여성, 자연 그리고 치유: 테리 템페스트 월리엄스의 『안식처』를 중심으로

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the complex relations between women, nature and healing in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place written by Terry Tempest Williams, in light of healing effect of writing. Interestingly she gives the account of her mother’s struggles and eventual death to cancer and the parallel destruction of the Bear River Bird Refuge to the rising waters of the Great Salt Lake. In the process of dealing with pain and loss, she shifts from the observer to the passionate activist. With her loss and suffering, nature becomes refuge and offers hope of healing and more importantly, writing this book itself becomes the essential aspect in the process of embracing the changes in nature, her family, the female body, and her own identity. Through the storytelling of her past, saturated with healing effects of nature, she has rejected the masculine tradition which would encourage her silence and the obedience to religion and community. Refuge shows how nature can inform and heal a life but also the writing itself performs the healing effects, in spite of the dangers of the narcissistic rationalizaton of the self and of igniting another challenge.