earticle

영어

The purpose of this paper is to examine Africa as a place for Henderson’s maturity by applying Donald Winnicott’s object relations theory in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Winnicott argued that infants can form a creative and healthy self through the environment provided by ‘maternal preoccupation’ that their mothers make to them. He also explains that good environment allows an infant to escape from dependence to develop into an independent self and to have a realistic perception. Therefore, he says that an ‘intermediate area’ is needed for stable change into an independent self for the infant. Henderson is confused as a toddler for maturity. He is not adjusting to the problem of his reality. So he tries to escape from the repeating inner voice, which is one of his problems. However, the attempt worsens the relationship with the surrounding people. Henderson, the self-disjointed and alienated, chooses the journey to find the answer to the problem in his chaotic reality. The Africa he escaped to is a space of rest; namely, the ‘intermediate area.’ It is the place for his change and maturity proposed by Winnicott. Henderson experiences the reality through contact with various events and people here. And he finds a path for coexistence and matures himself as a noble life. Finally he awakens to his self and maturity through the experiences of transitional phenomena and transitional objects in Africa which is the ‘intermediate area.’