문학교육에서 시적 정의와 법적 정의가 충돌할 때

A Pedagogical Approach to Poetic Justice versus Legal Justice in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles

Susan Glaspell’s Trifles offers an opportunity to discuss the relationship between poetic justice and legal justice in a literary text, which has been a topic of great controversy in a college level classroom. The debate over whether a murderer of her husband should have the right to earn sympathy from other women in the community, the readers, and the audience is worthy of attention, because it provides an opportunity to discuss the chasm between poetic and legal justices. In contemporary literature, poetic justice has become a relative term, unlike in the classical, Renaissance, and Neoclassical literature, since the clear binary between virtue and vice has been blurred and challenged. Jacques Derrida argues that law is force, not justice. In other words, people obey laws, not because they are just but because they have authority, and that law claims to exercise itself in the name of justice based upon its political power. Knowing that justice can be an undecidable idea which requires constant negotiation and experience, teaching a literary text must provide students with an opportunity to identify with the characters’ situations and emotions so the students can understand the author’s poetic license. Since students seemed to have hard time relating to the pains and predicaments that the protagonist is going through in Trifles, a group of four students and a professor developed a script that portrays a trial of an immigrant woman convicted of murdering her Korean husband. After the improvisational performance by the group, the students were able to understand that the protagonist's isolation and suffering are not unique to the individual, but can be a contemporary and pervasive issue, and even a case worth urgent attention particularly in Korean society.