해리엇 윌슨의『우리의 검둥이』:여성 공간 그리고 몸

Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: Feminine Space and Body

Harriet Wilson in Our Nig represents the indentured body of a ‘free’ black woman in a northern white family, exposing her body cruelly beaten and tortured by white women who not only try to engrave the meaning of blackness onto it but wage their deadly ‘war’ against it with unspeakable racist violence. Our Nig, by putting the issue of white woman’s sexual body as well as her violence into its very center, explores the feminine space and the body of black and white women and approaches some major issues of the nineteenth-century racist discourse of the North. It is the body of a white woman whom Wilson shows as sexually promiscuous and racially tainted; it is whiteness and white femininity which Wilson regards as monstrous and destructive. And it is the brutal will of dominance of white women against the historically/culturally/economically vulnerable other that Wilson accuses as the force of ‘evil.’ Thus Wilson in Our Nig subverts the nineteenth-century ideals of feminine space represented in white women’s literary tradition, the domestic and sentimental novels in particular. Through the major female characters, Wilson not just criticizes the ideology of domestic space (home, kitchen) and the “cult of domesticity” (especially of maternity) of the time, but lets us rethink the myth of white femininity, white/black women's sexuality, and the nature of whiteness. Wilson here clearly challenges the predominant white/racist myth that black women were “innately” and “chronically promiscuous,” and that blackness means “the physical”/“the sexual”/“the bestial.” This paper examines how the violent racial dynamics of the work divides women’s body, and how their different racial and class identities make up different discourses with regard to feminine space and female body. It finally shows how Wilson subversively re-envisions the nineteenth-century literary establishment and initiates the movement of black women’s writing.