길먼과 글쓰기: 새로운 가정성 제안을 통한 여성주체의 치유 모색

초록

Arguably, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s whole life was a process of struggling against her deep-seated anxiety about losing her mind, vividly fictionalized in her famous short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Through her writing, however, Gilman tried to cope with her trouble caused by oppressive domesticity imposed upon women. Furthermore, Gilman saw her trouble not only as her own, but also as that of women of her day. In this respect, writing provided Gilman with the opportunity to depict alternative ways of defining domesticity. This paper examines how Gilman’s writing becomes a tool for healing woman’s plight by reading some of her short stories and poems. In these works, Gilman portrays how women are in the state of lethargy and tiredness in the idealized space of the home which was in effect the locus of women’s oppression. Gilman presents alternative ways of looking at the long-held conventional ideas about domestic womanhood, of revising the distinctions between male and female roles, and of advancing radically new plans of domesticity. Ultimately, writing these works functions as a therapeutic process for Gilman in which she freely creates a fictional space where formidable cultural prescriptions of domesticity are adjusted and remodelled, and readers are in turn invited to share the process of healing the invalid status of womanhood.

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