Cold War Nationalizing ‘Comfort Women’through the Universalization of Women’s Oppression in Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum

Abstract

Mary Lynn Bracht’s White Chrysanthemum (2018) links the ‘comfort women’ issue and the Jeju 4.3 Uprising (April 3 Uprising) and transposes them to the comfort woman Hana’s marital life with a Japanese deserter and her sister Emi’s with a South Korean anticommunist police officer, respectively. This transposition universalizes women’s oppression as it renders identical all patriarchal ideologies, from Japanese colonialism to communism, South Korean anticommunism, and U.S. Cold War imperialism, as well as all kinds of oppression of women, whether institutionalized or individual and spontaneous. To critically read the novel’s universalization, I first introduce memories of the U.S. military government’s rehiring of former Korean officers of Japan’s colonial police and members of the Northwest Youth League as the agents of its scorched earth operations during the Uprising. These memories not only shed light on the U.S. Cold War involvement in the continuity between the issue and the Uprising, but also indicate the hegemonic neo/colonial entanglement between South Korea, Japan, and the United States that exceeds the novel’s homogenization of patriarchal ideologies. In addition, I recall memories of the U.S. anticommunist policy called domestic containment to read the novel’s discursive, formal, and thematic metaphorization of the policy through its oppositional representation in Emi’s economic and sexual empowerment in the domestic realm of South Korea and the impossibility of this for Hana in Sovietized Mongolia. By doing so, I conclude that the novel’s universalization ends up as an American Cold War nationalist representation of the issue utilizing a detour through that of the Uprising.