1960년대 북한소설의 철도 모빌리티와 젠더 표상: 식민지 대중동원 텍스트와의 비교를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper aims to examine gender symbolism of railroad mobility in North Korean fictions during the Chollima period, such as Byeonghoon Kim's 「Letters from ‘Haeju-Haesung’」 (1960), 「Fellow Travelers」 (1960), and Jeongwoong Kwon's 「Garden Zinnia」 (1960), by comparing and analyzing the colonial propaganda texts, including Deokjo Jang's 「The Day of Departure」 (1943) and Jeonghee Choi's 「Wild Chrysanthemum」 (1942). Just as the wartime mobilization system of the empire, railroad mobility in North Korean literature served as a means of public transportation that supported national construction and as a symbol of encouragement to “push forward” the people to move toward the future of the company. However, although the Chollima movement assigned female workers to railroad construction sites under the slogan of “the equality of a new Joseon with no discrimination between men and women”, it was unable to completely break away from the gender hierarchical structure that had existed since colonial times. In this article, the aspects of the mass mobilization campaign during the colonial period/ Cheollima period are broadly identified through texts such as propaganda films and songs. And by focusing on the railroad mobility and gender representation shown in the above North Korean fictions, this article analyzed 1) what position women secured under North Korea's mass mobilization campaign to achieve the goal of post-war recovery and economic construction and 2) how fictions in the Chollima period has embodied male and female body that acquires permanent status or disappear on the line of the campaign. In the literary works, women placed as the material and emotional foundation for men advancing into the future on the train had to be fixed in the ‘normative place and viewpoint’ of motherhood or transformed into immovable plant-nature symbols even after they completed their roles. As such, the research on female characters in the Chollima period's literacy that stood them at a different conclusion from the male subject is significant in that it catches the gender politics in North Korea's mass mobilization campaign and provides implications for examining the postcolonial nature of North Korean literature.