This article explores how Denise Levertov identifies a woman’s double selves with the domestic gender role and artist, and works toward constructing a female identity and voice in her poetry. She demonstrates a continuity of the theme concerning the self-split in a substantial number of poems. In her early poetry books, Here and Now and Overland to the Islands, she is unable to rebel successfully against the domestic self, and her poetry remains a contradictory and problematic pursuit because of pressure exerted by culture and ideology and her own internalization of their values. In the 60’s, however, she acknowledges the presence of the self-split without efforts to submerge or deny it. Furthermore, she suggests that the split is found between the woman and the masculine-defined world. Significantly, Levertov as an artist struggles against the influence of the gender role, but she rarely portrays this self as a victim. In the 70’s, her new vision of wholeness preserves her from a fruitless polarization. She develops the maternal as a mode of women poets’ authority, emphasizing an interactive form of contact between self and others. Levertov achieves an understanding and healing that allows her to remain free of self-defeating reduction by claiming her womanliness as a necessary condition of her artistic voice and vision.
인용문헌