강경애의 작품 속에 나타난 계급의식과 여성성의 길항관계

Abstract

Even though Kang is a woman who has acute observation and delicate sensibility, she can not get out of idealism and schema when she stick to class consciousness. This is because desperate reality of poverty that she experienced in her childhood or in Kando is something different from ideological concept she acquired through study. Feminity could not also be shown in full when her writings were based on ideology of class which let to reality of bias. However, when they were based on her feminine experiences, her observation and sensibility are well revealed. Eagerness towards humane life through her writings from experience shows how consciousness of others as a woman worked properly in the relationship of antagonism with class consciousness in her times. In her early pieces like [Pagum] and [Vegitable garden], it brings sudden endings of story due to trials to set her ideas into the reality not to show enough course of event through her experience or sense. There also exists discrepancy between her description of circumstance and class consciousness which proves her sensibility of feminity could not be fully displayed under her idea of class. After some criticism on her early writings for ideality and schema at the time, she wrote [Salt] which she described extreme poverty through her own experience and acquired considerable positive comments. And this led to her writings more based on experience covering class consciousness. [Human problem] also covers class consciousness telling a woman’s alienation due to violence of patriarch and sexual suppression. Her endings become more realistic, not in schema or idealistic, when her characters newly realize her own reality. [The woman] and [200 Won, as a fee of an article] show characters going though introspection of human initiated by class consciousness and Kang showed reflection of her own experiences. In [Salt], Kang described a woman’s consciousness fell into contradiction between economic poverty and her position of the time. The character has to fight for her reality of poverty but also for typical recognition of woman in feudalism. She showed desperate poverty through a man who became regardless of other people due to his circumstances in [Underground town]. In Korean literature, Kang was the most successful to show class consciousness together with woman’s experience. She was very insightful in her low class life but again, specific in experience as a woman. Identical life style of every women in the time Kang lived, which consists of man’s violence, alienation, maternity to overcome those defects of their lives, is fully revealed in Kang’s writings.