박경리의 『토지』에 나타난 집 떠나기 모티프와 여성

Abstract

On Narratives of Travelling Women in Park, Kyung-ri’s 『Toji』 Lee, Kyung In traditional Korea, leaving home and traveling was hardly allowed to women, who were expected to stay home and take charge of all the domestic affairs under the patriarchal dominance of men. It was the reason why women’s traveling used to have special meanings in that time. This paper tries to explore into women’s travel episodes of Park, Kyung-ri’s 『Toji』. The episodes reveal various modes of patriarchal violence against women, and women’s reactions to such violence, along the way of which women characters could achieve their Buildung(growth). The patriarchal dominance system had distorted women’s homes into spaces of violence and oppression, against which women have responded by leaving home and traveling to other places. Leaving home was a kind of accusation of violence which prevailed all over the male-dominated society, where women’s travels were equivalent to escaping from the androcentric relationship. Such episodes went further: they could make valuable achievement to find out their self-identities and the world for their own lives, during and after the travel. Sometimes, their journeys posed some wide spectra of prospective feminist visions to re-construct traditional home and domestic systems. The women characters, who could make their own first progress in revealing their desires through leaving home, began to be aware of their dignities as human beings and their social responsibilities as equal members of the society. Such awareness could, in turn, make them deconstruct the existing homes, which were nothing but the spaces where the patriarchal power relationships prevailed. At this point, it can be reminded that women’s travels in the novel are not only just changes of the place of their residence, but also forms of reaction to and methods of resistance against the patriarchal oppression: Women can get their own activeness to destruct the patriarchy and reestablish their own way of lives.