earticle

영어

Mary, the heroin of Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing, represents the typical femininity which is located in the center of domestic ideology in America. Even though her name implies spirituality contrasted with Martha’s practicality, she combines spiritual religiousness which domesticates wandering and skeptical men and leads them to faith in God, with practical “faculty” to do all kinds of housework magically. This magical domesticity shows up again in Phoebe, the heroine of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Phoebe’s role as housewife is not only to transform a dreary house into a warm and comfortable home, but to adapt herself to others’ emotional needs. More importantly, Phoebe’s domestic femininity is essential for the community that Phoebe and Holgrave create with Hepzibah, Clifford and Uncle Venner at the end of the novel. When domesticity lose its magical power and domesticity reveals its internal paradox that it consists of two different features of emotional adaptability and practicality, magical fantasy about women’s domesticity turns into a nightmare. The ghost of her husband’s late wife in Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” is actually the real aspect of domesticity when the magic loses its power, and Ethan’s desolate life with Zeena and Mattie in Ethan Frome reflects a nightmarish fantasy about the inevitable failure of the domestic ideology based on the efficient caretaker and emotionally comforting woman.