셰익스피어 소네트와 근대적 주체

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which the speaker persistently attempts to form self-identity as a modern subject in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144. The speaker performs the interpretative journey to discover the true nature and meaning of love. In the process of refusing the conventional definition of love and constructing a new existence of love, the speaker self-consciously struggles to fashion himself on a basis of logical reasoning and material desire representing modernity. He is placed in a complex love relationship in which the speaker, a young man, and dark lady try to appropriate love in their own way. The young man tends to idealize love, defining love in terms of purity and physical beauty, while the lady pursues love physically and consumingly, approaching love as a means of sexual desire and temptation. The love of these characters is fragmented, selfish and static. Overcoming the negative aspects of love, the speaker examines the meaning of spirituality and physicality and seeks to redefine the relationship between spiritual love and physical love in a unifying method. In the course of confirming a new identity of love, the speaker grows into the modern subject through employing a modern way of thinking, critical doubt and logical examination. Especially he establishes himself as a modern subject by proving and strengthening the value and necessity of material desire shown in “a woman coloured ill”(4). He liberates himself from the closed system of the binary opposition between spirit and body, male and female, and furthermore advances to pontificate the power of material desire up to the point which it can bring the birth of modern man. His tireless quest for modernity satisfies the training and conditions needed to become a solid modern subject. In the last part of the sonnet, he once again stands to write a new love story containing the attempts of carrying out a modern spirituality rooted in material desire. He will certainly be a writing subject. Here lies the speaker's identity as a modern subject.