페트라르카의 전통에 대한 도전: 존 던의 『엘레지』에 그려진 여성의 몸

The Challenge to the Petrarchan Tradition: The Body of Women in Donne’s Elegies

  This paper aims to examine the challenge to the Petrarchan tradition and authority by de-idealizing woman in Donne’s Elegies. The Elegies contain some of Donne’s most outspoken and unconventional love poems. Donne’s Elegies vary in their attitudes toward women and sexual love. Some elegies present women as objects of revulsion and nausea. They defy conventional authority of parents, fathers, husbands by showing illicit or socially disapproved relationships. Donne imitates Ovidian love elegy, so his elegies are realistic and focus on sex and the female body. Donne’s elegies represent women not as idealized creatures, but as low and impure creatures. There is a persistent misogyny in many of his elegies. Donne satirizes Petrarchan idealization of women, and rejects classical representations of the female body. Through a debasement of women, Donne parodies and subverts Petrarchan conventions of praising female beauty in the “Elegy 2: The Anagram” and “Elegy 8: The Comparison.” Both are based on the contrast between female ugliness and beauty, and filled with plenty of unpleasant detail. The woman in the poems is frequently ugly and deformed. These elegies has the political dimension involving power transactions between men and women. In his treatment of love, we can find the public world and the private world are so intimate and often inseparable, and his elegies possess a politically subversive potential. With his anti-Petrarchanism, we can also read Donne’s dissatisfaction with the rule of a female monarchy in these elegies.