『귀향』에 나타난 가족이데올로기의 해체와 가족의 재구성

This paper examines the dissolution of family ideology, gender ideology, family blood ties, marriage, and the re-constitution of family members in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. The play is particularly problematic and has provoked voluminous critical responses in the sense that the heroin Ruth decides to stay with her husband’s all-male family despite their suggestions that she become a prostitute. Thus, the heart of the matter is to find the reason for her choice and what the dramatist seeks to convey. She inhabits a kind of Alaska, her American home that denies female desire and female voices. Her father-in-law, Max’s home in England is like a wasteland in which the male family members suffer from the absence of a mother-wife relationship. Pinter ultimately re-constitutes the two family members as a Pinteresque alternative family. The males need Ruth taking their dead mother-wife’s place and she needs a home which provides a certain freedom to do as she desires. The play was written in 1964, so when we think of the variable types of families that have come into being today, we can see that Pinter was incredibly ahead of his time. It is his literary practice to resist and dissolve institutionalized custom, fixed ideas, and traditional systems.