『댈러웨이 부인』와 『술라』에 나타난 전쟁, 트로마, 여성 섹슈얼리티

War, Trauma, and Female Sexuality in Mrs. Dalloway and Sula

Through chiasmatic reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Toni Morrison's Sula, this essay proposes to perceive and analyze two women writers' "so like, yet unlike" narrative characteristics to resist and subvert violence and oppression. Simultaneously this essay examines the subplot of female friendship or lesbianism as well as its structural ad rhetorical functions in the text. First of all, as intertextual features, Woolf and Morrison resist the narrative conventions of sequentiality and causality, in their refiguration of traumatic experiences of Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway and Shadrack in Sula, shell-shocked Great War veterans. Woolf blots out boundary of in/sanity with ironic narrative of violence and oppression. Sula at every level questions easy divisions between war and peace, good and evil. Both writers refuse dichotomy and devise multiple voices and multi-layer narration. Morrison criticized the fact that friendship between women had never been depicted as the major focus of a novel unless it was homosexual and intended to invent such female closeness in sula. Woolf declared in A Room of One's Own that lesbian love could be observed in "the privacy of our own society" so it gad to exist in fiction. whether to read Morrison through the lens of Woolf or to read Woolf through the lens of Morrison, chiasmatic reading their works can afford to give the opportunity to research the aspects of multiple traumas beyond the differences of race, class and nationality.