강경애 소설과 ‘간도’의 공간적 시점

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyze Kang Gyeong Ae's 'Gando' from a spatial viewpoint. In 'Gando' as the author's autobiographical novel, speakers are different from each other in viewpoint. In the novel, the ideal and the reality, and the idea and the substance confront with each other, resultantly leading to the overturn of space or the closure of place. By using two characters, 'I' and 'she', Kang Gyeong Ae represents and at the same time severely criticizes intellectual women's superficial reality experiences and cognitive limits. The author also focuses on the apparent and hidden facets of 'Gando' which is not only a space for daily lives, but also a stronghold of the anti-Japanese movement. She takes her own strategy of illustrating both the non-existence of a space and another imaginative space, effectively suggesting a 'realistic community'. In the novel, 'Gando' is newly recorded by the bodies of women who are collectively the lower subject. Women's bodies, or 'abject' represent not only the space of barrenness and isolation, that is, Gando, but also 'contre-espace', that is, the stronghold of life and production that is opponent or resistant to the logic of Gando. This suggests that those women independently deciare their feminity by means of their bodies and that they recreate themselves into "existences of Gando" who take positive steps towards Gando. Based on her own attitudes of reflection and meditation, Kang Gyeong Ae looks into Gando and pays more attention to the unrevealed aspects of Gando. Her sympathy with the aspects is extended by way of her own imaginative, rhetoric politics. In the novel, the bodies of women who are collectively the lower subject is 'contre-espace', This clearly suggests Kang Gyeong Ae's unique feminism.