키츠의 「무자비한 미녀」와 「라미아」에서의 남/여성의 목소리

Abstract

This essay shows how Kaja Silverman’s theory on female voice may explain the tendency to divest the female voice of any authority in John Keats’s poems, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “Lamia.” This study focuses on male voices that define and posit the mysterious and enigmatic female identity and unreliable female voices in Keats’s poems. According to Silverman, while women may cry, scream, prattle, or murmur sweetly in the course of any film, they have little or no authoritative voice in the narrative. Keats places the male subject on the side of symbolic Law and discursive authority. In these two poems, the female voices are deprived of authoritative speech. The narratives of the poems are saturated with conventional masculine ideologies that silence the female voice. The lady moans, weeps, and sighs, and Lamia moans, sighs, weeps, and lisps. By appropriating a woman’s voice while denying its integrity, Keats shows how patriarchal discourse suppresses women’s voices.