안수길의 단편소설과 여성-「부억녀」, 「원각촌」, 「제삼인간형」을 중심으로-

Abstract

This paper examines the portrayal of women in An Sugil’s short stories 「The Kitchen Lady」, 「Wongakchon」, and 「The Third Type of Man」. An Sugil is not a writer who deals with women in earnest. However, it is also clear that the writer can’t avoid the problems of “Women” in order to deal with human and life problems. He established the world of fiction within the limits of An Sugil’s era, but “Women,” which appeared in this three works, is undergoing subtle changes. First, a representative example is the female protagonist in The Kitchen Lady, who is regarded as a representative figure of female suffering. Second, a representative example is the female protagonist Geumnyeo in Wongakchon, who is regarded as a possession. She was bought by her husband, who commits domestic abuse. Ultimately he packs up to leave, worried that others are coveting his wife, his property. According to Badiou, Marx saw the proletariat as “existing nothing”, in other words “the nothing that is.” The proletariat is not countable, but merely exists and serves as a revolutionary entity. In An Sugil’s fiction, women assume this status. Unlike his other possessions, she is “the nothing that is” that leads him to take action. Last, a representative example is the female protagonist Mi Yi in The Third Type of Man, who is regarded as a representative figure of an independent woman. Nevertheless, he has yet to shed his fixed image in the eyes of men. This short stories may be interpreted as offering the perspective of the exploited proletariat or the colonized, and the diasporic experiences of the people of Manchuria. When read in an analytical framework which encompasses class, history and society, the story becomes a mirror of these realities. From this perspective, when women disappears, only the type of social actor that she embodies remains. In other words, the female character is absorbed into the proletariat, who are doubly and triply exploited by a male, a family, and a community. Given the attitudes toward women in An Sugil’s era, he was unable to portray them as characters with a life of their own. In this novel, while women are uncountable, they maintain their status as trigger actions that challenge the class system. An Sugil is lacking in understanding when it comes to the lives and capacities of women, but ironically, the fact that he was able to narratively acknowledge this limitation in his works and elsewhere constitutes his underlying significance. Nonetheless women in three novels show themselves gradually changing even within the limits of their perception. Despite such limitations, when women emerge subjectively (as a decision maker of self-acts) and epistemically (as a manifestation of self-consciousness) on the horizon of life and cognition, the embodiment of man and life will see its completion.