버지니아 울프의 『등대로』에 나타난 모성과 예술성

Maternity and Art in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

This paper examines the ambivalent relationship between Lily as a daughter and Mrs. Ramsay as a mother, by borrowing Melanie Klein's theory of a mother-child relationship. Klein argues that the child's development involves the synthesis in the conception of the mother figure as both "good and bad." In the paranoid-schizoid position (during the first three months), the child has experiences of splitting into what it feels is good and what it feels is bad. When its mother is bad, the child "cuts her piece, or poisons" its mother. In the depressive position (around four to six months), the child's destructive feelings create guilt, while its aggressive feelings turn to love. The view of the mother is synthesized as a whole person who has both good and bad qualities. This dialectical relationship of pleasure and distress is paradigmatic of a later relationship. Klein's scenario, which starts with a lost mother (bad mother) and concludes with a reunion, resembles the pattern of Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Lily experiences both good and bad maternal bond in the relationship with Mrs. Ramsay. Lily feels her body mingling with that of Mrs. Ramsay. Inherent in this love, aggression is intense. When Mrs. Ramsay is willful and commanding, Lily feels angry and aggressive toward her. Klein's essay on the anxiety of the painter Ruth Kjar traces a painting to the desire to repair a maternal image. Kjar's chronic feeling, that comes from the sense that "something was lacking in her body," is intensified with the loss of a mother, yet she succeeds in filling the empty external and internal spaces by painting a mother figure. Like Kjar, Lily replenishes herself by reconstituting Mrs. Ramsay, leading her to finish her painting.