백신애 소설의 몸과 감각

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine body-sense relationship that characters of Baek Shin Ae's novel have, who appear in different contexts, determining what the novelist intends to show in her work beyond the matters of the times and existence. In her novel, body is largely classified into three, the body of ordinary people, the body of new women and intellects and that of women that seems to strongly reflect what the novelist is. As well known, ‘body’ is the space of sense that has consciousness and mental activity implied and the base on which sex difference and gender take place. As a representation of incarnated class, body is also the place where we can look for how to cope with otherness. ‘Sense’ is the origin of most of our notions that are dependent on sense organs and, through the organs, delivered into our wisdom. Sense may be seen both an experience and an object. It is sometimes united with body and, at other times, separated from body. Sense is a live meditator that makes us understand the world and open ourselves to the world. In Baek Shin Ae's novel, ‘a little bride’, a victim of an evil custom, that is, early marriage clearly suggests that ordinary people are bodily alienated under ‘pain’ and ‘violence’. Losing the sensitive ownership of body may be seen as a form of bodily alienation. It seems that the novel intends to make us feel sympathy about the bodies of others, or those of ordinary people who are suffering disease as the most common, direct sign of human alienation. In other words, the novel intends that we should experience such alienation through our common body. In the novel, new women and intellectual men are not still free from old-fashioned gender notions. Knowledgable and powerful, those characters are relatively free in making decisions about marriage or love than ordinary people, but they fail to develop the decisions occasionally because they are still obsessed with gender ideology. Arrested by gender and body, they can't properly notice what are needed by their contemporary times and themselves. Through characters who seem to strongly reflect the novelist herself - a student studying abroad, a divorced women, a widow and so on - and their bodies as the source of sense, Baek Shin Ae seriously raises questions about the issues of sense and subject. This is the process of discovering individual bodies from the common body. Through this move, the novelist stresses that we should live as we are based on the unity of body and sense not by negating our existence, but by recognizing it and then going towards the world.