"저도 노란 별을 달지요" - 에이드리언 리치의 유태계 인종의식과 종교적 예술가의 책임의식

Abstract

Adrienne Rich is, strictly speaking, not a religious poet. She neither meditates on the religious truth nor makes an attempt to transmit her religious insights or comforting religious messages to the reader. However, she had confronted Judaism because Jewishness of her identity would claim her, regardless of her wish to be called a contemporary American poet, all throughout her life: both Jewish community and White society had constantly asked her to provide an answer to their question of ‘what she is’ and constantly attempted to hit the last nail to the identity’s coffin with what they thought she was. As some one who had lived on the border of ‘what is’ and ‘what is not,’ Rich knew that her efforts to meditate on her identity would be almost already grounded on the religious context, and knowing the fact, she approached the politics of identity with utmost seriousness. In this respect, her meditation of a bordered-identity comprises the definition of a religious act and, in a way, could be claimed to be much more religious than that of a religious poet. This paper analyzes, thus, Rich’s meditation on her own border-identity as white middle class Jewish lesbian feminist mother and tries to illuminate how she unravels the complicated thread of her identity and winds racial, class, and sexual politics into a ball of feminist historical consciousness. Starting from her essay “Split at the Root,” this paper examines some of Rich’s poems on the subject of religion and historical amnesia and enlarges the range of her feminism to feminist spirituality. Ultimately, this paper underlines Rich’s earnest religious attitude toward the act of accountability to her own self, her people, her mother country.