UC Berkeley GAIA Books Title Factory Girl Literature: Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fd5v9cc ISBN 9781938169014 Author Barraclough, Ruth Publication Date 2012-06-15 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Factory Girl Literature Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea Published in association with the University of California Press “In this highly original work, Ruth Barraclough makes it absolutely clear that marginalized and degraded forms of literary expression, like those in which the factory girl figures, are fundamental to the definition and self-under- standing of working women’s subjectivity. Written in a lively and highly accessible style, her book will be of great value to scholars of Korea but also a broad array of literary critics, social and labor historians, and women’s studies scholars.” pau La rabinowitz, author of Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America “Bringing together labor history and literary criticism in the most innovative ways, Factory Girl Literature admirably explores cultural and literary representations to illuminate a com- plex subject that would be inaccessible via more conventional sources. Barraclough as- tutely illustrates how the crucial matrix of sexuality and the experience of various kinds of violence was an integral and constitutive dimension of the history of industrializing Korea. A must-read not only for scholars in Korean and Asian studies, but for all those inter- ested in labor and critical gender studies in the global context.” jin-kyunG Lee, author of Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea As millions of women and girls left country towns to generate Korea’s manufacturing boom, the factory girl emerged as an archetypal figure in twentieth-century popular cul- ture. This book explores the factory girl in Korean literature from the 1920s to the 1990s, showing the complex ways in which she has embodied the sexual and class violence of industrial life. ruth barracLouGh teaches history and gender studies in the Korea Program at the Austra- lian National University. Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies, 4 Factory Girl Literature The Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies editors: Noh Tae-Don, Seoul National University; John Lie, University of California, Berkeley advisory board: John Duncan, UCLA; Henry Em, New York University; Roger Janelli, Indiana University; Michael Shin, University of Cambridge; Sem Vermeersch, Seoul National University; Chang Dukjin, Seoul National University The Seoul-California Series in Korean Studies is a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies, Seoul National University. The series promotes the global dissemination of scholarship on Korea by publishing distinguished research on Korean history, society, art, and culture by scholars from across the world. Factory Girl Literature Sexuality, Violence, and Representation in Industrializing Korea Ruth Barraclough Global, Area, and International Archive University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London The Global, Area, and International Archive (GAIA) is an initiative of the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the University of California Press, the California Digital Library, and international research programs across the University of California system. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Manufactured in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48 – 1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Sexuality, Violence, Literature 1 1. The Invention of the Factory Girl 13 2. Tales of Seduction 36 3. The Road to Seoul 56 4. Slum Romance 87 5. Girl Love and Suicide 113 Epilogue 138 Notes 141 Selected Bibliography 165 Index 177 Preface and Acknowledgments Over the ten years I have spent researching and writing this book, a curi- ous problem has trailed it: the book’s title conveyed quite a different mean- ing in Korean and in English. In Korea, my working title, The Labor and Literature of Korean Factory Girls, elicited groans from friends and peers, or worse, concerned silence. Factory girls had been studied, I was told. There was no hidden literature, it had all been ferreted out and published in the 1980s, and ample critical discussions of it had followed. My proj- ect appeared to loiter around the great street battles of the late 1980s, for which only those with a penchant for Leninist organizational minutiae felt any nostalgia or interest. So I changed the title to more accurately reflect the thread that guided me, choosing Factory Girl Literature instead. But this title jarred people too. The words yogong (female worker) and munhak (literature) simply do not belong together, I was told. I would need to pro- vide some explanation, to soften the incongruity and abrasiveness created by the proximity of these two words. Literature and factory girls belong to two different worlds, separated by structures that invest each of them with histories that barely intersect. I would need to address this distance before creating and running with such a title. By contrast, in Australia and the United States when I presented my work, people were kind enough to be charmed by the idea of a Korean factory girl literature. The great nineteenth-century industrial novels and the Korean manufacturing economy were equally distant here, and they had no power to unsettle an attempt at neat categorization. Ever since the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams classified the mid-nineteenth-century novels of Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli, and Kingsley as “industrial literature,” the factory girl has taken her place as a key cul- tural figure in industrializing societies. She has traveled across nations, as vii viii / Preface and Acknowledgments well as genres, to inhabit an oeuvre that spans Europe, the United States, Australasia, Russia, and of course East Asia. Yet in Korea, rather than scrabbling to gain a prestige that only literature or the labor movement could confer, working-class women, when they took up their pens to write, confessed an uneasy relationship to writing and publishing. They seemed distrustful of a taxonomy that paid homage to them for their exotic dis- tance from (and suitable longing for) culture and refinement. The relation- ship between factory girls and literature was always tense in these texts, as my friends had warned. The question, then, became how was it that some of these books, such as Kang Kyong-ae’s In’gan Munje (The Human Predicament) and Shin Kyong-suk’s Oettan Bang (The Solitary Room), classics of factory girl literature, entered the modern literary canon in Korea? Taking these problems to heart, this book examines the tensions between class, sex, and literature in Korea’s industrialization experience — reading literature, not as the final arbiter of experience, but as one route by which new subjectivities might emerge. Many people and institutions have aided in the writing of this book. My first acknowledgment must go to the Australian Student Christian Movement (ASCM) and the Korean Student Christian Federation (KSCF), who together in the 1980s ran an exchange program that sponsored uni- versity students from one country to undertake a political and religious “exposure tour” in the other. Reading though the ASCM archives recently, I learned that it was the feminist and democratic principles of the organi- zation’s executive committee that had them light upon a seventeen-year- old undergraduate from Queensland as a worthy recipient of the program scholarship in 1989. The KSCF had greater difficulty in sending female university students abroad, a reminder that in the tightly run military state of South Korea it was easier to leave university and go underground as a factory worker than to visit the sunburnt country. I would particularly like to thank John Ball, Russell Peterson, Marion Maddox, and my father for encouraging me to take that journey. In South Korea, Lee Eunju, Yun Youngmo, and Choi Jonga looked after me. This book began as a PhD thesis undertaken at the Australian National University (ANU), and I would like to thank my supervisory commit- tee for their support and encouragement and the inspiration of their own work. I thank Kenneth Wells for encouraging me right from the beginning and for giving generously of his time and expertise throughout the writ- ing of the dissertation and beyond. I am grateful to Rick Kuhn for helping me think through the shift from dissertation to book and for his friend- ship when I returned to ANU to teach. I thank Aat Vervoorn for always Preface and Acknowledgments / ix being available when I needed to discuss my work and for his thoughtful insights. The three external examiners, Seung-kyung Kim, Hagen Koo, and Laurel Kendall, gave my thesis a rigorous, engaged and sympathetic appraisal; their ongoing support has meant a great deal to me. While I was a PhD student at ANU, the following friends and col- leagues provided valuable stimulation and encouragement: Kyoung-Hee Moon, Greg Evon, Andrei Lankov, Gi-Hyun Shin, Linda Bennett, Leonie Harcourt, David Hundt, Lewis Mayo, Kirill Nourzhanov, Linda Poskitt, and Vanessa Ward.