비너스의 전략적 모방

Venus' Strategic Mimicry: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis

Repression of a patriarchal discourse has been shored up by taboos that are concerned with sexuality and death. Patriarchal discourse maintains its masculine authority by fixing woman as ultimate source of tabooed desire and its successive destructive power which threatens the stability of the world. Therefore tabooed desire causes women to be seized with respect and fear or guiltiness in Ovid's Metamorphoses- taboo should be something absolute for women in a patriarchal society where men try to be predominant subjects both establishing and violating taboos at once for their own profit. However, the tabooed desire of Venus for Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis brings into question the authority of patriarchal standard supporting a taboo through her strategic mimicry. In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare adopts and transforms the figures of patriarchal discourse in Ovid's Metamorphoses in order to debunk the rigorous rigidity of patriarchal values. Shakespeare's Venus mocks the patriarchal authority when she reveals her aggressive and death-rousing desire for sexually tabooed Adonis, imitating Petrarchan male language. The tabooed desire of a woman provoking not guiltiness but obsession and violence effectively shows that the validity of taboo can be ineffective as much as one likes: taboo and its inherent patriarchal value are just a kind of man-made thing, not god made. Shakespeare borrows the Salmacis motif of Ovid's Metamorphoses to embody in Venus sexually aggressive woman trading kiss, deconstructing the motif's context of harmful woman as the source of taboo. Now, related to a market-place value variations is a woman's sexual pleasure which has been taboo in a patriarchal society. Shakespeare's Venus is also Venus and Myrrah combined, a desiring mother to display a narrow gap between motherhood and feminine sexuality. This desiring motherhood recovers the modern place of desiring female subject which has been exploited by patriarchal discourse.