전병순의 작가적 생애와 소설세계 연구 - 여성 작가의 글쓰기와 여성 주체 형상을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper is the result of a study of the literary life and novels of Jeon Byeongsoon, a novelist who was active in the Korean literary scene from the 1960s to the 1980s but has been forgotten in literary history, with a focus on women’s writing and the figures of the female subject. The literary life of Jeon Byeongsoon, a novelist from Gwangju, shows the writer’s original experience as a marginal person through the Korean War and the period of industrialization and modernization. Through her essays, this paper reveals the content and specificity of her literary life by analyzing her experience of crossing the gap between Seoul-centered texts triggered by the migration of her family life and texts from the Jeollanam-do region, the gap between pure literary art and women’s literature as a woman writer, and the gap between breadwinner and writer’s self-consciousness as a woman and novelist living in her time. Thus, the core of her marginal sensibility seems to lie in her worldview of distrust of absolute authority and ideology. This paper also analyzes how this sense of marginalization in her literary life, coupled with her perception of women’s writing, reveals differences in the representation of female characters in her novels. In her novels set in the 1970s, Madame Mist, Good/Wise Wife, and Unmarried Single Women, female subject figures include middle-class married women with children, female breadwinners, female bosses, housemaids, and unmarried single women, foregrounding characters with marginal sensitivities to the normatively of the family system and everyday life of the time. In Madame Mist, Madame Yoon and the wife of Jeongwoo’s brother, who works as a female boss, help Jeongwoo, a female subject anchored in the gendered norms of the family system and everyday life of the time, to break free from the gendered authority of male subjects through the strategy of demythologizing. In Good/wise Wife, Hyunju, a female subject with a different positionality as a housemaid rather than a wife within the same normatively, helps Myeonghwa and thoroughly examines the normativity of the ‘wise mother and good wife’ discourse of the 1960s and 70s. Furthermore, in Unmarried Single Women, Walla’s narrative examines the contradictions between the normatively of women’s lives, including the feudalism of society, motherhood, and women’s lives and loves. The narrative also relativizes the gender norms that subjugated women in Korean society in the 1960s and 70s through the ending in which Walla, as an unmarried single woman with children, gives her surname to her children. Finally, by examining the unique position of her literary life and novel world in the period of the formation of the field of Korean women’s literature, this paper argues that the approach to Jeon’s author and literary theory needs to be more actively investigated in the future.