역사화된 삶과 젠더적 삶: 환상의 파열 지점으로서의 젠더 —한무숙 소설을 읽는 하나의 관점

Abstract

Han Mu‐sook represented one of the few women writers in South Korea’s literary field for almost four decades since 1945. Being called “Gyu‐soo”—a woman member of noble family—writer, she was famous for her life as a wife, a mother and a daughter‐in‐law from the patriarchal aristocrat family, even though she grew up as a beneficiary of early modern woman education. This double identification of hers put her on the spectrum in-between conformity to or resistance against male-centric ideology. This article tries to re-examine the factor of past, the problematic element of her novels. Han’s stories tend to illuminate the present feelings of characters which were dealt not with by individual’s dimension but by historical context. One can find an inclination in her works to “historicize” human emotions and psyche. In this regard, her novels shed light on characters’ gendered lives from the viewpoint of historicism which emphasizes that all subjects exist in their historical conditions. Especially, Han finds the gendered life a place to reflect that colonial/post colonial subject’s fantasy of “ego-ideal” collapses. In the history of modern Korea, the effort one tries to identify themselves which had various structural limits of accomplishing social approval tend to highly depend on the ideal gender image. Her historical point of view rediscovers in the history of modern Korea that gender functions as one of the most central spheres which subject can materialize their ego ideal.