1950년대 여성시의 지형과 여성적 글쓰기의 가능성 1) —김남조와 홍윤숙의 시를 중심으로

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to investigate the topography of women's poetry in the literary community of the 1950s, examine how those poems tried to overcome the wounds of the Korean War, and discuss the possibilities of feminine writing attempted in those poems based on the works by Kim Nam-jo and Hong Yun-suk in the 1950s. In literary works whose main theme is war, female figures often represent victims. Such an image of female figures continued in the poetry in the 1980s under the structure of "absent father vs. oppressed mother and sister" or "father as an authoritative figure vs. woman as a victim." In the gender topography of Korea's literary history, the poems by Kim Nam-jo and Hong Yun-suk in the 1950s have significant topographical meanings. Their poems succeeded in depicting female figures as the representation of salvation and tried to heal and overcome the wounds after the Korean War by uncovering positive values such as "the breath of life" and "life." The late modernism poets were overwhelmed by an idea that the Korean society after the war should be regarded as ruins, that everything must be destroyed, and that there should be a new start on a clean slate. Contrary to that tendency, women's poetry in the 1950s led by Kim and Hong demonstrated a will to treat and overcome the wounds of the war with maternal force and a tree's life force. Common to Kim's and Hong's poems, universal imagination also deserves attention. Involving such heavenly bodies as the sun, the earth, the moon, and stars, universal imagination made often appearances in the two poets' works in the 1950s and differed from natural-universal imagination common to traditional lyric poems. In their works, universal imagination makes the current suffering seem like a trivial earthly matter and further helps to cope with the dismal situations after the war dominated by the dark shadow of death by forming relations with the thematic consciousness of life. Thus universal imagination in the poets' works contains meanings not recognized in the poetic history of the 1950s and deserves reevaluation. While Kim employs a tone of confession and praying, which later settled down as part of the characteristics of feminine writing, in her poems, Hong often uses a tone of determination and order that's rather exceptional. Their feminine writing in the 1950s provides clues to feminine writing later through their tones. Feminine writing in general is deconstructive writing to rebel against "male-father- language," and its buds are found in Kim's and Hong's poems in the 1950s. The tone of confession in their poems requires more detailed research from the perspective of feminine writing. In particular, Hong's attitude of ruminating upon the war's meanings through memory deserves definite attention in the overall structure of the poetic history of the 1950s in that it adopts an ethical point of view to open a door to the treatment and conquest of the wounds of the war, which was waged in the name of father, and that it allows for intellectual reflections of the meanings of war.