이순의 『우리들의 아이』에 나타난 가족주의와 계층이동 욕망

Abstract

This study aims to analyze how familialism and the desire for upward social mobility are represented and critiqued in Lee Soon’s series of interconnected short stories, Our Child, set against the backdrop of Korea’s rapid economic growth in the 1970s. Particular attention is given to the conflicts and tensions that arise as the Confucian kinship-based family functions as an economic unit. The series illustrates the shifting dynamics of family ideology through the failed attempts of a declining household to achieve upward mobility, the clashes between traditional familialism and emerging individualism, and the obsessive pursuit of patrilineal succession. It satirizes material obsession and snobbish practices of social distinction driven by the desire for class advancement. Through the perspective of the eldest daughter-in-law, the narrative vividly portrays the desperate efforts of a lower-class family to emulate the habitus of the middle class. However, these efforts ultimately reveal themselves as conformist self-disciplining practices aligned with the dominant socio-economic system. The work invites a critical reading of familial centrism and the growth-oriented national discourse through the use of an uncooperative narrator and an ironic ending. The attempt to reconcile negative realities under the collective name of “our” functions as a narrative strategy that exposes the internalization of the violent growth ideology of the developmentalist regime. The significance of this study lies in its detailed analysis of the embedded power relations, fissures, and the micropolitics of everyday life within the 1970s family discourse as depicted in Our Child, while also uncovering the potential for alternative, community-oriented perspectives that transcend bloodline-based familialism.