「무녀도」읽기: 환경 비평의 시각에서

Abstract

Eco-criticism tends to be defined as “the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any literary texts” (Slovic, 27). Examining the negotiation between human and nature has tackled the field of Korean “pure” literature called Sunsumunhak. These writers advocate the purity of literature by turning their eyes to nature from socialist realism or Western “modernism.” Kim, Dongni(1913-1995) represents this flow of literature when Japanese colonial rule controlled Korean literary circles in late 1930's and early 1940s. His representative work, “The Shaman Painting”(1936) describes the atmosphere of Korean nature in a remote village near Gyeongju, the ruined capital of ancient Korea. In this fiction, Kim attempts to reinvigorate shamanism as Korean tradition against Western religion, Christianity. He treats Christianity as an unwelcome guest which persecutes shamanism. For this reason, literary critics tend to understand this work as a religious struggle between East and West. This point of view is plausible; however, his obsession with shamanism seems to divert from a religious category. I want to explore Kim's obsession with shamanism from an ecological and feministic perspective. The death scene of a heroine, a shaman, and fictional characters' and a narrator's ruined identity enlighten me that these characters are deeply connected with nature, stage, and background. Thus, I explore how human beings negotiate with the nature in “The Shaman Painting.” Then, I examine the essence of the Korean spirituality that Kim portrays here.