1970년대 여성문학 —여성전업작가의 등장과 다양한 글쓰기 주체의 성장—

Abstract

During the 1970s, it may be said that the scope and contours of South Korean women’s literature were first roughly defined. Indeed, the work of mapping women’s literature began during this period. Although women’s literature lacked defining characteristics or an identity, this period saw the emergence of professional female writers, and for the first time it became possible to put the experiences of primarily middle-class women into writing. In short, it was a period during which the female genre was formed. The nationalist dictatorship, with its emphasis upon economic development, sought the rapid restoration of masculinity, and during this period the imaginary of the mechanical body emerged as hegemonic masculinity. The establishment of the writing subject in women’s literature arose out of the hysterical subject and the female proletarian writer, and it appears that this process was related to the rapid strengthening of nationalistic patriarchy. For this reason, the feminist voices that appeared in popular novels, which were one method of resisting the male-centric literary system, deserve close attention. We must recognize that women’s desires to make a place for themselves within the literary system and the efforts of marginalized women to speak about their experiences can be manifest in many forms. Indeed, the work of identifying and naming these voices is an important task for rewriting the history of women’s literature. Women writers of the 1970s can be considered as the hosts of various masquerade balls that took place under a patriarchal literary system in which women were not able to speak of their experiences. In particular, subjects with hysterical neurosis who spoke with their bodies can be seen as a method through which women’s literature resisted the patriarchy by inscribing the unutterable experiences of women on their bodies. This can also be interpreted as the literary strategy of the writing female subject who still lacked a language with which to express her own experiences. Moreover, women laborers, who were mobilized in large numbers to enhance labor productivity at this time, brought about a new concept of the female subject as a laboring body, which was an important topic to be written about. Although t he w ritings of t his time w ere limited to s omewhat unsophisticated essays, these were supplemented by “production” novels, which also succeeding in incorporating the experiences of the body. In addition, female writers were pioneers in the realm of popular literature at the frontiers of the literary system. Ultimately, however, these initial developments in 1970s women’s literature were restructured into the territory of ideological camps: becoming feminist and “people’s” literature, which brought new difficulties for the female writing subject.