여성 소설에 나타난 ‘병원’ 공간 연구－‘산부인과’와 ‘정신병원’을 중심으로

Abstract

Diseases in literature can metaphorically be perceived as life, qualification of humanity or social and political aberration. Especially, there is a similar aspect between novel and medical science which both can begin as pain but hoping to be end in cure. While an author is exposing the affected area of the age through characters' diseases from a literary work, a reader desires healing through the visualized affected area. Thus, an approach to the characters' diseases or the pathology of diseases is a crucial key to interpret a work in literature. Therefore, hospital is regarded as an important symbol in literary writings in which characters suffer from their diseases and cure their diseases at the same time. Furthermore, women's diseases are consumed as means of assuring self-alienation.That is to say, sexuality which can be the intrinsic value of females, be accessed from the question of “uterus”. Because, the uterus has always been supervised by males through modern hospital space. The hospital space in female authors' works are mainly obstetrics and gynecology in which the suppression mechanism can be is verified. Females are controlled and disciplined by dominant discourse which forces females their feminity as “Mother” through obstetrics and gynecology. Moreover, females who refuse and stand up to oppression are isolated from society and confined to a psychiatric hospital. The hospital space in female authors' works are an effective passage to reveal the fact that how males suppression controlled females' body and oppressed females desires. Therefore, this manuscript examines the meanings of obstetrics-gynecology and psychiatric hospital from the works of Korean representative female writers such as Park Wan-Seo and Oh Jung-Hee. Accordingly, these hospital space are not the place in which females' bodies and minds are managed but the place in which the females are connected the uterus that shows females own their ‘sexuality’.