earticle

영어

This paper investigates the similarities between the Paulina's play-within-the play hiding the Hermion's death on the off-stage and the renaissance women's secret private culture hidden, reading the particular episode of revitalization of the Hermione. Paulina intentionally tells a lie to protect the mentally-feeble queen as a dead and provides her with great care for sixteen years in the Paulina's private chapel. By denying the visibility of Plaulina's play about the queen's death intentionally on the stage, she leads a great repentance of Leontes to the surface at the end of The Winter's Tale with the spectacle scene of statue and gives a startling recognition that what goes on behind the scene(seen) not only to the spectators but also to the characters. The Paulina's intentionally unrepresented play-within-play has the power to reject the male oriented social discourse and subverts the system of patriarchy and offers the possibility of renaissance women's being subjective self. This subversive power of the patriarchal reality has a great similarity with the secret culture of renaissance women, “the closet” and “the gossip meeting”. They both free women from the rigid conventional gender roles embedded in the masculine codes as a means to maintain dominance over and exploitation of women on the basis of women's friendship and private talks. Though many women were into the lethargic area of imprisonment, silence and death in the seventeenth century, they wisely converted those area into their own and used them to overcome the existing reality. I think the hidden and unseen Paulina's play has the same energy to convert.