“A Peculiar Case” of a Woman’s Writing in Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons

초록

Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons makes a challenging case to those who approach it as a typical ‘women’s literature.’ Stoddard’s portrayal of the main character Cassandra Morgeson deviates from nineteenth-century women writers’ conventional representation of a heroine. Cassandra is an individual who finds its integrity in relation with a family, whereas the typical Victorian heroine is a singular figure fighting against society’s prejudices against her gender. Scholarly failure in grasping the atypicality of Stoddard’s authorial intention leads to continuous marginalization of her work from the literary tradition, either patriarchal or matriarchal. This paper takes that failure seriously and proposes to read The Morgesons as a metafictional story that at once reflects women-centered interpretations of women’s writing and exposes their limitation. It examines how Cassandra understands a notion of self in close interaction with other selves within a familial setting and how she searches for a symbiotic mode of different selfhoods through which individuality and communality do not conflict one another but prosper together. The paper ultimately argues for the necessity of liberating our reading of women’s writing from gender constrictions and conceiving an alternative methodology of appraising individual texts for their ‘peculiar’ qualities.

키워드