영국계 아일랜드 여성의 거부당한 정주의 삶: 엘리자베스 보웬의 『마지막 9월』

Abstract

This study sheds light on the Anglo-Irish community’s dilemma in Bowen’s The Last September as destined to be rejected from the settlement, by examining the protagonist’s intersecting gender and national identities. Specifically, this paper focuses on the double oppression that Lois goes through as an Anglo-Irish woman who yearns for safety and stability. Danielstown, the Anglo-Irish Big House symbolizing the dominance of the British Empire over Ireland, serves as a shelter from political turmoil during the Troubles of the 1920s, but its voluntary isolation embodies the paradox of the community thematically and structurally. Lois’s feeling of exposure, originating from the surveilling eyes of both the colonizer and the colonized, is aggravated by her gender role as “the angel in the house,” which she wishes to reject. The troubling intervention with male characters epitomizes how Lois’s sense of dislocation gets intensified. Through the eyes of three men—the British colonizer, the Irish gunman, and Anglo-Irish Lawrence—who are incapable of imagining a woman’s political place out of the domestic sphere, Lois is relocated as a female domestic servant of the empire and the house. Exploring the confrontation that compels Lois to be rejected for any possibilities of settlement, this article asks for new critical attention on the intersecting national identities of an Anglo-Irish woman.