강경애 일인칭 소설 연구

Abstract

This study takes issue with an oversimplified and schematic criticism method that defines Kang Kyung-ae's literature as an anti-feminist text based on her explicit speech at the narrative level. As feminist critics argue, if female narratives were to represent ‘another voice’, femininity should be ‘discovered’ rather than ‘evaluated’ or ‘publicized’. In this light, this study attempts to investigate the descriptive act of ‘feminine writing’ and the ‘hidden voice’ that, in effect of such, fires through cracks and gaps and recognizing it as femininity. Five first-person point of view works of literature by the author were analyzed wherein the alter ego of the author appears as narrators. The narrator of Writer’s Fee of 200 Won is often seen as a passive, dependent woman who had internalized paternalistic values. However, if her eloquent and confident voice with which she asks the cynical question of ‘is this affection?’ is noted, she can be re-interpreted as a person in conflict fighting with the contradiction of her desire to be liberated as the driver of her own life and the impossibility thereof. In this light, this novel, which is frequently attacked by feminists, can be re-evaluated as an example of feminine writing that strongly implies the existence of a ‘different hidden voice’. In all of the five narratives, internal/external-space confrontation pairs are found. The narrator hesitates between the two spaces, and the most representative symbol of such hesitation is presented in the form of ‘questioning’. Questioning not only serves as a starting point of the narrative, but also as an important motif representing the hesitation, confusion, and psychological instability of the narrator who stands at the border that divides the two spaces. Such borderline spatial consciousness and hesitation are best exemplified in Yu-mu and Sympathy. The first-person narrator of Kang feels ‘ashamed’ at his or her constant hesitation on the border. The most dramatic example is represented in Man in Mountain. The mountain man is the prototype of sub-subject subaltern, and the author deviates from her previous narrative method in reproducing this ‘the other’ that goes beyond her own scope of sympathy. At the same time, ‘I’, the narrator of the first-person narrative, is also the one who desires. While Pain has consistently been interpreted to refer to the pain of the man who is the internal speaker, if a hidden voice can be found through feminist reading, the meaning of pain can be expanded to mean that of ‘I’, the narrator, which derived from her sexual desire that is cautiously expressed. Feminist studies view that the gender that reproduces and narrates is one of the factors that determines aesthetic value of literature, and focus on the narrator as much as what is being narrated. Kang Kyung-ae’s first-person novels are all autobiographical and confessional, revealing her complex and contradictory psychology and the divided and shaken abyss of the subject. This is an effect that a third-person narrative cannot achieve and at the time the reason why female writing ultimately converges into an autobiographical form. All first-person narratives are said to be essentially an inquiry of ‘who am I?’ Kang Kyung-ae's first-person novels are also a question of a female writer who suffered from identity division and anxiety because she could not fully give herself up to a male-dominated order.