여성작가가 재현한 ‘신여성이라는 현실’ -이선희,박화성, 강경애를 대상으로-

Abstract

Lee Sun Hee, Park Hwa Seong, and Kang Kyeong Ae are female writers who lived contemporarily in the 1930’s. However, the ways they represent female writers (modern women) in their works are distinct. They are reproduced as a girl or a snob who needs enlightening, or they are embodied as a modern individual who concentrates on the personal desire and inner side. Park, Hwaseong did not take down the rumors of female writers who had been discussed on such negative episodes as love stories, extravagance,and vanity in the 1930’s. She, however, failed to show a modern woman who longed to break away from the contemporary culture of patriarchism. The modern woman that Kang, Kyeongae showed corresponds to the image of modern women as a figure of mockery and hostility which was presented on the media of the 1930’s. A woman who does not know self-reflection and possesses intellectual vanity is an aspect of the contemporary female writer that Kang captured. Park and Kang were female writers who received new education, but they do not reveal any particular stance on modern women as a human being in their works. What is important to the modern woman in Lee, Sunhee’s works that have been said to expose bourgeois sentiment is her own desire, emotion,and inner variation. The modern women represented in Lee’s works incarnate ambilaterality of urbanites who had to live in colonial modernism;that is, they bask in the modern culture but they feel a sense of alienation and solitude due to the fact that they cannot actually have it. The perspective of the female writers’ in the 1930’s on modern women is starkly reflected on the modern women’s eyes that view Joseon’s penurious life (and space). Park’s modern woman accepts the reality of Joseon’s lower class in a surprised and educational way, whereas Kang’s modern woman hierarchizes it into a disparate space where people cannot live and therefore she should not belong. Meanwhile, for Lee’s modern woman farming and fishing villages are not a space for life and living, but they are just a background (nature) on which an individual’s desire and ego are projected. For bourgeois modern women, engrossment in themselves (their desires) is equal to life and livelihood, and thus the outside world cannot be considered significant. Their reality was different from that of Joseon’s general public.