개발기 모랄의 위기 서사와 건전한 속물의 탄생: 김승옥의 대중적 장편소설을 중심으로

Abstract

As Kim Seung-ok’s 『Jane Doe』and 『Riverside Wife』are a Kinsey Reports in the Seoul style for an ideal action of Middle Class in Urban or a scandal, it is borrowing a grammar of popular narrative in that it shows a naked skin of Korean Modernity. Especially, strong sexuality of 『Riverside Wife』gives delight to the readers, which offsets felling of helplessness and tension that the fascism society brings to bear on, on the other hand, it functions well as a product of a popular fiction that can console a sense of inferiority that originates from class differentiation or can give moral superiority. This popular fiction, however, has a character of studying the philistinism of middle class that compares delight with benefit within reality, so it is beyond imagination of pornography as a box office hit. The reason why is that it visualizes a distinguished sense of calculation that middle class persuades an actual profit, which has self-governed ability of realizing identity shift, on the other hand, that it shows aberrant and improper impulse that lurks in the disordered life that loses ideal things. These popular fictions show the course of changing man subjectivities to healthy materialistic person, as they that entered into a city of desire referred as Seoul during developmental dictatorship period lost ‘female’ as ‘significant others’ that lets them know their false and gains dominative masculinity focusing on partial family. AS the title implies, in these fictions, woman is the central figure, which is very rare in Kim Seung-ok’s work, but female is different from his previous novel, she loses moral and mythical significant, so she falls into a common materialistic person or an unpleasant symbol that threatens a social order with uncontrolled obsessed-sexual desire. Female that is exiled from mythical world seems to get liberty, as getting physical and sexual body, but she is incorporated into a home that the hegemonic male subjectivity of developmental state controlled. This is also to foretell that the male subjectivities of Kim Seung-ok will be born as a patriarchal moral subjectivity, not getting self-honesty against popular interests, as losing female as a reason of self-interrogation.