‘여공’의 알리바이와 젠더 노스탤지어 - 신경숙의 『외딴방』을 중심으로

Abstract

This essay explores the identity of Sin Kyŏngsuk’s literary works by examining the relationship between nostalgia and the space-time of factory girls in 1970s South Korea. I focus my analysis on Sin Kyŏngsuk’s autobiographical novel Oettanbang (The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, 1995). First, I examine the potential objects of nostalgic longing in the novel and how they are represented, while both complementing and challenging existing interpretations. Subsequently, I focus on the status of women as the subject/object of nostalgia in the novel as an opportunity to critic a binary understanding of gender which surrounds the concept of nostalgia. Nostalgia in Sin Kyŏngsuk’s works has generally been interpreted as directed towards the space of the premodern countryside community and compassionate familialism. Her work has also been praised as a rejection of a depraved and corrupted society as well as criticized as ahistorical and regressive. However, I argue that the object which is summoned from painful memories by the speaker in Oettanbang is the space-time of the factory girl in late 1970s and early 1980s South Korea. Nostalgia is not simply an idealization of the past. The remembering subject’s emotional longings for and ethical interrogation of the past can transform past hardship and tragedy into an object of nostalgia. Female workers during Korea’s industrialization were the agents of both economic growth and labor activism, however, it was through the signifier of ‘the factory girl’ that they were culturally alienated and violently represented. For Sin Kyŏngsuk, the space-time of the factory girl is an object of concealment and repression, as well as that which must be faced along the road to discovering one’s identity. Oettanbang can be interpreted as a conscious attempt to work against the gender stereotypes and male-centric thinking contained within the paradigm of nostalgia. It also reveals how through the repression of the factory girl’s sexuality, the author is still confined by society’s violent gaze directed at the factory girl. Oettanbang is a nostalgic reflection on the working class during Korea’s developmentalist period, a time when people had no choice but to work themselves to exhaustion under the existing socioeconomic conditions. It can be claimed that coming face to face with Oettanbang was a “rite of passage” desperately needed by South Korean society in the 1990s—a society defined by disillusionment and a sense of guilt. Therefore, the space-time of the factory girl became an alibi to verify for both the reader and the author the existence of the present.