『만인보』가 호명한 여성과 그 의미

Abstract

This is the article that clarifies the substance of the image of women characters in Ko Un’s Maninbo. It is difficult to find out the outcome of focusing on women even though a number of people’s names are mentioned in the voluminous work of his 30 books. In addition, the ultimate reason this research tries to concentrate on the women described in Maninbo is that we wonder the substance of women seen by Ko Un, so called, a practical discussion producer. This is in line with the previous researches, where we tried to clarify the substance of women described by Kim Namju or Park Nohae. A lot of women are mentioned in Maninbo. The author mentions many women in the history, however, he does not intervene in their lives. Besides, he does not propose any prospect or alternative to the history that never acted positively for women. He simply tells that there ‘exist’ women who went through the pain during the historical events like the Japanese Rule or the Korean War. The narration of women who are exposed to physical or sexual violence is analogous. In Maninbo, the condemnation of the men hitting women or the women’s wrath or resistance against them etc is not revealed. The author concentrates on revealing the fact that ‘there exist’ men, the perpetrators, and ‘there exist’ also women, the victims, in the cases of violence. Through the study, we were able to confirm the significant perspective of understanding Maninbo. It is that Maninbo is the mere narration about ‘existent’ women. The women the author mentioned are the people as well as historical figures. However, although plenty of women features in Maninbo, they are not narrators. It suggests that women are only objects stared at and the subjects staring at them are generally men, which could be a problem in that there is a chance the women in the text might be distorted by the male narrators.