earticle

영어

When Sarah Kane, a famous English playwright in the 1990s, staged Blasted, her stage of extreme violence amazed theatrical world. Audiences gave harsh comments on her play due to the extreme violence, such as rape, mutilation, and murder. However, her play aroused audiences’ emotional and intellectual reaction. The author made all her readers and audiences to ask themselves who they really were. In this paper, how the subject suffering from trauma becomes a whole self is indicated through Kane’s work. The protagonist of Phaedra’s Love, Hippolytus, suffers from trauma and always worries about matters related to existence, such as life and death. From the pathology perspective, trauma is caused by experience of combat, a natural disaster, and mental damage. Although a person having trauma does not want to confront traumatic events, unexpectedly, traumatic memories repeatedly invade consciousness. Consequently, trauma destroys the balance of consciousness and leads to the split of a whole self against their will. Hippolytus is one of the subjects polarized into body and soul. Hippolytus is a nihilist but his attitude toward life becomes changed through Phaedra’s death. Hippolytus considers Phaedra’s sacrifice ‘her present to me,’ owing to the fact that he gets an opportunity to be freed from his own torment. In other words, Phaedra’s death becomes paradoxically Hippolytus’ salvation. As he is eager for change and release through death, he willingly chooses a public execution by the rioting mob. He by himself experiences atrocious violence; that is, his penis is cut off and his bowels are torn out. When confronting the moment of his death, everything is suddenly connected and he can experience of becoming a whole self. Paradoxically, in order to experience the moment of becoming a whole, he has to die. His final words, “If there could have been more moments like this”, show that he recognizes the connection between the spiritual and physical. Kane’s subject is not the one defeated in his own fight. In Phaedra’s Love, even though Hippolytus destroys himself, he pursues honesty physically, morally, mentally, and spiritually. Kane’s subject does not give up oneself but longs for change and finally achieves a whole self. In a word, it is a modern subject that Kane has created in Phaedra’s Love.