루시 그릴리(Lucy Grealy)의『얼굴의 자서전』(Autobiography of a Face)에 나타난 장애여성의 정체성과 치유

Abstract

This paper is designed to analyze Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face to broaden our understanding of the identity and sexuality of the disabled woman and to explore the constituting and healing potential of the autobiography. Autobiography of a Face shows her ordeal with Ewing's sarcoma of the right lower jaw, diagnosed when she was nine years old, whose treatment required years of chemotherapy, radiation and operations. Autobiography of a Face as a counter discourse offers readers insights into how the face shapes her experience as a disabled woman with a facial deformity and how reading and writing open the possibility of healing her wounds. Autobiography of a Face shows that she is forced to concede that her face is herself, because of her deformed face caused by the facial surgery, one of the medical procedures to fight cancer. Unlike the identity understood in terms of autonomy and individuality among others, the fact that her face which becomes her is not a trivial or meaningless aspect of self but a site of a culture's socially shared understanding of female sexuality. But the failed effort to restore her face to what is the normal, which serves as models against which her identity continually judges, measures, disciplines and correct itself, leads her to the healing potential of writing and reading. The autobiographical act of writing her memoir itself narratively constructs herself through the autobiographical gap between the narrating “I” and the narrated “I”. Reading and writing become the essential activity for her to go beyond the catharsis to heal her emotional wounds. Newly reconstituting herself by narrative acts of reading and writing, she is able to accept her deformed face. In spite of, and because of the epistemic problems with autobiography, and the healing effects not on the social dimension, but on the individual level, Autobiography of a Face serves as the troubling but meaningful text in the study of autobiography and healing.