earticle

영어

Contending that the popularity of the marriage plot is a symptom of cultural compulsion to fill up the lack that is figured in and by ‘woman’ in the collective imaginary of modern bourgeois society, this essay critiques the gender politics of conventional marriage plot structured by the myth of the phallus. Placing Henry James’s novels against this problematics, this study analyzes two of James’s novels as narratives that appropriate the conventional marriage plot to critique its fundamental premises. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) begins by borrowing some shared premises of the marriage plot but end up creating a female protagonist who, dislocated from the course of a woman becoming a subject through a phallic union with a man, becomes a “Subject” instead through a profound post-marital disillusionment with phallic masculinity. The Wings of the Dove (1902) dismantles the conventional marriage plot by highlighting the impossibility of the hegemonic formula—i.e., that of translating desire into heterosexual love and love into heteronormative marriage. Because the normatizing narrative of marriage heavily rests on the man’s phallic performance, the conventional marriage plot also ironically creates a crisis for the male subject. James points to the abjection of love, as a possibility of the subject’s emptying itself out in the abyss of desire and thus of wresting itself away from the phallic narrative that anchors desire to the telos of marriage. James’s most radical critique of the marriage narrative, as seen in The Wings of the Dove, may be found in his poignant representation of masculine subjectivity undoing its own phallic notion of self in the abyss of intersecting desires that cannot be contained in the marriage plot.