초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims at reading Mona Caird’s The Daughters of Danaus, as a feminist attempt to establish a new form of Künstlerroman portraying the frustrated artist as a married woman with three children. As the most ‘notorious’ feminist whose controversial essays denounce marriage as a failed institution, Caird alludes to the Greek mythology of the Danaides, who kill their husbands on the wedding night to be punished in the underworld with an endless toil to fetch water. Caird portrays an aspiring and frustrated female artist, given no other choice than to flee from the family or to suffer from the exhausting labour of caring. Hadria, whose musical talent is so rare among the Victorian heroines, has to give up her ambition to be a composer, in order to meet her family obligations. Caird presents various types of independent women, a novelist and a social worker, more or less acceptable in their contemporary society, and goes further to raise a question of woman’s basic human right to develop her talent and to give expression to her rare genius as a musical composer. Caird, herself a married woman with a son, is a trailblazing “New Woman” writer who tries hard to make the woman’s paid work and family life compatible and peacefully coexistent. Describing Hadria’s passion and artistic ambition, with her breakthrough and frustration, Caird not only records the deadlocked conditions of female artists at the fin-de-siècle, but also makes various suggestions to help ameliorate the contemporary gender relations, throwing light on the ‘feminist dilemma’ of our age.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus, Künstlerroman, New Woman, female composer
