레즈비언 여성주의 비평가 아드리안 리치 - ‘특별한여성’의 신화에서 ‘보통 여자’ 에밀리 디킨슨 구해내기

Abstract

As one of the representative lesbian feminist critics, Adrienne Rich’s dream of a common language has often been examined as an innately woman-centered and separatist vision for a long-silenced mass of lesbian women. Nonetheless, she has continued to get out of both the posh privilege of Token Woman granted by the mainstream critical community and the specific and discriminating position of a lesbian poet-critic in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper, therefore, looks into Rich’s critical essay on Emily Dickinson and illuminates how she tried to save both Dickinson and herself from the privileged but confining myth of Token Woman and to connect her to the history of masses of common women who have dealt with the same problems of silence, self-abnegation, depression, and a death wish. In particular, it examines Rich’s critical notion of “lesbian feminism” and “lesbian continuum” and how Rich re-defined Dickinson’s silence and slanted language not as evidences of her insecurity and ‘little-ness’ as a woman poet but as proofs of her poetic confidence as an outsider poet. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how much Rich wanted to purge the negative connotation from the word “lesbian” and to underscore “the eye of the outsider,” persistent in the tradition of American woman poets.