임신중지 서사의 감정 각본 다각화 – 2019년 낙태죄 헌법불합치 판결 이후의 한국 소설을 중심으로

Abstract

In Korean society before 2019, abortion was clearly prohibited by law, but was implicitly permitted in reality. This situation, where anyone can have an abortion without difficulty even though it is subject to legal punishment stipulated by criminal law, ironically has resulted in abortion not being fully considered in our society. The poverty of abortion discourse is no exception even in the field of literature, so full-scale research on abortion narratives and abortion narratives is limited. However, after the Constitutional Court ruled that the abortion law was unconstitutional in 2019, new abortion narratives began to be gradually discovered within the Korean literature. Accordingly, this paper seeks to examine the representation of abortion in recent Korean novels, focusing on works published after the 2019 ruling that abortion was unconstitutional. The target works are Lee Hyun-seok’s “Even in other worlds”(2019), Ha Myeong-hui’s “When November comes”(2021), Park Seo-ryun’s “The novel”(2021), and Lee Seo-su’s “Tangled Sleeves”(2022). In particular, I would like to pay attention to the cracks that recent narratives inscribe in the ‘abortion emotional script.’ An emotional script is a consistent narrative that defines the ‘common sense emotions’ of a society, and only negative emotions such as sadness, guilt, and shame have been allowed in our society’s abortion emotional script. However, as Erica Millar emphasizes, some abortions can lead to positive emotions such as relief, gratitude, and hope. The narrow-mindedness of our society’s abortion emotional script must be reconsidered in that there is a risk of dismissing the voice of someone who thinks about abortion and happiness together as unethical. This paper seeks to confirm attempts to diversify the emotional script of abortion narratives shown in recent Korean novels by examining four recent works dealing with abortion and Erica Millar’s discussion.