1910년대 이광수 문학과 감정의 현상학

Abstract

Yi Kwang-su’s The Heartless has been evaluated as a typical literature of enlightenment, however, the protagonist of this work is not a hero of enlightenment but an emotional character who is carried away by his own feeling and goes so far as to fall into mental or psychological disorder. These kinds of protagonists often appear in the Yi’s works of the 1910s, that is supported by literary criticisms at that time. This tendency corresponds with the culture of eighteenth-century in Europe. Emotions and sentiments were emphasized as key constituent of human nature and valued for moral virtue such as pity, benevolence and empathy. The new theories of human nature centered on the nervous system whose role was important to all passions, sentiments and emotions. A more refined nervous system and a greater sensibility were believed to proof of the more civilized, but at the same time they were more liable to nervous collapse. Hysteria was the most representative and well-known nervous illness at that time. Those who show a hysteria caused by extravagantly violent emotions involving the vapors and the spleen appear as main characters in the Yi’s works of the 1910s and the protagonist of The Heartless is not free from traits of nervous illness(のぼせ). He whose personality is emotional even effeminate can overcome with help from his companion represented as a typically masculine man. Nevertheless, the genderization of emotions does not sweep in that work and the private emotions as the source of public value in the way of benevolence and empathy are sustained. But in the Yi’s works of the 1920s, the moralization of medicine appears widely so that nervous illness is negatively recognized as an epidemic that plagues the national character and a result of a lack of will, that is a capricious, unstable and fragile female personality.