정박과 저항: 킹스턴의 『여전사』와 이창래의 『영원한 이방인』의 여성인물 연구

Abstract

This study aims at critically reexamining three Asian American women characters who are related to silence in Kingsotn’s The Woman Warrior and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker by suggesting different analytic form and perspective. As King-kok Cheung says in Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, “[S]usceptible to judgement is Asian American silence”(2). Especially, silences of these three Asian American women this study deals with are much more likely to be misunderstood for their changeless and self-defensive attitudes. The purpose of this study, however, is not “articulating” these silences. Rather, this study focuses on the ways in which those Asian women are misjudged as failures of their lives because they are just ‘confined to an image of passivity’ and ‘failed to assimilate into American society.’ Then, how could ‘resistance’ of these three Asian American women be discussed against the discourse that they are just victims or the oppressed of patriarchism and racism? First, this study attempts to discover the possibility of their resistance by referring to Foucault’s “power relations” theory that resistance is a part of power relations. In this sense, the women characters’ self-defensive reaction against unpleasant situation could be regarded as resistance at least in passive way. This study, however, goes further from here and suggests that these three women’s changeless attitudes should be reconsidered as an active resistance with regard to ‘anchoring.’ In the context of this study, anchoring means physical/psychic shelter or refuge; these three Asian women drop anchor on some places and make it a support of their own lives while living in America as eternal strangers. At the same time, though, anchoring itself possibly could be one way of resistance as well; through anchoring, those three Asian women –consciously or unconsciously- refuse to be entirely captured by the logic of assimilation, and with this rejection they seem to leave their footprints somewhere in the text. Actually, attempting to understand the meaning of their footprints is nearly impossible though, it is important because it exposes that the fundamental cause of violence which is done to these women is ultimately on the structure. Besides, anchoring itself paradoxically cracks this structure, so that disturbs discriminative and exclusive order of patriarchism and racism. In this reason, we could suggest that anchoring functions not only as physical/psychic shelter for those three Asian women living in America but also as an active resistance by bringing about reverberation effect on the network of power relations. Body of this study consists of three chapters. In chapter Ⅱ, this study deals with one woman character Moon Orchid in relation to her sister Brave Orchid in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Through reexamining Moon Orchid’s story, we can suggest that she dropped anchor on madness and anchoring functions as resistance interacting with mental asylum. In chapter Ⅲ, we will deal with another woman character quiet girl in relation to young Maxine in the same text above. In this chapter, the quiet girl’s silence can be suggested not only as weapon of resistance but also as anchoring point. In chapter Ⅳ, we will deal with the other woman character Ahjuhma in relation to Lelia, Henry, and Henry’s father in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. In this chapter, it could be suggested that kitchen, two small rooms, and relationship with Henry’s father are her anchoring points.