논문 / 가려진 목소리 : 할렘르네상스의 흑인여성작가들 = Voices in Veil : The Black Women Writers in the Harlem Renaissance

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study deals with the black women writers in Harlem Renaissance, whose roles have been mistakenly regarded as meager and inarticulate. Until recently, the studies on Harlem Renaissance have mainly focused on the male writers such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and so on. However, with close scrutiny on Harlem Renaissance, we could find that Harlem Renaissance was not a male phenomenon. A substantial number of literary women played significant roles: Jessie Fauset, Zora Hurston, Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Nella Larsen were among the most prolific writers of the era. But their writings have seldomly been published and remained almost unknown until quite recently. Then a questeion why their voices have been in veil was raised. This paper starts with this question, and efforts have been made to analyze the social factors which put the black women writers in a position of marginal being. The social factors which led balck women writers to be excluded and marginalized despite full participation in the Harlem Renaissance are as follows: First of all, the Harlem` Renaissance was a time when men were $quot;in. vogue.$quot; Moreover, the homosexual coterie of friendship and patronage blocked female writers` way to access to the publisher and the reader. In a world that valued and catered more to males, women writers were definitely excluded from the beneficence and the particular sphere of favoritism. Secondly, within the black society race was the first problematic and gender was the second. Amid the efforts to forge a revised racial identity, a woman who persisted in raising concersns on sexism might see them dismissed as irrelevant or trival; she might herself be perceived as distoyal to the race. Finally, in a society reluctant to recognize sexuality in most women, black women writers themselve were not active enough in making their voices be heared. Rather, they internalized their experiences at the intersection of race and gender. In Retrospect, however, black women writers could write on their own stories, disregarding the absence or presence of an audience for their works. In other words, being marginalized in the male-dominant Harlem Renaissance, they were free to describe their own plights as black women in the American society. Unlike the male writers who had tried to suit the taste of the white readers, they freely wrote on miscegenation, passing, racism, the disillusionment with northern cities, lynching and the sorrow of having chiledren...etc. Their themes range from the problems that skin color and/or $quot;passing$quot; raise to the reaction of a mother who decides to kill her child rather than have her(him) live to suffer the racial injustice. Most of those themes by the black women writers in the Harlem Renaissance have been reiterated by modern black writers. Thus, this finally makes them forebear of the modern black writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, and so on. To speak more positively, looking at black women writers enables one to see the $quot;Harlem Renaissance$quot; as a larger and diverse movement that went beyond what we call $quot;Harlem Renaissance$quot;.