초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims to examine how sexual desire is dramatized in Shakespeare‘s Measure for Measure, especially in the context of ascetic Puritan theology in 17th-century England. The focus is on (1) the production of Puritan subjectivity from the perspective of the Lacanian Symbolic order and also on (2) the maintenance of the social order in early modern England by controlling the sexuality of the docile and self-denying Puritan subject and simultaneously containing sexual energies in the institutionalized space of marriage. As a self-righteous puppet, Angelo mistakes his fictitious Puritan identity of humiliated and depraved selfhood as true and genuine, but when his repressed sexual desire returns, he simply collapses with the most horrific and traumatic awareness of his dual nature. The constant strife between the stoic Puritan self and the repressed sexual desire seems to characterize the split psyche of the Puritan Angelo and the saintly but “precise” Isabella.
Puritan subjectivity, sexuality, Symbolic order, self-denial,social order, family
