The Alienation of Caring and Domestic Labor and Woman's Space: Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and James Joyce's "Evelyne"

돌봄/가사노동의 소외와 여성 공간 -도리스 레씽의 「19호실」과 제임스 조이스의 「이블린」

  • Published : 2008.06.30

Abstract

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri find in women's caring/domestic labor a potential for producing affects, relationships, and forms of communication and cooperation in the family and in the community. Caring/domestic labor in their view is biopolitical in that it directly produces social relationship and forms of life. In this way, they contributed in deconstructing the fixed idea that women's caring/domestic labors are confined to the private domain rather than public one. The literary representations of women's caring/ domestic labor, however, have tended to emphasize its repetitive and confining attributes to private domains and the accompanying physical and mental alienation. Doris Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" and James Joyce's "Eveline" are the examples. "To Room Nineteen," an indirect manifestation of Doris Lessing's position as a Communist, criticizes the sexual distinction of domestic labor under Capitalistic ethic and describes the possible extinction of women's subjects who internalize the capitalistic ideology of bourgeois middle class nuclear family. "Eveline," the fourth work of Joyce's Dubliners, is another example to show the negative result of internalization of Catholic orthodox in which women are obligated to care and sacrifice specially through domestic and caring labor.

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Supported by : 부산대학교