1980년대 소설의 젠더적 공간 재현 양상과 그 의미-『고삐』와 『여왕벌』을 중심으로

Abstract

This article aims to examine the reproduction of Itaewon around the U.S. military base and the women living there, targeting Yoon Jeong-mo’s long-running novel “The reins” published in the 1980s and Yoo Jae-soon’s “The Queen’s Bee.” Until now, the area has been imaged mainly by ethnic literature as a “base village prostitution woman” who was given typicality in the 1980s. In particular, during this period, the literary achievements of the male subject’s reason and reflection on the plight of the people through the elderly women in the base village at the literary center will be recognized. To break through this, Yoon Jung-mo and Yoo Jae-soon, both female writers, use methods to emphasize “voluntary experiences” and “realism” in describing what happened near Itaewon. In the process, though the subject that the two writers were trying to convey was still a masculine-national consciousness, the portrayal and reenactment of the specific place sometimes seem to exceed or go against the subject. The importance of national consciousness, which is claimed by male figures in the conceptualized language in “The reins,” can only be realized through detailed descriptions of various places, including Itaewon. However, in this process, the specificity of reproduction overwhelms the abstraction of the conception, paradoxically allowing women to look into the problem of internalization by men instead of the issue of externalization that the novel intended to emphasize. The “Queen Bee” calls for women in Itaewon to have a national consciousness more directly than “The reins” by putting the character “Reforator” at the forefront of the narrative, which can be replaced as a writer. However, Yoo Jae-soon’s “Lee Tae-won Girl” symbol leads the reader in a way that goes against the writer’s voice. Eventually, the novel ends without solving this rift. “The reins” solves the problem by emphasizing the focus of the national consciousness at the end of the narrative, and the cracks between the theme and the reproduction that were not resolved in the “Queen bee” are posthumously sealed in the film “Queen bee” two years later. However, this discrepancy between the narrative and the reproduction found in the novel shows that the time and space of Korea in the 1980s itself was a multi-layered space that contained signs that could not be converged only by a single voice of national consciousness.