women are purloined by their sexual rivals. Meanwhile, dissembling is for women a means to constitute themselves as transgressive yet autonomous desiring subjects despite patriarchal restrictions of female sexuality and to survive the mad world in which sex is the close nexus of money.

미들턴의 『미카엘마스 개정기』에 나타난 토지, 도시, 그리고 모방 환상

지승아 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2018 중세근세영문학 Vol.28 No.1

This paper examines Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term that dramatizes both the attraction and danger of London through class conflict between a landed gentry Easy and a London merchant Quomodo. Easy tries to embrace conspicuous consumption and self-indulgence in the urban life that he regards as a highly developed and refined culture. Quomodo tricks Easy into mortgaging his estate to him with the aid of his fellow tricksters Shortyard and Falselight. Quomodo’s financial scam on a credit network shows that London is an arena of struggle in which individuals pursue their own profit at the sacrifice of others. I, however, contend that the moral dichotomy of an innocent country and an evil city that the gullible Easy and the vicious Quomodo represent simplifies the play by focusing only on class conflict. While Easy and Quomodo conflict with each other as swindler and victim, they ironically have mimetic fantasies for each other. Easy has a fantasy for living as a Londoner, and is willing to do anything simply because it is in fashion in London. Quomodo, complaining that he cannot but bequeath the unfair profits he makes to his son Sim, wants to make Sim the legal heir to the estate he takes from Easy. Both Easy’s and Quomodo’s mimetic fantasies imply that their desires are not only individual but also social ones. They are rivals but at the same time the mediators who arouse desires in each other. Middleton satirizes both Easy’s foolish pursuit of the urban culture and Quomodo’s passion for upward social mobility. This paper consequently argues that Middleton puts responsibilities on individuals to restore morality and social order to corrupted London in the capitalist market economy.

고자치 시스템 설계를 위한 모델베이스 개념

지승도(池承道) 대한전기학회 1993 전기의 세계 Vol.42 No.3

미들턴의 『과부』에 나타난 과부의 낭만적 환상과 구혼자들의 현실 인식

지승아 한국중세근세영문학회 2017 고전·르네상스 영문학 Vol.26 No.1

This paper examines the widow hunt in Thomas Middleton’s The Widow, arguing that the male suitors’ fantasy about a rich widow reflects their urgent need to seize the economic opportunity she offers. This paper also suggests that a rich widow pursues a fantasy of romantic love because she is well aware that her suitors woo her not for her virtue but for her wealth. A rich widow’s remarriage was anxiety-provoking in early modern England. Wives as femmes covert did not have any property rights, but widows as executrices could wield their legal and financial power at their own will. This circumstance imposed an anxiety on suitors about a rich widow, who was socially superior to, and older, wealthier, and more experienced than them. To handle this threatening gender reversal, suitors tended to sexually objectify a rich widow as a lusty widow, who is susceptible to her insatiable desire and hastens to remarry. The lusty widow stereotype thus could function as a compensation for a transaction between a rich widow’s wealth and her suitors’ masculinity. In The Widow, a young prodigal Ricardo puts a rich widow Valeria into a violent courtship because he wrongly assumes that she is a rich and hence lusty widow. But his sexual prowess ironically reveals his bitter reality that he has no other merit than his virility to take possession of Valeria. Meanwhile, as a clever and willful widow, Valeria is not blind to a disparity between romantic fantasy and reality. She puts her suitors to the test to find out whether they really love her by feigning to be penniless. Her test manifests that she is not and will not be under male control. Ricardo passes her test, but her remarriage to him does not seem to be the best bargain for her, because he covets both her body and her money. Consequently, The Widow shows that the lusty widow stereotype is an ideological construct, and Valeria’s romantic fantasy ends up being wishful thinking.

“사랑의 이상한 효과”: 릴리의 『엔디미온』과 사랑의 담론들

지승아 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2024 중세근세영문학 Vol.34 No.1

John Lyly’s Endymion is recognized for its portrayal of the Neoplatonic ideals of love and beauty, with Cynthia, the moon goddess and earthly queen, celebrated in a Petrarchan convention. Amidst the exploration of love versus friendship and lust versus contemplative affection, characters comprehend human mortality and the ironic value of constant inconstancy Cynthia represents. While the play is often viewed as a political allegory of Elizabeth I and her court, this paper shifts focus to the gendered discourses of love and friendship. Women are depicted as hypocritical, lustful, and morally unstable. Endymion conceals his love for Tellus while desiring Cynthia; Cynthia harshly judges Tellus and Semele, reflecting patriarchal gender norms. Eumenides, epitomizing true love, prioritizes male friendship over love, perpetuating a gender-biased view that positions friendship and love as conflicting values. Consequently, Lyly’s exploration of true love is hindered by misogynistic ideals inherent in masculine discourses of love and friendship.

“Too volatile for a confinement to domestic avocations”: Domesticating American Revolutionary Polemics in Foster’s The Coquette

지승아 한국현대영어영문학회 2019 현대영어영문학 Vol.63 No.1

This paper examines the sexual politics of a seduction plot in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. Foster places the responsibility for Eliza’s fall not only on her seducer Sanford but also on Eliza herself. Eliza’s youth, gaiety, and volatility that label her as a coquette inflame her passion for freedom that exemplifies the emancipatory spirit of the American Revolution. The pursuit of liberty and independence as democratic ideals, however, posed a dilemma in the early republic, because America, as a new nation, politically had to challenge British parental control, while individual American fathers domestically had to uphold their parental authority over their children. Eliza’s seduction plot reflects such a dilemma inherent in the American republican ideology by domesticating American revolutionary polemics. In particular, anti-patriarchalism is more troubling to women because their exercise of free will cannot secure their virtue. Eliza’s coquettish airs are always already subjected to her virtuous female circle’s scrutiny. I contend that Eliza’s plight thus becomes a testing ground for the possibility of early republican women’s autonomy without breaching gender decorum. Consequently, Foster’s The Coquette serves as a guard to keep the solid patriarchal restriction of women in the domestic realm.

여왕권과 여왕의 두 신체: 록헤드의 <스코틀랜드 여왕 메리는 참수를 당했다네>

지승아 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2023 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.31 No.3

This paper explores the fateful rivalry between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I in Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Although Scottish Catholic Mary and English Protestant Elizabeth led drastically different lives in their respective countries, both struggled with queenship in sixteenth-century British political culture. During this time, queens regnant came into conflict with patriarchalism, as societal norms dictated that women obey their men, yet queens ruled over their men as subjects. Consequently, it was challenging for queens to pursue their desires without risking a loss of power. In this context, a queen’s marriage became a crucial issue for her subjects. The contemporary concept of the king’s two bodies, representing the natural body and the body politic, sheds light on understanding the question of women’s rule that involved the intricate interplay of gender, religion, and politics. Dramatizing the rival queenship of Mary and Elizabeth from the Scottish perspective, Lochhead poses the inquiry of whether a queen can remain just a queen. This paper argues that both Mary and Elizabeth fail to maintain a balance between their two bodies. They are compelled to choose one body for their rule and take responsibility for their choice.

사기의 기술: 로버트 그린의 불한당 팸플릿과 일탈의 미학

지승아 한국중세근세영문학회 2015 고전·르네상스 영문학 Vol.24 No.2

Rogue pamphlets which became popular in early modern England scrutinize the criminal underworld growing along with economic expansion in London. The popularity of the rouge pamphlets shows that they kept exciting people’s curiosity about the threatening underworld by marketing public fear of crime. The criticism of the pamphlets has thus revolved around whether the depicted criminal world is real or fictional. Reading the rogue pamphlets as creative non-fictions, this paper, however, focuses on the pamphlets’ social satire that explores the analogy between the market economy and the criminal world and transgressive aesthetics of the pamphlets as a literary form. In particular, Robert Greene’s A Disputation between a Hee Cony-catcher and a She Cony-catcher can be read as a literary work that dramatically represents cony-catchers and whores. A dialogue between a male cony-catcher and a whore shows that criminals are professional workers rather than lazy bodies living off the sweat of others. Above all, Greene represents whores as transgressive yet autonomous subjects, who challenge patriarchal gender norms and actively engage in business with their wits and beauty. Green’s characters criticize the bleak society in which those who cannot dissemble cannot live and at the same time provide theatrical pleasures by their dynamic performativity in dissembling. Readers can enjoy the world of cony-catching, secure in the knowledge of a safe distance between the representation and the reality. Greene does not sacrifice humor and dramatic energy for a moral lesson and a social warning, and this is why his pamphlets fascinate readers.

“yet I am chastly honest”: Militant Chastity and the Negotiation of Gendered Morality in Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures

지승아 한국고전중세르네상스영문학회 2014 중세근세영문학 Vol.24 No.2

This paper examines female militancy in Margaret Cavendish’s Loves Adventures and discusses how Cavendish attempts to reconcile women’s social and political actions such as military experiences and petitioning with conventional gender norms. Cavendish dramatizes women warriors in Bell in Campo and Loves Adventures, but deals with female militancy in a different way. Both Lady Victoria in Bell in Campo and Lady Orphant in Loves Adventures engage in warfare for love as an overriding motive of their military pursuits. But, while Lady Victoria expands her personal needs to women’s rights in general, providing forceful arguments for female liberty and autonomy, Lady Orphant regards her military adventure only as a romantic pilgrimage and remains a subordinate subject to her lover, embracing gender hierarchy. This ambivalent attitude towards female self-sovereignty and political capacities shows that Cavendish attempts to vindicate women’s rights without breaching the standards of feminine deportment demanded by patriarchal gender ideologies. Satirical texts during the Civil Wars commonly identified political women with whores. Cavendish is well aware that female militancy blurs the boundary between chastity and whoredom, diverging from the conventional gender norms. Thus, she reconciles female political pursuits with socially inscribed female modesty by dictating chastity in her women warriors. In so doing, she makes female autonomy and pleasure compatible, free from accusations of whorishness. This militant chastity of women warriors, I contend, is the product of Cavendish’s negotiation with gender-biased social imperatives.