Childhood Trauma, Femininity, and the Asian Other

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

  This essay is intended to address De Quincey’s politics of the unconscious. In his confessional writings, he pioneers the workings of the unconscious even before Sigmund Freud. In order to explain the unconscious, De Quincey introduces two terms: “involute” and “palimpsest.” He uses the former to argue for the convergence of different events making appearance in his dreams; in other words, he introduces it to give account to a sudden juxtaposition of “vagrant” “digressive” episodes. The latter, on the other hand, indicates the temporal version of “involute.” The word “palimpsest” is a metaphorical term through which De Quincey explains the relation of the origin of his sufferings to its later modifications. While revising the 1821 Confessions in 1856 and writing Suspiria de Profundis as the sequel of it in 1845, De Quincey gives special attention to the operations of the unconscious as a kind of “palimpsest.”   De Quincey places the mutual involution of feminine love and sublimity at the heart of his unconscious. While he assigns the former to the English, he assigns the latter to the Asian other. As a male-imperialist, De Quincey makes an imaginative control of two marginal others-females and Asiatic others-in his dreams, so that they can fit the flow of his male-imperial desires. They take charge of respectively pleasure and pain, beauty and sublimity, love and politics, and Britishness and otherness. In his unconscious as compared to “palimpsest,” the two elements of English femininity and the oriental other reemerge repeatedly by transforming themselves. Thus, for instance, the antagonism of his dead sister Elizabeth and the excessively lively oriental climate during childhood is transferred into the opposition of his meetings with Ann and a Malay during adolescence. They are apparently in stark contrast with each other, but serve the efficient circulation of De Quincey’s male-imperial desires.   The tension of feminine love and oriental sublimity becomes remarkably mitigated as De Quincey revises the 1821 Confessions in 1856. In an essay added newly to the 1856 Confessions named “the Daughter of Lebanon,” the Asian other represented by the title character is portrayed as being feminized and christianized, and thus anglicized. The Christianization of the Lebanese woman is fastened to British advantage over China accompanied by two Opium Wars during the mid-nineteenth century.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. Introduction Ⅱ. The De Quinceyan Structuralization of the Unconscious Ⅲ. De Quincey and the Politics of Palimpsest : The Feminization and Racialization of the Unconscious Ⅳ. Conclusion Works Cited Abstract

참고문헌 (Reference)

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