조선 제2세대 여류문인에게 있어서 근대주체의 문제 — 노천명의 경우

Abstract

This paper focuses on how Cheon-myeong Noh, a second generation female writer, explores and gets to the modern subjects and personal subjects during the start and settlement processes of the Korean modern literature and in the midst of the irregularities of fascism and patriarchy. Cheon-myeong Noh, as a second generation female writer, had a moral ought of forming the new female subjects that were different from the 1920s, in the environment of not only being trapped in the realm of the modern nation–state but as well as of literary paternalism that tried to ghettoize through nonliterary regulations called the “female writers.” At the same time, within herself, as a graduate of a women’s university, existing were the self–esteem and loneliness of elitism. The exaggerated self-awareness for a poet-as not the national identity, not the personal subject, but as the female subject-required a method different from the conventional old–fashioned femaleness. Put differently, it called for a method that was not compliant to the system such as institutional divergence similar to one’s self within the aggregate group, obedience and devotion, or the opposites in divorce, infidelity, etc. The pronoun, “I,” often featured in Cheon-myeong Noh’s poems, is read not as a premodern femaleness that is aggregated in an old-fashioned way, but as the strengthening or hardening of “self” in the modern subject. The author of “The Daemo (Godmother),” Sun-deuk Lim, uttered this way : “The environment is the worst for the modern women of Chosun to become independent.” At the time, the absolute buzzwords for Chosun women were self-reliance, self-existence, and self-independence. Cheon-myeong Noh, unlike Yun-suk Mo who was involved in the public sector, was a poet more sensitive to the personal and existential crises. Personal loneliness and nostalgia can be seen as the internalization process called, “self-confession.” What appeared like this as the final trial of personal subject were “love” and “romance.” These were not the collective and generalistical subjects of Yong-un Han, which were the longing for one’s lover or the universal love towards God in Christianity, but was the passion as the personal subject. In other words, this was the dynamics for self-establishment and the dialectic for the subject establishment.