입센의 페미니즘과 프랑스의 실패한 만남 = Special Topic : Ibsen`s Feminism and Its Failed Encounter with France

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study is the second part, centered on France, of the collaborative study on the Ibsen ‘translation’ in the West and East Asia during the turn of the twentieth century. In the first study, which explored the Ibsen translation in the French drama field in comparison with Germany and England, we suggested that the three European countries actively translated Ibsen in the late nineteenth century because Ibsen responded to the modernity demanded by the European drama field in the most comprehensive way and that the substance of modernity differed among European countries depending on different demands by their different drama fields. We also paid attention to the fact that Ibsen`s dramas did not encounter the Feminist discourse in France as in East Asia, England, or America. This study attempts to answer why. The direct reason why Ibsen`s feminism was not ‘translated’ in France was the underdevelopment of the women`s suffrage movement. In France where women`s demand for voting right had never acquired popular support, feminists did not make appearance in the drama field as in England and America. Moreover, the French drama field did not show surprise or welcome at runaway Nora but rather encouraged her to commit adultery: it could not understand nor accept Nora`s ‘sexual morality’ that made her the icon of feminism elsewhere. This mentality of the French drama field, which was a reflection of the French ethos about morality and sexuality formed in the long course of French history, throws a cultural light on the underdevelopment of feminism in France. The French drama field knew very well about the feminist repercussions in Anglo-Saxon countries caused by Ibsen when his dramas were translated and performed in France. Aversion to the moralism of the feminist movement and a different moral code between Protestantism and Catholicism underlay the French critiques of Ibsen that lumped together his heroines as the ‘other’ of French women on the ground that they resisted the existing patriarchal society not by body but mind. In addition, as the manners of aristocratic society remained strong in nineteenth-century France, not only were bourgeois married women still enjoying relative sexual autonomy, but the ideology of ‘bourgeois familism’ failed to wield overwhelming influence. In particular, since the manners of the Belle Epoque were characterized by ‘frivolity’ and ‘freedom’, ‘husband-wife-concubine,’ the trio of the boulevard dramas, had greater appeal than did social criticism raised by runaway Nora. Bourgeois married French men and women did not found very appealing the feminist assertion that the sexual morality of monogamy should be equally applied to men and women.