오정희 소설 속에 나타난 여성 정체성의 의미화 과정 연구 － 「바람의 넋」, 「파로호」, 「옛 우물」을 중심으로 －

Abstract

Oh Jung-Hui is a writer who has described hard lives of female subjects experiencing Korean society through their whole bodies. Women in Oh Jung-Hui's novels are depicted as ones suppressed and injured in Korean society which has deep-rooted patriarchal tradition. Thus, female subjects may well experience more hardships than males in the process of establishing self-identity. Characters of Oh Jung-Hui's novels pass though the hard process to discover that truth and to realize their wishes considered as the manifestation of life and the perfection of self. Oh Jung-Hui's novels excel in presenting cruel reality and esoteric truth by her lively description of the miserable conditions of female characters. The scenes representing the conditions of injured characters in her novels are so wretched and painful but have the sense of mystery and secret. The shock and effect of the injury given to female subjects are heavy and strong but the vision of recovery is only but weak and passing. However Oh Jung-Hui's novels have the plot concealing the deep narrative underneath the surface narrative, using the devices of image, style, and symbols. This structure of complex narrative ascribes the sense of mystery and the multi-layered nature to Oh Jung-Hui's novels. In Oh Jung-Hui's works, the figures of Women as ‘a injured and deprived mother’ are sublimated in the images of divine mother mourning the deserted, transcending the boundary of past and future, and bestowing both poison and medicine, surpassing the fate of female subjects under the miserable conditions of life. Oh Jung-Hui's works the complex narratives organized in elaborately textured forms made up of the narrative of injury and the narrative of recovery vertically and horizontally overlapping or embracing each other, which present effectively the esoteric theme of life and death. Thus, it is necessary that reading her novels is accompanied with the work of excavating and restoring female narratives of mother's embracing and overlapping Oedipal writings in the symbolic words. The ‘feminine’ writing revealed in Oh Jung-Hui's works, is the process which could compose together acts and events positioned on the opposing levels like life and death, injury and recovery, loss and restoration, surface narrative and deep narrative, etc.