한강 소설에 나타난 생태학적 양상 고찰

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to shed light onto Han Kang's literary world by examining her short stories from the perspective of ecological literature. Since her debut as a writer, she has continued to show her own ecological thinking by proposing the restoration of lost life force and creativity and the directionality toward the world of mutual symbiosis beyond her rejection of male-dominant dichotomous world view and ruling discourses. The ecological consciousness in her novels can be summarized in three aspects as follows: First, her works present nature symbolically as a place that the characters leave and also a space they yearn for. The space, which is specified as the country house where the character stayed as a kid, the mountain in dreams, and the sea near the accommodation, functions as a natural space to embody an ecological world as the source of life beyond the role as a simple background. Her characters strive to move toward a utopia of natural space beyond the actual world where they belong. It is in this process of spatial transition that they reach the state of self-awareness and form and develop their identity. Nature is a spiritual base and ecological place to grant life force to them. Secondly, the characters in her novels get hurt in their relationships with others, but they try to heal their wounds by understanding and embracing others. When they learn the true meaning of love for others, they not only change their attitude toward them, but also look at the world differently, which is profoundly related to the self-realization of deep ecology, which argues that all human beings make spiritual growth when making mutual relations with others. Nature and man become one through the greater maturity and growth of ego. Finally, her novels depict the ways women escape from their painful life by becoming one with nature after being suppressed and confined by the desolate urban civilization and the tyranny of patriarchy. Women exhaust their life force in solitude, wound, and cessation of communication and restore their life force, vitality, and initiative after making a contact with nature. Their feminine principle helps to maintain all creatures in nature and society and create a space to enrich them. In short, the characters' longing for nature and nature-friendly attitude in Han Kang's works are loyal to the ecological idea of wishing for a life of man in harmony with nature. The writer also wakes her readers up to the abnormality of life caused by the exclusion of women and nature and arouses their attention to the values that people have lost and should restore. It is an ethical relation of cooperation in which all creatures are in balance and make connections with one another. Ecological literature tries to establish a peaceful community through the harmonious coexistence of the entire ecosystem including man and nature. Her novels are thus in contact with ecological literature to awake readers' ecological consciousness and pursue an ecological world view. An effort to read ecological consciousness in Han Kang's novels will be a meaningful research for an inquiry into her new and diverse values about literature. It will be also a significant attempt to examine her literary spirit closely and broaden the horizon of ecological literature.