김태원: 골방연극, 모방, 혼종성: 마가렛 카벤디쉬의 ｢쾌락 의 수녀원｣과 성의 정치 pages 49 ~ 74   
     [Kim Tae-won: Closet Drama, Mimicry, Hybridity: Gender Politics in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure]    


Abstract

Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure was presumably written during her banishment, though having been published in 1668, so that many scholars tend to see it as a closet drama. As one of the favorite genres for women playwrights in early modern England, the genre of closet drama offered them with a unique venue for self-expression and critical engagement with the social order of patriarchy. When the heroine of Cavendish’s play decides to lock herself and her female companions into a convent, it becomes apparent that the closet goes beyond the simple setting of dramatic action and rather enables the playwright to introduce a flurry of thematic, generic, social implications into the dramatic representation of female seclusion. And the way in which Cavendish employs the genre of closet drama, I argue, is deeply entangled with how she precariously positioned herself as a Royalist woman writer during the interregnum period and beyond, and how she steers her drama between conflicting forces. While assuming the form of closet drama, The Convent of Pleasure constantly invokes Shakespeare and his oeuvres as the major source of imagination and thus, with the borrowed authority, establishes her as a serious playwright. But at the same time, her unique way of mimicry and hybridization seems to fragment Shakespeare’s forms and images and thereby paves way for the presentation of herself as an authentic, genuine writer. In order to explain the ways in which Cavendish engages with Shakespeare’s authority and takes advantage of the inherited theatrical forms, this essay introduces Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry and hybridity. Drawing upon the Bhabha’s concepts in reading her dramatic strategies, I attempt to investigate the crisscross of closet drama and public theatre in the play, as well as the authorial engagement with the patriarchal and heteronormative order, in envisioning and representing the obverse side of the contemporary social structure.


Key words

마가렛 카벤디쉬, 󰡔쾌락의 수녀원󰡕, 골방연극, 모방, 혼종성, 호미 바바, 셰익스피어, 성정치, 수녀원

Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure, closet drama, Homi Bhabha, mimicry, hybridity, William Shakespeare, gender politics, convent