메두사의 후예들영미여성 문학텍스트의 여자 괴물 되기 = Medusa`s DaughtersBecoming a Female Monster in Women`s Texts

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

While defining a mythical creature, Medusa, in terms of feminine anger and creativity, this paper discusses female monsters in women`s texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman`s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Jean Rhys`s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In doing so, the paper attempts to answer some questions including what makes a woman a monster?, what does the female monster symbolize?, who/what defines (a)typical femininity?, and how is female madness interpreted in relation to identity, sexuality, and gender? As women`s texts have demonstrated, traditionally, a woman has been seen either as ``an angel in the house`` or ``a witch/monster`` in a male-centered society. Through autobiographical writing or writing the body in Cixous`s words, women writers have deconstructed such the patriarchal binary mechanism and empowered marginalized and silenced women with angry voice and madness. In Gilman`s The Yellow Wallpaper, against the wishes of her doctor-husband who diagnoses her illness as temporary nervous depression, the nameless wife-narrator keeps writing secretly which reveals the process of her becoming a monster in a haunted house. Likewise, in Rhys`s Wide Sargasso Sea which deconstructs Jane Eyre, a creole wife, Antoinette, is renamed as Bertha and locked in the attic of an old mansion by her English gentleman-husband who considers her emotional fragility as inherited mental illness. In the end, even though delusional and paranoid, these wife-narrators come to reject the feminine images or normality produced by patriarchal society and are reborn as Medusa`s daughters aggressive and creative. Put another way, in women`s texts, becoming Medusa or a female monster signifies transforming a silenced and subordinated female self to a ``speaking subject`` who dares to stare at men and makes new stories.