쉬디산(許地山)의 ＜상인의 아내(商人婦)＞에 나타난 식민담론 양상 연구 — 재현과 정체성 문제를 중심으로

Abstract

The Merchant’s Wife(商人婦) which Xu Dishan(許地山) released in 1921 presented his creative peculiarities. His works were called religious narrative or female narrative, but also called Nanyang narrative on Southeast Asia. It makes us understand the relationship between China and Southeast Asia at the time and its transition under expansion of Western modernization and imperialism. Singapore and India, which were the background of this work, were colony of UK in the early 20th Century. Singapore as a kind of intermediate trade area under control of UK was the concentrated area of Chinese immigration as well as the developed region of commercial and trade. Shi Shumei史書美 argued The Merchant’s Wife showed some kind of ethnic othernization through lives of two Chinese migrants in the work. Lin Yinqiao林陰喬 who is the heroine and narrator Xiguan惜官’s husband, headed Singapore in order to recover his financial collapse. This narrative was similar to those of English fictions which some British characters left UK for economic recovery or fleeing overseas due to crime. In these narrative, Singapore and India were kinds of compensatory colonies. This is one of the othernizat mentioned above. And the other one came out from the distinctive expression and description. The former was the discriminatory expression, ‘過番(to move to barbarian territory)’ indicating his moving to Singapore. The latter was Xiguan’s descriptions of the Malaya woman who was husband’s mistress. She was described as ugly and immoral. These were two kinds of othernization, Shi Shumei found out in the work. But the colonial discourse in The Merchant’s Wife was much more complicated. The work reminds us of the ambivalence of colonial discourse inherent in Western imperialism. Literary representations and exclusions of the Xu Dishan’s works revealed how he perceived reality. I argue he intentionally excluded real lives of immigrants to Singapore. Lin Yinqiao was a successful merchant and Xiguan finally became a teacher through lots of adversities. They were intermediate status in the colony. It showed us that Chinese people had sense of resistance against Western imperialism and its expansion, and reversely, desired to reaffirmed their positions by accomplishing Western modernization, clinging to the position of their ancient empire. The Xiguan’s identity flew and changed in the work, and its process directly revealed the ambivalence of colonial discourse. Xiguan, as an illiterate Chinese woman, was sold into concubine for an Indian man to give birth to a mixed raced son, but finally learned to write with christian neighbor’s help to acquire the status of teacher. She had no hometown to return and her ex-husband was completely disappeared. And in the end, she declared she had became an Indian. Her status change showed the liquidity rather than the stability of identity. She learned Christianity and modern Western knowledge, which were effective weapons of the imperialism, to acquire the identity of teacher, but the heterogeneous and hybrid identity of Asian immigrants showed the impossibility of a fixed identity. The colonial discourse conclude that the distinction between oneself and others was fixed and unchangeable, but it turned out to be false in through Xu Dishan’s narratives in the work.