Abstract

이진아   "변화의 칸토"에 나타난 자아 위기     101 ~ 126   Medieval and Early Modern English Studies Volume 25 No. 2 (2017)
        [Jin-Ah Lee   The Self in Crisis in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie]

Noting that Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos registers the general crisis and change of Europe in the early modern era and the poet’s perception of it, this paper illumines the poem with the concept of self, and shows that the subversive claims of Mutabilitie anticipate the dissolution of Spenser’s Christian-Platonic idea of self and the emergence of new self-concepts since the 17th century. Mutabilitie is a precursor of Decartes, Locke, and their successors in the discussion of self and identity. Her shaking of the extant hierarchy of the Aristotelian and the Christian-Platonic world in turn affects the microcosmic world of humans and disturbs the foundation of human self. Mutabilitie’s views of human beings and life and death contain an early modern germination of the ideas of modern self, the self-concepts that would dismantle Spencer's firmly believed non-material, immortal, divine substance of self. Her subtle mentioning of mind, not soul as the immortal constituent of a person, foreshadows Descartes’s choice of mind as the core of self and identity. Mutabilitie denies the existence of eternal soul after death, materializing self. This materialization of self is parodied in the act of Faunus, who has made the divine chastity of Cynthia a voyeuristic object. Mutabilitie’s disclamation of the existence of soul after death predicts Locke’s idea of self which puts consciousness at the center of self and identity without consideration of the immortal substance of person. Her doubt of any immortal, immutable constituent within human beings could be related even to the post-modern ideas of no-self or an unimportance of identity.

Keywords

에드먼드 스펜서, "변화의 칸토", 자아, 자아 위기, 플라톤, 데카르트, 로크
Edmund Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, self, self-crisis, Plato, Decartes, Locke