초록/요약

This essay examines how Hermione’s body is appropriated in The Winter’s Tale with her pregnancy in the first three acts and her statue scene in the final act. I would argue that her body represents a battleground for different discourses rather than one side of each conflict. With her pregnant body, she exposes what the contemporary patriarchal and Protestant discourses cannot contain, and how she is sacrificed to be a monument to relieve the male anxiety of controling a female unruly and unpredictable body. Her bodily absence seems to bring stability but results in never ending mourning and penance which does not benefit the community at all, whereas her resurrection or return to the community opens another discursive chaos not just for Leontes, but this time for audiences, too. When she moves from a statue, her body invites further discussions on differences between dead image and living human body, creating meta-dramatic moment of revealing actor’s body performing the statue and Hermione. Her body now serves as a “thing in itself” not occupied or identified yet, but does not allow a full access to its substantial knowledge to anyone but Paulina, who witnessed off-stage bodily changes Hermione has experienced; giving birth, death, and recovery. Hermione, with a female body, better embodies early modern discord in understanding human body as sign and substance.