시선의 교차와 다른 목소리로 말하기 - 김채원 소설에 나타난 여성 산책자 연구

Abstract

This article aims to explore the aesthetic forms of female subjectivation in interaction with urban modernity in the 1970s focusing on Kim Chaewon’s early short stories. To this end, this paper examined debut works set in Tokyo and two short stories published immediately after her returning to Korea. The concept of female flâneur, or flâneuse was used to analyze the aspects of female subjectivation in novels in the 1970s. A walk in the metropolitan city of Tokyo allows the flâneuse to acquire gazes towards themselves, but the gaze of female characters in the position of peripheral strangers in the exotic city of Tokyo is blocked by the gaze of male characters who otherize the females. This unables them to be the subject of gaze. Meanwhile, the flâneuse in Kim Chaewon’s short stories set in Seoul refuses to be a consumer subsumed by the logic of capitalism and fascinated by products, and reveals her desire to establish herself as an aesthetic subject. The crossdressing of a flâneuse aspiring to become a poet uncovers the anxiety of becoming a female author obstructed by the male-centered mainstream literary field and firmly established literary history and tradition. In this regard, the female-to-male crossdressing has the meaning of a strategy to circumvent the pre-existing order of the literary field through parody. In order for females, as subordinate subjects, to become speaking subjects, they have no choice but to use ambiguous and hybrid language. The subjectivation of females as subects of gaze and aesthetic subjects requires an ethics of listening that delicately reads the hybrid language utilized by the female subejcts. Therefore, Kim Chaewon’s early novels, which were not sufficiently illuminated due to the dual constraints of being a female modernist, can be reevaluated as dealing with the aspect of female artist’s subjectivation through modernist aesthetic practice that developed across the border between metropolitan Seoul and Tokyo.