『마음의 죽음』 = A Narrative on Elizabeth Bowen's Vision of Life in The Death of the Heart.

국문 초록 (Abstract)

본 논문에서는 세속적 삶의 입문에 있는 사춘기소녀 포셔가 홀로 낯선 세상에 나와 겪는 경험들로 인한 새로운 인식과 삶에 대적하는 의식적 태도를 보여주지만 결코 단순한 성장소설은 아닌 『마음의 죽음』에서 엘리자베스 보웬이 드러내는 진정성 있는 평범한 삶에 대한 비전을 살펴본다. 1930년 중반, 자신의 나이도 30대 중반에 이른 시기에, 보웬은 일찍이 부모와 떨어져 외국에서 홀로 지내야했던 자신의 개인적 생활양상과 전쟁이 연이어 발발하는 혼란스런 세상의 경험을 바탕으로, 어떻게든 세상에서 살아가야만 한다는 구실로 포셔 주변의 인물들이 드러내는 순수한 마음에 대한 비판적이며 결국은 배반의 상처를 안기는 말과 행동을, 실존적 삶의 거부할 수 없는 진실을, 신중하면서도 아이러니컬하게 묘사한다. 특히 인물들의 심리적 측면에 섬세한 관심을 집중시키는 이 작품에서, 보웬은 집이나 장소, 사물에도 심리적 특성을 부여하여 독해의 즐거움을 배가시키며, 일기쓰기와는 다른 소설쓰기 양식의 중요성을 강조하는 세인트 퀜틴처럼, 전통적 내러티브의 기대를 피하며 모호한 열린 결말을 맺음으로써 반전통적 서사기법을 구현하는 글쓰기 방식을 견지하였다.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this paper is to study a narrative vision of genuinely ordinary life in the Anglo-Irish woman writer Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart. She was the heiress of ‘Bowen's Court’ in County Cork and one of novelists trying to write from outside her own nationalty, class or sex.
Bowen showed the adult characters' attitudes and views on life, through their responses to one adolescent character, Portia. Portia experiences betrayal in life and suffers from ‘the death of the heart.’ She also loses her innocence, the loving nature in vacuo, in order to live in the real world, not to just stay in a dream wood. As Bowen mentioned in an essay, ‘Out of a Book,’ “it is not only our fate but our business to lose innocence, and once we have lost that it is futile to attempt a picnic in Eden.” In The Death of the Heart, to live means to keep illusion as an art by which we live. And it also means to uphold a sort of lunatic giant which keeps our intercourse from utter banality, as well as specious wisdoms and bare facts as Portia's diary that gave Anna a rather more disagreeable feeling about being alive.
The Death of the Heart, the finest of the Bowen novels, is not a mere bildungsroman of an adolescent girl, but a minutely well-plotted novel with so tight a patterning of characters, setting, and narrative organization, to investigate the reality of the adults more tragic than that of Portia, whose “function in the story is to be the awake one”, as indicated in Bowen's radio interview. Bowen made a significant achievement in modern fiction by writing techniques including dialogue “providing means for the psychological materialization of the characters”, diary writing in contrast to the style of novel writing, and elusive open-ending escaping an expected conclusion of traditional narrative. It is especially evident that she doubles the pleasure of reading the novel by endowing houses, places, and objects with psychological characters and human sensibility and perception.