동성애자의 여성 재현

A Gay’s Representation of Women: A Reading of Crane’s “National Winter Garden”

Hart Crane’s “National Winter Garden” has been less studied than the other poems of The Bridge, for it is a portrayal of burlesque, a vulgar form of American popular culture of the 1920s. Though a relatively short poem of twenty-eight lines, it exceptionally positions itself as a direct confrontation with the female body, sexuality, and male desire. For Crane, the representation of woman is one of those forms of hiding, erasing, and universalizing his own homosexuality. Crane seems to reproduce the traditional role of woman as an intermediary of salvation and synthesis in the space of the epic, but constantly disrupts and destabilizes the ruling structure of male desire in a multiplication of signs and obfuscation of meanings. Therefore the poem could be read as a harsh criticism of the capitalistic exploitation of women and cultural degeneration, or as a ritual of rebirth, a way of restoring energy to the human body and saving life from death and corruption. It could also be read as both. Crane struggles to include all meanings in the one space of the text, but the fundamental instability of the homosexual condition in early twentieth-century America unsettles any unity or harmony among floating signifiers and polyphonic desires. The poem, as a homosexual text, conflicts with the traditional male narrative of cohesion, balance, and resolution. It illustrates, instead, chaos, dissemination, or uncontrollable and unsutural disruptions and contradictions. As such, it brings the reader’s tastes, values, and historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions into crisis. In this essay, I neither impose any consistent structure, or hierarchize or totalize a plurality of meanings of the text. I rather propose an inclusive reading that allows all the competing and contradictory ideologies and appreciates the discontinuous signs of deviation, deference, surplus or absence.