초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Using the concepts of Avery F. Gordon’s “ghost” and Marilyn Francus’s “spectral motherhood” as a set of analytical frameworks, this paper examines Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724). It also uses Judith Herman’s “revenge fantasy” to effectively conceptualize the trauma of the birthmother and implicitly decipher the psychological presentation of Roxana’s traumatic memories and anxieties. In doing so, this paper reconfigures the traumatization inscribed in Susan’s death and her ghost, Roxana’s maternal absence, and spectral motherhood within the social and historical context of eighteenth-century Britain and its literature. As Gordon asserts, the ghost represents a loss. Roxana’s early traumatic experience of surrendering her children and her loss of birthmotherhood manifest in a revenge fantasy enacted upon Amy, the Landlord, and Susan, which is closely linked to the traumatic memories of maternal loss and unacknowledged grief of the birthmother. This paper reconfigures Susan’s ghost through the lens of Herman’s revenge fantasy; also, by recapitulating Roxana’s maternal absence through Francus’s spectral motherhood, it points at and highlights the site where the unspeakable speaks and the invisible becomes visible.
