앨리스 쏜턴의 자서전에 나타난 여성의 몸 읽기

Abstract

This paper reads Alice Thornton's autobiography, one of the late seventeenth century female-authored autobiographies. The main interest in this paper lies in exploring the ways in which Thornton re-members her life through various sicknesses and deaths. The more specific focus of this paper is put on how she obsessively records her maternal experiences that involve pregnancy, childbirths, nursing, obstetrical illnesses, and losses of children, and how in doing so she interprets them as at once afflicting and delivering God's hands. All the sicknesses and losses she experiences as a mother become her ultimate empowerment, when she willingly submits to ineffable Providence, and they consequently become her salvation as a God's true and humble subject. The conclusion of the paper is that early modern social, religious, cultural, and medical discourses on women's unstable, inferior, and fluid body gets contested in Thornton's autobiography, due to the female author's attempt to view particularly feminine, maternal, and bodily experiences as an exclusive stairway to heaven and spiritual regeneration.