길먼의 『핵심』에 나타나는 여성의 서부 개척 이야기: 우생학적 이상향 건설과 여성의 역할

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a period of social upheaval in America, there pervaded a common theme of a heroine's social transgression in woman's literature. These heroines act against the stereotypes of gender which forced them to remain in the house as an angel. In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman takes up this theme in The Crux. The protagonist, Vivian Lane, in company with other women, moves from the native New England town to the West in order to find the freedom to establish her identity on her own. By making Vivian geographically separated from a traditional social boundary and its limitations, Gilman substitutes the west cure for the rest cure. Introduced and widely used by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell to treat woman's neurotic symptoms, the famous rest cure in fact functioned to suppress women's defiant energy to social rules in many cases. By representing Vivian as an agent who adventurously explores the Western frontier, Gilman subverts the stereotypical conception of women. As a way of gaining women's social and economic independence, Gilman suggests housekeeping as a means for business. Futhermore, by emphasizing the importance of motherhood as a positive way for regeneration from a eugenic viewpoint, she sheds a new light on woman's biological role. By proposing utopian marriages in a harmonious community in the ending of the novel, Gilman attempts to project an alternative to social ills of her day.