Communicating Female Voicelessness

Eunah Kim Communicating Female Voicelessness

Communicating Female Voicelessness A Feminist-Narratological Study of Pak Wansô's Short Stories from the 1970s

Eunah Kim

ISBN 978-91-7911-322-3

Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies

Doctoral Thesis in Koreanology at Stockholm University, Sweden 2020

Communicating Female Voicelessness A Feminist-Narratological Study of Pak Wansô's Short Stories from the 1970s Eunah Kim Academic dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Koreanology at Stockholm University to be publicly defended on Saturday 28 November 2020 at 10.00 in aulan, hus 4, Kräftriket, Roslagsvägen 101.

Abstract Communicating Female Voicelessness. A Feminist-Narratological Study of Pak Wansô’s Short Stories from the 1970s. This study focuses on seven short stories written by the South Korean author Pak Wansô (1931-2011) in the 1970s. Pak was one of the most established contemporary female authors in South Korea. Not only did she describe her painful experiences of the Korean War, she accurately depicted a country experiencing major socio-economic and cultural transformation and how that affected the lives of middle-class women. When Pak made her literary debut in the 1970s, she was one of the very few female writers in a male-dominated literary scene. Pak had to find ways to legitimise her right as a woman, a social group that had been marginalised and was almost absent in public debate, to be heard and make her depiction of women’s experiences and interests important. For the analysis of Pak’s short stories from the 1970s, a feminist-narratological approach, inspired by the American theorist Susan Sniader Lanser, has been chosen. Feminist-narratology was a part of the reconceptualisation of narratology which occurred in the 1980s, recognising the connection between gender of the author/narrator and narrative form. In order for an author or a text to gain authority it must respond to different types of audiences, readers, social norms and aesthetical values and power relations within the cultural sphere. Thus, when studying the narrative voice or the point of view in a text one has to consider that it not only carries a certain message but the narrative technique itself is an expression of ideology. The study demonstrates that one essential component in Pak’s stories is the use of a homodiegetic narrator, and the stories are focalised through the female protagonist. The narrator/main character is telling her own story, so she has the possibility to analyse and reflect on her experiences. When it comes to women’s roles as authors and narrators, the issue of absence is also important. Authority can be given to a particular point of view by repetition and emphasizing a single character’s stance. To gain authority can be a subversive act by a female author/narrator in a context where women, due to their subordinate position, have been marginalised and silenced. By focusing on strategies addressing the narrator and by highlighting certain narratological devices, the study argues that Pak communicates the narrator’s point of view and the story’s ideology through narrative technique.

Keywords: Pak Wansô, South Korean Women’s Literature, South Korean Literature in the 1970s, Feminist Literary Theory, Feminist-Narratology, Susan Sniader Lanser, Narrative Voice.

Stockholm 2020 http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-185832

ISBN 978-91-7911-322-3 ISBN 978-91-7911-323-0

Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies

Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm

COMMUNICATING FEMALE VOICELESSNESS

Eunah Kim

Communicating Female Voicelessness

A Feminist-Narratological Study of Pak Wansô's Short Stories from the 1970s

Eunah Kim ©Eunah Kim, Stockholm University 2020

ISBN print 978-91-7911-322-3 ISBN PDF 978-91-7911-323-0

Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2020 To my father who spurred my interest in literature

Acknowledgements

Writing this thesis has been a long, arduous and at times lonely process, and I could not have managed without the help, support and encouragement from colleagues, friends and family. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Professor Sonja Häussler for guiding me through the challenges of writing this thesis. With her extensive knowledge and great experience, Professor Häussler has been my pillar of strength. Her patience and commitment have gone way beyond what one can expect from a supervisor. I cannot thank her enough. My special thanks also go to my co-supervisor Professor Emeritus Anders Cullhed for always showing up at our supervision sessions with enthusiasm and for giving me insightful feedback. I would also like to thank Professor Emeritus Staffan Rosén who was my professor when I was an undergraduate student. He saw my potential and encouraged me to pursue an academic career. My sincere thanks go to Dr Marina Ludwigs at the Department of English, Stockholm University, for giving me valuable feedback at my final seminar. I am grateful to Professor Monika Gänssbauer and Dr Stina Jelbring at the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, Stockholm University, for reading my manuscript and pointing out areas in the thesis that needed further explanation. To my friend Dann Ling Zhang, thank you for taking the time to read my thesis and offering constructive criticism. To my fellow colleagues at the Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies, Stockholm University, thank you for your helpful comments at seminars and for cheering me on. This project has partly been funded by the Korea Foundation and the Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus Foundation. Research travel was made possible by grants from the Swedish School of Advanced Asia Pacific Studies (SSAAPS) and Stockholm University scholarship trusts, the John Söderberg Fund, the Lydia and Emil Kinander Fund and the Rhodin Fund. Thank you for your generosity. Last but not least, my heartfelt thanks go to my family for standing by my side through this long and bumpy journey. This thesis would not have been possible without your love and support.

Stockholm, October 2020

Eunah Kim Contents

1. Introduction ...... 1 2. Biography of Pak Wansô...... 4 3. Previous Research ...... 15 4. Theoretical Outline and Methodology ...... 32 5. The Development of Modern Korean Women’s Literature...... 45 5.1 Korean Women’s Literature Before 1945 ...... 45 5.2 Women’s Literature After Liberation Until the 1970s ...... 53 6. South Korean Literature in the 1970s ...... 58 7. Women in the Industrial Period of the 1970s ...... 63 7.1 Close Reading of “House of Bubbles” ...... 66 7.2 Close Reading of “Identical Apartments” ...... 76 7.3 Close Reading of “An Outing” ...... 86 7.4 Close Reading of “A Walker with a Camera”...... 99 8. Pak Wansô’s War Literature of the 1970s ...... 108 8.1 Close Reading of “In the Realm of the Buddha” ...... 112 8.2 Close Reading of “Winter Outing” ...... 120 8.3 Close Reading of “The Heaviest Dentures in the World” ...... 127 9. Summary and Conclusion ...... 137 Bibliography...... 142 Sammanfattning ...... 155

1. Introduction

A man once asked me […] how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing.’ I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also. Dorothy L. Sayers - Are Women Human?1

Pak Wansô (1931-2011) is widely considered one of South Korea’s foremost contemporary female authors. She was one of the very few female writers on a male-dominated scene during the 1970s, and after her literary debut in 1970 with the autobiographical novel Namok (The Naked Tree) she produced more than 20 novels, as well as numerous short stories, essays and children’s books. Over the years, Pak received a great deal of praise from readers and critics alike and was awarded several prestigious literary prizes. Not only did she describe her painful experiences of the Korean War, she accurately depicted a country experiencing major socio-economic and cultural transformation and how that affected the lives of middle-class women. As a housewife and mother of five, her background made her stand out among her male counterparts. And mainly addressing a female readership, her works were initially labelled as mainstream literature and were poorly reviewed by male critics. She was considered an anomaly, and instead of being judged solely on her merits, prejudices and preconceptions hindered her from getting serious literary attention. However, her works did receive some positive reviews and she was praised for her incisive depiction of the drawbacks of rapid industrialisation and modernisation of society. By the early 1990s, Pak Wansô had become an object of scholarly research but the focus has been on a thematic level and on individual works and book reviews. Despite a long and successful career as a well-established writer of

1 Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?: Address Given to a Women’s Society, 1938,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 8, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 177, https://doi.org/10.1353/log.2005.0040.

1 contemporary Korean fiction, the research into her work has lacked an extensive study of the narratological aspects of her writings. Given her considerable creative output it would be too time-consuming to try to cover her entire production in a Ph.D. dissertation; thus, my intention in the present study is to conduct an in-depth structuralist analysis of her earlier texts, which have received less attention from researchers. I have selected the following seven short stories from the early 1970s which I consider to be representative of Pak’s narrative characteristics and theme: “Ôttôn nadûri” (An Outing), “Ses- angesô cheil mugôun t’ûlli” (The Heaviest Dentures in the World), “Puch’ônim kûnch’ô” (In the Realm of the Buddha), “Talmûn pangdûl” (Iden- tical Apartments), “Kyôul nadûri” (Winter Outing), “K’amerawa wôk’ô” (A Walker with a Camera) and “P’omarûi chip” (House of Bubbles).2 These stories were initially published in literary journals, and have since been repub- lished in different anthologies. In 1999 a complete collection of Pak’s short stories was published in five volumes for the first time, by the publisher Munhak tongne. And in 2006, the same publishing house reprinted the stories in a different binding and with an added volume. In this collection, consisting of six volumes, the stories were published in chronological order from 1971 to 1998, beginning with the short story “Semo” (The End of the Year), the very first story published by the author in March 1971. The short stories analysed in this study are from the Munhak tongne collection of 2006. Pak Wansô’s narratives were born out of a specific time in Korean history, in a specific social reality, thus in my readings of her stories, I intend to place them in a larger socio-historic and literary context and at the same time shed light onto some of the distinct characteristics of Pak Wansô’s poetics. I have divided the close readings into two different chapters, according to the stories’ main theme: Women in the industrial period of 1970s and War literature. However every story discussed in this dissertation is in fact set during the period of industrialisation. Stories such as “A Walker with a Camera” address both the civil war and the drawbacks of modernisation, since the civil war and its aftermath of national division paved the way for a military regime which gained legitimacy through economic achievements. This dissertation consists of two main parts. The first part will give an overview of previous research on Pak Wansô’s works, a biography and the theoretical and methodological outline of the thesis. The biography is extensive, but necessary in order to deepen the understanding of her works. I believe that

2 “Ôttôn nadûri” (An Outing) was first published in Wôlgan munhak (Monthly Literature) in September 1971, “Sesangesô cheil mugôun t’ûlli” (The Heaviest Dentures in the World) in Hyôndae munhak (Contemporary Literature) in August 1972, “Puch’ônim kûnch’ô” (In the Realm of the Buddha) in Hyôndae munhak (Contemporary Literature) in July 1973, “Talmûn pangdûl” (Identical Apartments) in Wôlgan chungang (Monthly Chungang) in June 1974, “Kyôul nadûri” (Winter Outing) in Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought) in September 1975, “K’amerawa wôk’ô” (A Walker with a Camera) in Han’guk munhak (Korean Literature) in February 1975 and “P’omarûi chip” (House of Bubbles) in Han’guk munhak (Korean literature) in October 1976.

2 Pak Wansô’s childhood experiences during the colonial period - being suddenly uprooted from her beloved Pakchôk village and the trying move to Seoul, then her wartime experience as a young woman - were events that pro- foundly impacted her life and writing. This has been manifested in so many of her works. I hope that biographical facts about the author, without distract- ing attention from the work itself, can provide keys that add an extra dimen- sion to my analyses. The purpose of this chapter is not to engage in biographical criticism of Pak Wansô’s works, which has already been thoroughly done by other researchers. In the first part of the dissertation I will also place Pak Wansô’s narrative in the broader historical, social and literary context of the 1970s. The second part of this study will focus on close readings of selected short stories. The Romanisation of Korean script follows the McCune-Reischauer system, except for proper names and names of places that already have a widely accepted and established different transcription into Latin, for example Seoul, Rhee Syngman, Park Chunghee. Korean names in the text are written according to Korean convention, i.e. family name first. Korean particles have been attached to the nouns instead of appearing separately. All passages cited from the short stories “An Outing”, “The Heaviest Dentures in the World”, “A Walker with a Camera” and “House of Bubbles” are my own translations. When I use the term ‘Korean literature’, I am referring to South Korean literature unless stated otherwise. The first time a Korean title is mentioned, an English translation will be provided and after that only the English title will be used.

3 2. Biography of Pak Wansô

Pak Wansô was born in 1931 in Kaep’unggun, Kyônggido, near the city of Kaesông, which is now a part of North Korea. In her autobiographical novel Kû mant´ôn singanûn nuga ta môgûssûlkka (Who Ate up All the Shinga) from 19923, one can read that her father passed away when she was three years old, and after his death it is presumed that her mother, who was firmly resolved to give her children the best education possible, made a bold decision to move to Seoul with her son and put him in a commercial school. This must have been quite unheard of for a married woman from a conservative, noble family. Not only did she defy her parents-in-law’s wishes but moreover she neglected her duties as the eldest daughter-in-law. Pak’s mother wanted to embrace modernity, and a life in the countryside with its backwardness was not what she wanted for her children. While her mother was away, Pak Wansô was left in the care of her grandparents, uncles and aunts. Despite the fact that she was separated from her mother, her childhood seems to have been happy and harmonious. In Pak Wansô’s works, Pakchôk village where she lived until she was seven years old is often described and romanticised as a heavenly place on earth, where she spent most of her time outdoors, playing with the other children from the same village with nature close by, a carefree existence:

Sometimes we’d make bridal dolls out of grass, wind their hair into buns, and hold mock wedding festivals. Hollowed crab shells were hung as pots, pine needles became noodles, and golden grass turned into kimchi. As a finale, we’d pull up purslane roots and rub them with our fingers. Then, eagerly chanting, ‘Light a lamp for the groom’s chamber, light a lamp for the bride’s chamber,’ we’d make nuptial lanterns from the reddened roots. We had an unlimited sup- ply of playthings at our disposal and never needed to repeat a game from one day to the next.4

In the small remote village consisting of 20 households or so there were only two families with the surname Pak. Nevertheless, the village was named after

3 The autobiographical novel was published in 1992 and translated into English by Yu Young- nan and Stephen J. Epstein. The passages quoted from the novel are from this English translation. See Pak Wansô [Park Wan-suh], Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel, trans. Yu Young-nan and Stephen J. Epstein (New York: Colombia University Press, 2009). 4 Ibid.,17.

4 the Pak family, marking their upper-class status. The author’s grandfather who had lived in Seoul in his childhood often bragged about his background, his family being yangban (nobles), and he reminded Pak that they were superior to the other families and that she should act accordingly. But her grandfather’s opinion did not affect Pak, who never perceived herself to be different from her neighbours. She has described the villagers with affection, as proud and independent people who cherished their way of living and their customs. For her, her birthplace of Pakchôk village was a place where people lived dignified lives without any antagonism between rich and poor. When Pak’s grandfather suffered a stroke which left him partially immobile he opened a village school, a sôdang where he taught the village children to read and write, and his grand- daughter the “Thousand Character Classic”. In both Ômmaûi malttuk 1 (Mother’s Stake 1) from 1981 and Who Ate up All the Shinga5 the author gives realistic and vivid accounts of this early childhood. Pak’s light-hearted existence was interrupted when her mother came back to fetch her and send her to primary school in Seoul. In her mother’s mind, girls had an equal right to education and her ambition was to make her daughter a sinyôsông (A New Woman). This term was coined in the 1920s to describe women who had sought higher education, sometimes abroad, and possessed progressive ideas, advocating a new kind of womanhood, opposing the Confucian patriarchal ethics.6 Before the departure to Seoul, her mother cut her hair into a short bob, the way modern girls in Seoul wore it:

‘You need to study hard and become a New Woman.’ Such was Mother’s mantra. I didn’t understand what a New Woman was. Nor, I suppose, did she. The phrase had been coined during Korea’s ‘enlightenment’ in the early years of the twentieth century, and it remained as compelling to her as it was mysterious. It was impossible for me to understand the resentment-cum-fascination she ex- hibited toward women living lives so different from the traditional norm.7

5 The scientific name of the plant Shinga is Aconogonon alpinum or Alpine Knotweed in Eng- lish. The plant’s height is one metre and it blooms during the summer months. The young leaves and the stem have a sour taste and are edible. The plant is unknown to most Koreans and ever since the novel came out, a standing question among readers has been what the word Shinga in the book title means. Shinga was among many edible things growing in the back hills of Pak’s home village and for the author, it symbolized the richness and fertility of the nature in the countryside, which was in striking contrast to the poor and sterile city without much greenery which became her home environment after the move to Seoul. In the book, Pak recalls how disappointed she was to find out that the petals of Acasia flowers at Mount Inwang which the other children enjoyed eating did not taste as good as Shingas back home, making her eyes tear up and causing her to feel homesick. See Pak Wansô, “Naega irûn tongsan” (The Lost Hills), in Kkoltchiege ponaenûn kalch’ae (The Ovations I’m Sending to the Person at the Bottom) (Seoul: Hanyang, 1994), 24-25. 6 For further explanation of the term sinyôsông, see chapter 5. 7 Pak, Who Ate up All the Shinga?, 49.

5 Pak’s works show an ambivalent and complicated relationship with the mother figure. On the one hand, the mother is a person the daughter admires and looks up to. Not only is she one of the few literate women in the village but she is also an amazing storyteller. But she is also a superficial person, someone who is willing to sacrifice everything and herself to give her children the education and future she herself could not have, so they can climb the social ladder. There were no limits to her mother’s aspirations, which her daughter had to live up to. The move from the countryside to the city became a traumatic experience for the six-year-old girl. The family lived in extremely poor conditions in a rented room in Hyônjô-dong on the outskirts of Seoul. Her mother even forged the residential records so that her daughter could go to a school inside the city, and be among “real” Seoul residents. Pak recalled how alienated and provin- cial she felt among her classmates in school and at the same time she did not have any friends in her own neighbourhood. Her mother did not allow her to play with them because in her view they lacked manners and did not have the right background. Due to the colonial government’s language policy, only in- struction in Japanese was allowed in school and students were prevented from speaking Korean. When Pak Wansô started school, she had no knowledge of Japanese because she had only been taught classical Chinese by her grandfather, and her mother insisted on teaching her the Korean alphabet hangûl. Pak has recalled how difficult it was for her to learn to read and write. These language difficulties were shared by many writers who were educated in Japanese during the colonial period, and after the liberation they were expected to write in a language and script they had not mastered. In 1944, at the age of 13, Pak entered the Sookmyung high school for girls. But after one year, when the eviction order was issued by the Japanese colonial government, she had to move back to Kaesông and was transferred to another high school. Then after liberation, Pak returned to Seoul to continue her studies at Sookmyung. In her fifth year, Pak’s supervising teacher was the author Pak Nogap8 who taught creative writing and the Chinese classics. He obviously had a significant impact on his students, considering four of his pupils became well-known writers: Han Malsuk, a close friend of Pak Wansô, Pak Myôngsông, Kim Yangsik and Pak Wansô herself. Pak has recalled how much her teacher disliked the elegant prose and sentimentality of Japanese romance

8 Pak Nogap (1905-1951?) made his literary debut in 1933 with the short story Anhae (The Year Before) in Chosôn Chungang Ilbo. He was a member of Chosôn munhakka tongmaeng (Korean Writers Alliance). Pak published 50 short stories and the novel Sasimnyôn (40 Years) in 1948. In his earlier works, he wrote about the severe living conditions of poor farmers during the Japanese occupation, and in his later works he focused on urban life and social issues such as poverty, crime and prostitution. Pak disappeared in 1951 and is presumed to have defected to North Korea. Therefore he “vanished” from the history of South Korean literature, but the ban on his works was lifted in the late 1980s. See Kwôn Yôngmin, Han’guk hyôndae munhaksa 1 (A History of Modern Korean Literature 1) (Seoul: Minûmsa, 2008), 56.

6 novels and how he often stressed the importance of writing sentences that carried the weight of life experience. Not only her teacher, but new fellow students who shared her interest in literature were also very inspiring and encour- aging for Pak.9 Pak Wansô’s brother, who shared the same passion for literature, helped her to get access to Japanese translations of the collected works by Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, and after school she often dropped by a bookstore run by the parents of a friend in order to read. She was especially caught by Tolstoy:

[…] over a long period, I did read Tolstoy’s major novels- Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection. And read them again and again. They became very important to me. I rarely reread books even if I really enjoyed them or found them too difficult to fully comprehend the first time through, but Tolstoy’s work were an exception. Although they were initially hard to understand, there was something compelling about them and they piqued a growing interest within me. I think it’s because, above all, for the first time I was enthralled by the power of excellent characterisation.10

In 1950, Pak had been accepted to Seoul National University as a literature major and aspired to be a writer. She had studied just a few weeks when the civil war broke out. Influenced by her brother who was a leftist activist, Pak initially sympathised with the communist movement and was attracted to the idea of social equality for all people. She got involved in Democratic Youth League at her school and participated in leftist rallies.11 After the outbreak of the war, Seoul changed powers four times, and because her family was labelled as Reds, Pak was constantly harassed and brought in for interrogation. Upon her brother’s death during the war, Pak was forced to give up her education to provide for her family by working as a cashier at a US Army Post Exchange in Seoul. There she got to know a poor artist Pak Sugûn (1914- 1965), who painted small portraits of American soldiers and must have left a lasting impression on her. Because 20 years after this encounter, Pak wrote her debut novel The Naked Tree about a young girl, Kyônga who just like the author lost her loved ones during the war and finds relief in her otherwise miserable existence through an encounter with a sincere and honest artist with whom she falls in love. During the war, literature became a source of comfort for Pak Wansô and helped to ease her pain. Books did not cost anything at the time and as she

9 Pak Wansô, “Pogwôndoeji mothan kôttûrûl wihayô” (For Those Things that Could not be Restored), Ch’angjakkwa pip´yông (Creation and Criticism), no. 64 (June 1989), quoted in Kim Kyôngyôn, “Kaesông 1931- Seoul 1991: Pogwôndoeji mothan kôttûrûl wihan pudanhan yônju” (Kaesông 1931- Seoul 1991: A Ceaseless Rendition for Things that Could not be Restored), Chakka segye 3 (The World of Authors), no.1 (March 1991): 22. 10 Pak, Who Ate up All the Shinga?, 171. 11 Ibid., 184-185.

7 worked and earned money she ploughed her way through every classic and so-called must-reads:

[…] I tried to find joy solely in books where I hoped to be compensated for everything I’ve lost in life. Another joy I found in the second-hand books I bought was when browsing through them, I could discover the inscriptions of where and when they were obtained. It was also joyful to buy books with lots of underlining and go through the parts the previous owner found moving and sharing your thoughts on the book with this unknown friend. It was all because of loneliness. Not only did I feel that I was sharing my emotions with the former owner through these underlining or short notes, I wondered if this person had died or survived in this ravage of war.12

Despite her interest in literature, after the war, Pak married and became a housewife instead of pursuing a literary career. She became a mother of five children and was preoccupied with taking care of her family. Han Malsuk (b.1931), a close friend and old classmate, made her literary debut in 1956 in Hyôndae munhak with the short story “Pyôlbit sogûi kyejôl” (The Star-Span- gled Season). Han used to come by Pak’s house and tried to encourage her friend to start writing, but they led very different lives. After spending many years as a dedicated wife and mother, neither the children nor her husband needed her anymore and she felt the urge to do something meaningful for herself. In the very moment that she suffered from boredom Pak read an an- nouncement in Sindonga (New Donga) about a literary contest in the non- fiction section and got the idea to write a biography on the artist Pak Sugûn. However, Pak soon realised that she did not really know him that well (they had known each other less than one year) and also that she had difficulty stick- ing to facts because she really enjoyed fabricating. And on top of that, she kept returning to her own story. So she decided to let her imagination run wild and realised that when she did not feel bound by restrictions, her story became more lively and vivid.13 So what was initially intended as a biography on the artist Pak Sugûn became Pak Wansô’s own fictional story, the autobiographical novel The Naked Tree. The artist Pak Sugûn is obviously still present in the novel, but in a minor role.14 The novel won the Yôsông Donga’s literary

12 Pak Wansô, ” Ch’aek kanan kogûm” (Books, Poverty and the Ancient and Modern Times) in Nanûn wae chagûn ireman pun’gaehanûn’ga (Why I Keep Being Infuriated by Small Things) (Seoul: Haeppit ch’ulp’ansa, 1990), 109. 13 Pak Wansô, ”Naege sosôrûn muôsin’ga” (What Novels Mean to Me) in Sô innûn yôjaûi kalttûng (The Struggles of an Independent Woman) (Paju: Nanam:1986), 31. 14 Pak Sugûn (1914-1965) has been labelled Sômin hwaga (the artist of ordinary people) because he often worked with simple lines and compositions, depicting common people living their daily lives in granite and light-grey tones. According to critics, there is a beauty in such simplicity of rustic motives, transmitting the sentiment of the Korean people. During his life- time, he suffered from poverty and did not gain recognition until after his death. Some of his famous works are Ppallaet’ô (Washerwomen by the Stream) from 1954 and Agi ôbûn sonyô (A

8 contest for female writers in 1970, so at the age of 40, Pak made her literary debut and the novel became the starting point of her career. The Naked Tree is a coming-of-age novel, based on the author’s own personal experience of war, and contains realistic and painful descriptions of separations and long- lasting emotional wounds caused by warfare. These traumatic experiences played a crucial role in her literary career and became an inspiration, a fact which the author not only expressed in her novels but also in essays and in interviews:

Family relations became twisted and complicated because of ideology, and there was no way I could escape getting into trouble. I was accused of being rightist by the communists and of being leftist by the South Korean government. If you have not experienced the filthy war first-hand, there is no way you can imagine how devastating it was to have the finger of scorn pointed at you. In order to survive, I had to endure all kinds of humiliation and brutality. The urge to bear testimony one day through writing gave me the strength to endure these moments. Even when I was forced to crawl like a worm in front of, in my opinion, a pathetic excuse for a human being, I thought: “All right, one day I will reveal that you are in fact the worm, not me”. This kind of thirst for revenge kept me from becoming a worm inside and at least I retained my pride. So literature has that kind of power. Twenty years have passed since I started writing and even now I’m grateful to the mysterious power of literature which has prevented me from losing my humanity and helped me to endure.15

For Pak, bearing witness to the cruelties and barbarism of the war became her life’s mission:

Others easily forget, easily forgive, and their wounds heal so fast one forgets how they came about in the first place. And they all live happy lives. But I cannot forget all the suffering that was brought upon me and I cannot forget the fact that I was fooled by my naivety. My stubborn and nasty nature, to uncover the truth at any cost, made me start writing later on and those same qualities added fuel to my literary creativity.16

In her early works, Pak was preoccupied with her own family history. She tried to find peace and reconciliation with the past through writing. She grew up without a father and relied emotionally on her brother who was ten years older. He had participated in the communist movement during the post-liberation period but had given up his underground activities and was working as a middle school teacher when he was conscripted to the Korean People’s

Girl Tending to an Infant) from 1960. Namuwa tu yôin (Two Women by a Tree) from 1962 is the one depicted in Pak Wansô’s novel The Naked Tree. 15 Pak, ”What Novels Mean to Me,” 31. 16 Pak Wansô, ”Naege sosôrûn muôsin’ga” (What Novels Mean to Me) in Uri sidaeûi sosôlga Pak Wansôrûl ch’ajasô (In Search of the Writer of Our Time Pak Wansô) (Seoul:Woongjin, 2002), 22.

9 Army after the North Korean troops seized Seoul. After returning back home alive but traumatised, he was accidentally injured by a gunshot. After the Jan- uary Fourth Retreat17, without the possibility to seek refuge because of her injured, lame brother, she had to witness him slowly pass away in an empty and deserted Seoul. The strong sense of guilt she felt over his death continued to haunt her. From early childhood, Pak had experienced the healing power of literature and storytelling:

[…] whenever I was bored, or craved snacks, or wanted to wear nice clothes like others, when my pride was hurt because I was teased by clever Seoul kids, when I missed my friend from my home village, when I lacked self-confidence because of bad exam scores, my mother was perplexed for a short while but soon her face turned bright and sad as the moon and she tried to comfort me with funny stories.18

Literature became a source of comfort in difficult times and Pak’s own writing was therapeutic and helped her to process and cope with her pain. Throughout her literary career, Pak returned to her wartime experience and the aftermath of the war in numerous works. After the publication of her debut novel The Naked Tree in the early 1970s, a number of her short stories were published in literary journals: in 1973 “Chirôngi urûmsori” (The Cry of the Earthworm) was published in Sindonga (New Donga) and “Chumal nongjang” (Weekend Farm) in Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought). In 1974 “Ibyôrûi Kimp’o konghang” (Farewell at Kimpo) was published in Munhak sasang and “Yônindûl” (Couples) in Wôl- gan munhak (Literature Monthly) and in 1975 “Chôrôk’e mani” (So Many) was published in Sosôl munye (Fiction and Literature) and “K’amera-wa wôk’ô” (A Walker with a Camera) in Han’guk munhak.19 All of Pak’s stories up until 1976 were compiled into her first short story collection entitled Puk- kûrôumûl karûch’imnida (I Teach You Shame), consisting of 18 short stories and one conte.20 During the 1970s, Pak not only addressed the devastating impact of the civil war, she also began to sharply criticise the negative consequences of the rapid modernisation on people’s way of living, and of changes in customs and

17 January Fourth Retreat also known as the Third Battle of Seoul was one of the decisive events of the Korean War when The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and seized Seoul on the 4th of January 1951, forcing the United Nations forces to retreat. See Lee Ki-Baik, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har- vard University Press), 379-381. 18 Pak, “What Novels Mean to Me,” 35-36. 19 During the 1970s, Pak published over 30 short stories, published in literary journals such as Munhakkwa chisông (Literature and Intelligence), Hyôndae munhak (Contemporary Literature) and Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought). 20 Kim, “Kaesông 1931- Seoul 1991,” 31.

10 traditions. In the novels Hwich’ônggôrinûn ohu (A Staggering Afternoon) and Tosiûi hyungnyôn (A Lean Year in the City) Pak targeted the middle class, demonstrating how they, in their quest for wealth and higher social status, were willing to sacrifice everything, and how social deprivation was directly reflected in the distorted family relations. Pak became more and more socially conscious. She strove to depict prevailing sentiments and values in a rapidly changing society and how problematic tendencies in the public sphere affected people’s private life, i.e. the family. A Lean Year in the City was serialised in Munhak sasang from December 1975 to July 1979 and A Staggering After- noon was serialised in Donga Ilbo throughout 1976. Pak also became a widely read essayist. Her texts in newspapers and literary magazines were compiled and published in two books in 1977, entitled Kkoltchiege ponaenûn kalch’ae (The Ovations I’m Sending to the Person at the Bottom) and Honja purûnûn hapch’ang (The Chorus I’m Singing Alone). In her essays, Pak discussed ordinary matters that concerned a mother and wife who lives in an urban environment and witnesses the sudden breakdown of traditional ways of living among her neighbours and people around her. She criticised people’s excessive eagerness to embrace the Western lifestyle and the extravagant habits of the newly rich, and how these disturbing customs and morals were being spread among common people. Pak also discussed children’s education and how to teach moral values in a competitive society that only emphasised social status and wealth. The essays and the novel A Stag- gering Afternoon became a commercial success and established Pak as a best- selling author. Despite the fact that the year 1975 was selected as the international women’s year by the UN, the question of women’s rights was pretty much invisible on the political agenda during the fervent struggle against military regimes and the ongoing class conflict. Pak herself wrote a critical essay on the women’s movement in 1977, where she expressed the need for women to take a step back because the battle for human rights and social equality came first.21 But in 1979, with the novel Sara innûn narûi sijak (The Beginning of Vivid Days) which was serialised in the newspaper Donga Ilbo, Pak made a statement where she directly addressed the question of gender equality and women’s rights.22 In 1981, Ômmaûi malttuk 2 (Mother’s Stake) was published in Munhak sasang and was awarded the Yi Sang literary prize. The jury, consisting of renowned writers such as Kim Tongni (1913-1995), Ch’oe Chônghûi (1906- 1990) and literary critic Kim Yunsik, praised the author for her “elegant style and precise use of language” (yuryôhan munch’ewa pint’ûm ômnûn ônô kusa)

21 Pak Wanso, ”Yôgwôn undongûi hôsang” (The Delusion in the Women’s Movement) in Kkoltchiege ponaenûn kalch’ae (The Ovations I’m Sending to the Person at the Bottom) (Seoul: P’yôngminsa, 1977), 139-142. 22 For more on Pak and the gender question, see chapter 3.

11 and her ability to make a complicated and difficult subject such as the national division comprehensible by drawing on her own family history.23 In 1984, the novel Ttôdonûn kyôrhon (A Circulating Marriage) was serialised in Chubu saenghwal (The Life of Housewives) and was published in book form in 1985, under the title, Sô innûn yôja (An Independent Woman). Initially treated as a work of ordinary domestic fiction, the same book with this new title was read and regarded as a feminist novel. It attracted a new readership, of women who were frustrated by the prevailing inequality between men and women and who identified with the female protagonist, who in her quest for independence and self-fulfilment had to face different obstacles imposed on her. The author was invited to reading circles where the book was discussed, reflecting a general trend in the society where women’s issues were being brought to the fore.24 The same year, in 1985, Pak’s first epic historical novel Mimang (Illusions) was serialised in Munhak sasang. It is a saga which begins at the end of the Chosôn dynasty and closes with the outbreak of the civil war. The story centres on a merchant family in Kaesông and their ups and downs as they live through the turmoil of contemporary history. Pak has described the process of writing this novel as a way for her to revisit her hometown, which in reality was still impossible. In the novel, Pak depicts the long-vanished traditions and customs of the Kaesông people and their characters as proud individuals, willing to defend their way of living and endure hardship stoically in order to stand by their goals. In an interview, Pak mentioned difficulties in writing a historical novel such as Mimang because of her inability to write about things she had not experienced or witnessed first-hand, expressing doubts about her ability to realistically recreate the historic past. She confessed that she was greatly helped by her mother’s memories of the past.25 In the course of 1988, Pak lost both her husband and her son. Grief-stricken, she left Seoul to spend some time in a catholic convent in Pusan (Pak had converted to Catholicism in 1984). Afterwards, she went on a trip to the US, taking a break from writing. To cope with the pain and agony of losing her loved ones, Pak started to write a diary. It was serialised under the title Han maltchûman hasosô (Please Just Say One Word) in the Catholic journal Saenghwal sôngsô (The Bible of Everyday). Because of her personal loss, Mimang was not completed until the May issue of Munhak sasang in 1990, after five years. In 1990, Mimang was also published as a book in three volumes and that very same year the novel was

23 Kim, “Kaesông 1931- Seoul 1991,” 35-36. 24 Ibid.,40. 25 Ch’oe Chaebong, “Iyagiûi himûl minnûnda” (I Believe in the Power of Storytelling), in Pak Wansô munhak kilch’akki. Pak Wansô munhak 30 nyôn kinyôm pip’yôngjip (In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path. Collection of Critical Essays in Commemoration of 30 Years of Pak Wansô’s Literature), ed. Yi Kyôngho and Kwôn Myônga (Seoul: Segyesa, 2000), 38.

12 awarded the Taehan minguk literature prize, and the Isan literature prize the following year. With the publication of the novel Kûdae ajikto kkum kkugo innûnga (Are You Still Dreaming) in 1989, Pak’s popularity reached a new level. The story centres around a divorced single mother who is prevented from finding happiness because of prejudice and discrimination imposed by a patriarchal society. Han’guk Ilbo selected the book as the bestseller of the year and the newspaper even talked about a “Pak Wansô-sensation”. In 1991, Chakka segye (The World of Authors) dedicated its spring issue to Pak, commemorating the 20 years since her literary debut. The fact that the whole issue was dedicated to Pak was a sign of recognition and an acknowledgement by the literary establishment. In 1992, Pak published her autobiographical novel Who Ate up All the Shinga. Three years later, in 1995, its sequel Kû sani chôngmal kôgi is- sôssûlkka (Was the Mountain Really There?) came out. Both novels depict the author’s childhood in Kaesông during the Japanese colonial period and her time in Seoul during the civil war. These books have become classics and must-reads for school children. In the preface to Who Ate up All the Shinga, Pak gives the following explanation of her intention with the novel:

I do not know if one is allowed to call this kind of work fiction because I have relied purely on my memories. There are actually few occasions when I have not used my own experience when writing fiction or essay or when I have not used embellishments when needed. But this time I have made efforts not to make up memories and have refrained as far as possible from polishing, and have built up my text like a house with only already existing components.26

Pak also gives the following statement:

One bigger dilemma was the unreliability of one’s memory. As you get older, you often walk down the memory lane with family and friends and every time, you are surprised to find out that memories can differ even among people who have experienced the exact same thing. I realised that even when it comes to memories, it is all about one’s own imagination.27

Because of the detailed descriptions of everyday life by an author who has witnessed the historical upheavals through several decades first-hand, these books have also been highly regarded by historians as important and valuable sources of material. In 1999, a short story collection consisting of five volumes was published

26 See preface to Who Ate up All the Shinga?, 6. 27 Ibid.

13 by the publishing house Munhak tongne consisting of stories from 1971 to 1998. In 2000, in commemorating 30 years of Pak Wansô’s literary achievements, a collection of critical essays was published by Segyesa.28 In addition to short stories, full-length novels and essays, Pak also wrote children’s books, such as a fairy tale collection San-kwa namurûl wihan sarang pôp (The Rules on How to Love Mountains and Trees) published in 1992 and Chajôngô toduk (The Bicycle Thief) published in 2000. In the 1990s, Pak Wansô’s work started to be translated into foreign languages and published abroad. In 1993, Mother’s Stake came out in French and in 1994, Are You Still Dreaming was published in Germany. In 1995, Pak’s debut novel The Naked Tree was translated into English.29 In 1999, two story collections were published in English: a short story collection consisting of nine short stories, entitled My Very Last Possession and Other Stories30 and A Sketch of the Fading Sun.31 Likewise, Who Ate up All the Shinga appeared in English in 2009. When Pak Wansô passed away in 2011, at the age of 80, she was one of the most admired and beloved writers in South Korea. Just about every South Ko- rean has probably come across her works in school textbooks, and no writer has been so widely read and appreciated as Pak. Several works by Pak have also been adapted into films and television dramas.32 Since Pak Wansô’s death, her fiction and essays have been repeatedly reprinted and published in commemoration of her. And since 2012, in the city of Kuri in Kyônggi province where Pak lived the last years of her life, public readings and musical performances based on her works are organised every year.

28 Yi Kyôngho and Kwôn Myônga, ed., Pak Wansô munhak kilch’akki. Pak Wansô munhak 30nyôn kinyôm pip’yôngjip (In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path. Collection of Critical Essays in Commemoration of 30 Years of Pak Wansô’s Literature) (Seoul: Segyesa, 2000). 29 Le Piquet de ma mére was translated by Gobae Kang and Helene Lebrun and published by Actes Sud, Das Familienregister was translated by Helga Picht and published by Volk and Welt, and The Naked Tree was translated by Yu Young-nan and published by Cornell Univer- sity. See Yi Kyôngho and Kwôn Myônga, In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path, 400-401. 30 My very last possession, and other stories by Pak Wansô, trans. Chun Kyung-ja et al., published by M.E. Sharpe. 31 A Sketch of the Fading sun, trans. Hyun-Jae Yee Sallee, published by White Pine Press. 32 For example, Pak Wansô’s novels Hwich’ônggôrinûn ohu (A Staggering Afternoon) was made into a movie in 1979 and Kû hae kyôurûn ttattûthaenne (The Winter was Warm that Year) in 1984. The novel Mimang (Illusion) was televised in 1996 and Sô innûn yôja (An Independent Woman) in 1986 by MBC.

14 3. Previous Research

Looking at the list of research works devoted to Pak Wansô, it is easy to get the impression that almost every scholar working within the field of modern Korean literature has felt the need or even obligation to, in one way or another touch, upon her works. A great number of research articles, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations have been produced in Korean by Korean scholars, affirming Pak’s status as the grand old lady of modern Korean literature and the profound influence she has had on the literary scene. I have reviewed the research materials published outside South Korea and in other languages, and to my knowledge, there exist only two master theses in English, produced at Seoul National University and the University of Toronto.33 The present Ph.D. dissertation is the first monograph written in English solely dedicated to Pak Wansô. In 2012, it came to my knowledge that a doctoral dissertation dealing with Pak Wansô’s short stories was defended by Li San Yun at Saint Peters- burg State University in 2008.34 Li’s dissertation is not solely concerned with Pak’s works, and the stories that she has chosen to analyse in her study are not included in my dissertation. But we have both chosen to study Pak’s short stories from the same period, the 1970s, and to apply a structuralist approach. Unfortunately, my lack of knowledge of Russian has prevented me from an in-depth reading of Li’s dissertation. However, with the help of my supervisor, Professor Sonja Haeussler, who translated Li’s own summary of her dissertation into English, I have been able to compare her analysis of Pak’s short stories with my own results. Thus, any references to Li’s work in this present study are solely based on the summary of her thesis.35

33 Diana Hinds, “A Study of Hysteria in the Women of Pak Wansô’s Fiction – Repression of Desires in a Confucian Patriarchal System” (Master’s thesis. Seoul National University, 2001) and Sarah Suh, “Autobiography as Fiction, Fiction as Autobiography: A Study of Autobio- graphical Impulse in Pak Wansô’s The Naked Tree and Who Ate up All the Shinga?” (Master’s thesis. University of Toronto, 2014). 34 Li San Yun, “ Rasskaz v tvorchestve sovremennykh pisatel’nits Respubliki Koreya (Pak Wanso, Sin Kyonsuk i Yn Khigyon)” (The Short Story in the Literature of Contemporary Fe- male Writers of the Republic of Korea. [Pak Wansô, Sin Kyôngsuk and Ûn Hûigyông] (PhD diss., Saint Petersburg State University, 2008). 35 Li San Yun’s own summary of her dissertation, avtoreferat, was published in Moscow, In- stitut Vostokovedenya in 2008.

15 I have not come across any research works in Chinese and Japanese, which suggests that no larger studies on Pak Wansô exist outside of South Korean academia. The lack of research output applies not only to Pak Wansô but also to contemporary Korean literature as a whole. In the past, Korean studies scholars abroad have mainly focused on pre-modern Korean literature and it was not until the 1990s that they began to pay attention to contemporary Ko- rean literature. That is also the case with research on Korean literature during the colonial period, which also started in the 1990s. When Pak Wansô made her literary debut in the early 1970s her works were disregarded by the literary establishment, which consisted of mainly male critics. The fact that she was a housewife without any higher education, had made her debut in a women’s magazine, and mainly addressed a female audience caused her to stand out among her male counterparts, and she was treated accordingly. The following statement by one of the most influential left-wing literary critics and intellectuals of the time, Paek Nakch’ông, is quite telling:

Pak Wansô does not actively take part in the liberation movement in the literary arena, and she is also a female author and a mainstream writer. But the clear and sharp social criticism shown in works such as the novel A Staggering Af- ternoon and the majority of the stories in her short story collections I Teach You Shame and Summer of Betrayal has rarely been seen in literature.36

Due to Pak’s growing popularity and because she, like her male colleagues, addressed the same kind of social issues faced by the country, her works could not be entirely ignored even though critics were more interested in the author’s private life and the fact that she was a woman. In 1977, the first research institute for women’s studies was established at Ewha Woman’s University by social science students who had learned West- ern theories from studies abroad, which they tried to implement at home. Ini- tially, feminism was mainly associated with a social movement and literature was primarily used to enlighten people and to describe the reality of women’s lives in order to explain why the research on feminism was needed in the Ko- rean context. The real breakthrough of feminism in literary and other research areas came in the mid-1980s, as a result of the development of women’s movements and women’s studies in Korea. The democratisation process in the 1980s and the struggle for human rights progressed into the women’s liberation movement. In Marxist and socialist-oriented journals such as Yôsông (Women) and Tto hanaûi munhwa (Another Culture), the distorted portrayal of women in literature by male authors was criticised by women, along with

36 Paek Nakch’ông, “Sahoe pip’yông isangûi kôt” (More than Social Criticism) in Ch’angjakkwa pip’yông (Creation and Criticism) 1979, quoted in Cho Hyejông, “Pak Wansô munhage issô pip’yôngûn muôsin’ga” (What Criticism Means When it Comes to Pak Wansô’s Litera- ture), Chakka segye 3 (The World of Authors), no. 1 (Spring 1991): 100.

16 problematic female characters in literature. The term Yôsông haebang munhak (Women’s Liberation Literature) was frequently used to describe literature dealing with the suppression of women.37 Literature had an important role in teaching women the basic principles of feminism and how one should live as a woman. In the 1990s, feminism was no longer only associated with the women’s liberation movement. Feminist theories from the West and abroad were widely used to analyse and interpret literature by women, and thus the readings and the meaning of literary works became politicised. One of the main goals of feminist literary criticism was to rediscover and reread works by female authors who had been lightly treated or even neglected in Korean literary history. This concerned authors such as Kim Myôngsun, Na Hyesôk, Kim Iryôp, Paek Sinae, Kang Kyôngae, Chi Haryôn and Pak Wasông who were active during the colonial period (the 1920s and 1930s). By giving attention to these writers, feminist scholars stressed the need to differentiate women’s writings from men’s in regard to content as well as form. They emphasised that an aesthetical valuation of such works should be carried out for their own sake. As a result, anthologies and complete collections of works by these “forgotten” female authors were published in the 1990s, and the academic research has continued until today. The writers who made their debut in the 1970s such as Pak Wansô and O Chônghûi,38 were also revaluated. An- other endeavour within feminist literary criticism was to reread works by highly regarded male authors such as Yi Kwangsu, Kim Tongin, Hyôn Chingôn, Hong Myônghui, Yi T’aejun, Yu Chino, Yi Hyôsôk and Yi Sang in order to problematise their bias towards women and show how patriarchal values were reflected in their often stereotypical and uniform portrayal of women.39

37 Kim Hyônsuk, “P’eminijûmi Han’guk yôsông munhage kkich’in yônghyang” (The influence of feminism in Korean female literature), Yôsônghak nonjip 17 (December 2000), 10. For more on the history and development of women’s studies in South Korea, see Kim, Yôngsôn, “ Han’guk yôsônghak chedohwaûi chônsagi (1960-70 nyôndae) chisik saengsanûi tonghak: changso, saram, p’ûrojekt’û (Dynamics of Constructing Korean Women’s Studies in the 1960s and 70s: Spaces, People and Projects), Hyônsanggwa insik 37 (Phenomenon and Recognition) no.3 (2013):117-139. 38 A lively discussion on how to interpret Pak’s works among first and second-generation feminist scholars culminated in the Pak Wansô controversy in the beginning of the 1990s. As for criticism of O Chônghûi’s works, Jin-kyung Lee claims that during the 1970s and 1980s, the literary establishment ignored the “ideological function” of O’s works, only focusing on her sensitive and feminine way of writing. In the 1990s, feminist critics politicised her works and interpreted her representation of motherhood and sexuality as resisting patriarchy. See Lee, Jin- Kyung, “National History and Domestic Spaces: Secret Lives of Girls and Women in 1950s South Korea in O Chông-hûi’s ‘The Garden of Childhood’ and ‘The Chinese Street’”, Journal of Korean Studies 9, no. 1(Fall 2004). 39 Kang, Chinho, ”Munhakkwa sahoe, kûrigo munhak yôn’gu: Sanghô hakhoe 20 chunyôn-kwa kukmunhak yôn’gu” (Literature and Society, and Research on Literature: 20th Anniversary of Sanghô Society and the Study of Korean Language and Literature), Sanghô hakpo 37 (February 2013): 30-32.

17 Although Pak Wansô made her literary debut in 1970, it was not until the 1990s that research into her works increased and several collections of critical papers and reviews were published. The entire 1991 spring issue of Chakka segye was dedicated to Pak Wansô, and her literary achievements were examined by critics. In one of the papers, Cho Hyejông states that Pak Wansô’s works have been misinterpreted by the male-dominated literary establishment. She divides the responses to these works into three groups. One group consisted of elitist, misogynist critics who treated Pak as a mainstream writer, and because of their condescending and unprofessional attitude, as Cho believes, they did not make any serious efforts to really understand her works. Early on, another group of well-known critics showed an appreciation of Pak’s works and her way of critically addressing social issues and questions on women’s oppression. Despite their efforts to interpret her works without bias, they failed to recognise that the reality of men and their experience and history may not be the same as women’s. In the end the works were still read from a male perspective. The third group consisted of a few female critics who in that period adopted the same language as their male colleagues in order to survive in the highly competitive literary scene.40 This newfound interest in Pak Wansô reflected a new movement in the literary scene, with an increasing proportion of female writers appearing and making their voices heard. A new world order was emerging during the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, including events such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and East European communism. All of this created a different intellectual climate where writers could distance themselves from political literature and turn their focus from society’s outer realm to people’s inner life, without being burdened by tradition or fixed social expectations. Experimenting with different styles of narration and a free and bold use of language, these writers became increasingly introverted and preoccupied with small-scale stories, frequently on an individual level. They focused on the little man in a modern, changing society – on individuals struggling to live their own lives, making rules of their own without interference from the outside world. Female writers such as Sin Kyôngsuk [Shin Kyung- Sook], Kim Insuk, Ûn Hûigyông [Eun Hee-Kyung], Chôn Kyôngnin, Kong Chiyông [Gong Jiyoung] and Cho Kyôngnan [Jo Kyung-ran] who made their debut during that time benefited from this change of atmosphere with creative freedom and diversity in literary themes. The presence of more female writers led to a noticeable boost in numbers of female literary critics, which in turn resulted in improvements in the quantity, quality and diversity of the research on literature by female writers. Research institutes and academies focusing on women’s studies were established at universities, and a great number of collections of critical reviews on literature by female writers were published. In conclusion, the advancement of female writers and researchers, which started

40 Cho, “ What Criticism Means,” 99-100.

18 in the 1980s and reached its peak in the 1990s, continued until the beginning of the 2000s.41 As previously stated, during the 1990s, research on Pak Wansô increased, and academic interest has continued ever since. Until 2014, a total number of 277 academic papers devoted to Pak’s works had been produced, including 260 master’s theses and 17 doctoral dissertations (nine published before 2011 and eight after 2011). In the academic research on Pak Wansô so far, scholars have focused on selected works, analysing them on a thematical and narratological level but most of the research has been descriptive and based on analysis of content. A number of scholars have dedicated their research to comparing Pak with other female authors such as Pak Kyôngni (1926-2008) and O Chônghûi (b.1947) who were active during the same period and who addressed similar subjects, such as motherhood, strained mother-daughter relationships, and women’s search for selfhood in a fast-changing modern society, full of contradictions and challenges. 42 Regardless of perspective, the inquiries of previous researchers have been centred around three core subjects: 1.The civil war and the reality of national division, 2. The negative drawbacks inflicted on society by rapid modernisation and industrialisation, and 3. The oppression of women in a Confucian patriarchal society. When dealing with Pak Wansô’s works on the civil war and its aftermath, the research has mostly focused on the same set of novels, such as The Naked Tree from 1970, Mongmarûn kyejôl (A Thirsty Season) from 1978, Mother’s Stake from 1982, Kû hae kyôurûn ttattûthaenne (The Winter was Warm That

41 Female critics such as Pak Hyegyông, Hwang Togyông, Paek Chiyôn, Yi Hyewôn and Kim Mihyôn published several ground-breaking collections of critical essays. For titles, see Kim Chuyôn, “Hyôndae Han’guk yôsông pip’yông munhagûi sôngjanggwa kû sônggyôk” (The Na- ture and Development of Modern Literature Criticism by Female Critics), Asia yôsong yôn’gu 44 (The Journal of Asian Women) no. 2 (November 2005): 7-35. 42 For some representative works, see Pak Chôngae, “Yôsông chakkaûi chônjaeng ch’ehôm changp’yôn sosôre nat’anan ‘monyô kwan’ge' wa ‘ttarûi sôngjang’ yôn’gu: Pak Kyôngniûi ‘Si- janggwa chônjaeng’gwa Pak Wansôûi ‘Namog’ûl chungsimûro” (A Research on ‘Mother- daughter Relationship’ and ‘a Daughter’s Coming-of-Age’ in Novels Depicting War Experi- ence by Female Authors: Focusing on Pak Kyôngni’s ‘Marketplace and Battlefield’ and Pak Wansô’s ‘The Naked Tree’), Yôsông munhak yôn’gu 13 (Research on Women’s Literature) (2005). See also Chông Misuk, “Sijômgwa chendô konggan: Pak Kyôngni, Pak Wansô, Yun Chôngmorûl chungsimûro” (Point of View and Gender Space: Focusing on Pak Kyôngni, Pak Wansô and Yun Chôngmo), Munch’ang ômun nonjip 37 (A Collection of Literary Works) (2000). For comparison between Pak Wansô and O Chônghûi, see Im Sônsuk, ”1970 nyôndae yôsông sosôre nat’anan kajok tamnonûi ijungsông yôn’gu: Pak Wansôwa O Chônghui sosôr-ûl chungsimûro” (A Study of Duel Attitudes on Family Discourse Expressed in Women’s Novels of the 1970s: Focusing on Works by Pak Wansô and O Chônghui) (PhD diss., Ewha Women’s University, 2011). See also Yi Chônghûi, O Chônghûi, Pak Wansô sosôrûi tu kaji p’unggyông: Han’guk sosôre nat’anan kûndaewa yôsông (Two Different Landscapes in the Novels by O Chônghûi and Pak Wansô: Modernity and Women in Korean Fiction)(Seoul: Ch’ôngdong kôul, 2003).

19 Year) from 1983, Who Ate up All the Shinga from 1992 and Was the Mountain Really There? from 1995. After going through the enormous number of papers and theses produced so far, I conclude that they are largely preoccupied with the ideology and values expressed in Pak’s works. Because of the autobiographical elements in Pak Wansô’s works, researchers have inevitably paid attention to the correlation between motives and themes and certain events and details in the author’s personal life. The loss of a brother is such a recurring theme.43 Yi Ûnha states that in works such as The Naked Tree, A Thirsty Season, “In the Realm of the Buddha”, Mother’s Stake and “A Walker with a Camera”, the death of a brother has devastating and long-lasting consequences for the female protagonist, creating wounds that never seem to heal. Given the absence of a father, the brother is the pillar of the family and according to Yi Ûnha, he is often portrayed as humane and kind-hearted, a person the main character admires and looks up to. But he is also weak-minded and sensitive. The death of an innocent victim such as the protagonist’s brother makes the war appear more cruel and merciless and hard to reconcile with. Yi also makes an interesting comment on the fact that in war literature by male authors such as Kim Wônil, Yi Tongha and Yi Munyôl, a father symbolises a larger entity such as society, ethics and tradition/heritage. Thus, the search for and recovery of an absent and missing father becomes crucial because it relates to the question of national unification and the essence of ideology. But in the case of Pak Wansô, the stories centre around a maternal family and a complicated mother-daughter relationship. A missing father is never perceived as problematic or discouraging by the female characters.44 Another researcher, Paek Chiyôn, emphasises that Pak Wansô witnessed human deprivation and the collapse of morality and decency at a young age. In her analysis of the novel A Thirsty Season, Paek states that the observation and the description of the war can never be objective for Pak because literature is all about using her wartime memories and what she experienced first-hand to tell her own family history. Paek continues by stating that “fabrication in literature becomes subordinate to the strength of the truth and the main agent in literature is that the recollection of suffering can only be complete through subjective experience.”45 Im Kyuch’an chooses to analyse the same novel, about a young girl (who is the protagonist and narrator) and her older brother

43 For further works of Pak Wansô dealing with war experience, see “Pukkûrôumûl karûch’imnida” (I Teach You Shame) 1974, “Chônyôgûi haehu” (An Evning’s Reunion) 1984, “Ajôssiûi hunjang” (A Mister’s Medal) 1983. 44 Yi Ûnha, “Pak Wansô sosôre nat’anan chônjaeng ch’ehômgwa kûlssûgie taehan koch’al” (War Experience in Pak Wansô’s Novels and a Study on Her Writing Style) in Han’guk munye pip’yông yôn’gu 18 (Research on Korean Literary Criticism) (December 2005): 231. 45 Paek Chiyôn, “P’yehô sogûi sôngjang” (Growing up Amid Ruins) in Pak Wansô munhak kilch’akki. Pak Wansô munhak 30 nyôn kinyôm pip’yôngjip (In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path. Collection of Critical Essays in Commemoration of 30 Years of Pak Wansô’s Literature) (Seoul: Segyesa, 2000), 260.

20 who are both left-wing sympathisers, and the hardships and trials they have to endure because of the war, which eventually brings death and devastation to their family. Im points out that in comparison to other works set during the civil war, such as Cho Chôngnae’s epic novel T’aebaek sanmaek (The T’aebaek Mountains)46, A Thirsty Season is primarily Pak’s own small-scale family history, and draws solely on her own experience. With its narrow perspective, Pak’s novel does not give the big picture of the war itself and lacks a deeper understanding of the roots behind the ideological conflict and the complicated process which leads up to the outbreak of the civil war. But at the same time Im admits that “one must draw attention to the fact that even if it [the war] was a national tragedy, the wounds and their depth are [always] personal.”47 He also points out that A Thirsty Season is set in the capital, Seoul, which he considers unusual in literature on the division of Korea. As mentioned earlier in Pak’s biography, unlike most people who fled to the southern part of the peninsula, the author remained in Seoul where the battles were fierce and the suffering of the inhabitants most severe. Seoul changed hands four times and in the midst of the political turmoil, the main character in this novel, just like the author, becomes the sole provider for her family after her brother’s death and must endure all kinds of hardship to support the rest of her family. Im appreciates the novel’s description of and insight into how ordinary people actually perceived the power shifts and the North Korean army on a personal level and how their minds changed as the war progressed. The main character Chin, who is engaged in the underground leftist movement wel- comes the North Korean army with open arms in the hope of getting rid of the old and rotten society and establishing a new world order. But her enthusiasm is later replaced by a feeling of emptiness, drained by the relentless propa- ganda of patriotism, loyalty, and party politics. She realises that her dedication to ideology was in vain because the only thing that matters in the end is freedom.48 When evaluating Pak Wansô’s way of addressing the civil war, the researchers seem to be divided into two camps. One is represented by critics such as Kim Yunsik who praise the author’s insistence on realism, and her

46 Cho Chôngnae’s T’aebaek sanmaek (The T’aebaek Mountains) consists of 10 volumes and was written during 1983-1989. The story spans over five years, beginning in 1945 with the liberation from Japanese rule until the outbreak of the civil war in 1950. To understand the origin behind the ideological struggles that intensified during this period, Cho goes back in history, to the final years of the Chosôn dynasty and the Japanese occupation to show the deep- rooted class conflict that existed in Korean society and how this socio-economical breach ultimately led to a bloody ideological left-right confrontation. 47 Im Kyuch’an, “Pak Wansôwa 6.25 ch’ehôm: Mongmarûn kyejôrûl chungsimûro” (Pak Wansô and Experience of the Korean War) in Pak Wansô munhak kilch’akki. Pak Wansô munhak 30 nyôn kinyôm pip’yôngjip (In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path. Collection of Critical Essays in Commemoration of 30 Years of Pak Wansô’s Literature) (Seoul: Segyesa, 2000), 114. 48 Ibid., 123-125.

21 way of telling stories without affectation. According to Kim, Pak does not need certain narrative devices because “literature came out of her body”.49 Other scholars are more critical and perceive her narrow perspective and sub- jectiveness as problematic. One of them is Chông Houng who criticises Pak for being preoccupied with her own family story and relying too much on her own experience. Without a macro-perspective, a certain amount of objective- ness and the ability to see “those who are living and moving outside the author’s own vision”, her stories do not manage to adequately deal with the war and ultimately do not offer any solace or deeper understanding of the war itself.50 Because of the many references to factual events from the author’s life, which are well-known to the public, her works have been interpreted and read more or less as autobiographical, regardless of her own intention. With the publication of Who Ate up All the Shinga and Was the Mountain Really There?, Pak Wansô expressed the ambition to use a minimum of fictional devices and to rely solely on her memories as much as possible, in order to give an authentic and truthful account of her early childhood in a small village near Kaesông and her pre-adolescent years in Seoul, witnessing Korea’s independence from Japanese occupation, the political strife leading up to the outbreak of the civil war and the tragic events she and her family had to endure during the fierce battles. After the publication of these two novels, researchers’ interest in the autobiographical elements of her work was renewed. In “Autobiog- raphy as Fiction, Fiction as Autobiography: A study of Autobiographical Im- pulse in Pak Wansô’s The Naked Tree and Who Ate up All the Shinga”51, Sarah Suh gives an overview of the theoretical issues raised by scholars on autobiography as a genre, and discusses the writing process behind the novel The Naked Tree. According to Suh, the novel was originally intended to be a “non-fiction biography” but ended up as “autobiographical fiction”. By comparing Pak’s debut novel with later works such as Who Ate up All the Shinga and Was the Mountain Really There?, which Suh considers to be dependent on nonfictional elements, she concludes that the difficulties in placing these works in a specific genre reflect the author’s own struggle with the dichotomy

49 Kim Yunsik, “Pak Wansôron - Ch’ônûi mubonggwa taejungsôngûi kûn’gô”(About Pak Wansô - A proof of flawless and popular appeal), in Munhak sasang (Literature and thought 1989). 50 Chông Houng, “Sangch’ôûi tu kaji ch’iyu pangsik”(Two ways of curing wounds) in Chakka segye (The World of Authors, Spring 1991), 63. A similar view is found in Hwang, Kwangsu, “Minjok munjeûi kaeinjuûijôk kuljôl”(Distortion of individualism in dealing with the national question), in Ch’angjakkwa pip´yông (Creation and Criticism, October, 1985). 51 Sarah Suh, “Autobiography as Fiction, Fiction as Autobiography: A Study of Autobiograph- ical Impulse in Pak Wansô’s The Naked Tree and Who Ate up All the Shinga?” (Master’s thesis. University of Toronto, 2014).

22 of non-fiction/fiction.52 According to Suh, those novels come close to a nonfictional account of the author’s life. She bases her findings on notes by the author and the fact that the Korean word chahwasang “self-portrait” is used on the Korean book covers.53 Suh also substantiates her statement by studying narrative features in the novels, such as the lesser use of “plot-carrying con- versations” and more “one-liner” dialogue pieces.54 What is lacking in Suh’s analysis is that she does not take into consideration the fact that Pak Wansô’s works are created in a certain historical, political and literary context. The author’s change of approach in these two works of the 1990s compared to her debut novel in 1970s may have been influenced or encouraged by the change in the political and social climate. After the publication of Who Ate up All the Shinga and Was the Mountain Really There?, numerous articles and papers dealing with women’s autobiography as a genre were produced, reflecting a new movement in the literary scene during the 1990s. The women in these autobiographies were often well- educated and were clear about how they wanted to live their lives, without interference from patriarchal social norms. These women were not afraid to express and live out their inner desires, and matters that previously had been considered private, such as love, women’s sexuality, adultery and troubled relationships between husband and wife were made public and relevant. There were no subjects too shameful or embarrassing to discuss. The growing number of female authors clearly set a new trend, and consequently, I-stories and autobiographical novels by female writers became a source of interest, chiefly among feminist scholars. They focused on how female protagonists were portrayed and what kind of womanhood they represented. These studies showed that women’s quest for self-identity and self-fulfilment expressed a change in attitude on motherhood, femininity and sexuality, and its social and political implications became a popular research topic.55 According to Kim Yônsuk and Yi Chônghûi, the autobiographical writings by female authors gave a voice to women who were excluded from the public sphere and unable to communicate with society. These writings dealt with questions of self-realisation and self-discovery; through the very act of writing, women had found an outlet for their suppressed despair and alienation.56 In their study of autobiographical writing by female authors, Kim and Yi

52 Ibid., 13. 53 Ibid., 28. 54 Ibid., 33-34. 55 Yun Chôngsuk, “P’eminijûm munhak pip’yôngesôûi yôsông ‘Chaehyôn tamnônûi yôkhal gwa panghyang” (The Roles and Possibilities of the Discourse on the Representation of Women for Korean Feminist Literary Criticism), Uri ômun yôn’gu 31 (Korean Language Research) (May 2008): 364-365. 56 Kim Yônsuk and Yi Chônghûi, “Yôsôngûi chagi palgyônûi sôsa. ‘Chajônjôk kûlssûgi’” (Nar- rative on Women’s Self-discovery. Autobiographical Writings), in Yôsônggwa sahoe 8 (Women and Society) (July 1997): 193.

23 found similar characteristics in Pak’s Who Ate up All the Shinga and Was the Mountain Really There? and Sin Kyôngsuk’s novel Oettan pang (An Isolated Room) from 1995.57 Both writers used the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel as a frame or structure to depict the formation of an individual in a larger historical context. Even if the stories were based on personal experience, the process of self-formation happened during a specific period in history and was inseparable from the turbulent social and historical transition that the country underwent.58 In this case, what made the works by writers such as Pak and Sin meaningful was the way they showed that even the most personal everyday life experiences took place within a particular socialisation process. This approach also enabled the writer/narrator to reflect and comment on her place in the society, in the historical past and present.59 Researchers started to look more specifically to the fact that Pak Wansô returned to her wartime experience in the 1990s after her literary debut and throughout the 1970s and 1980s in works such as The Naked Tree and A Thirsty Season and Mother’s Stake. According to Cho Misuk, Pak was inevitably affected by the prevailing political climate in the 1970s and up to the end of the 1980s, a time when Korea was ruled by an oppressive anti-communist regime that denied intellectuals any freedom to express their personal views on controversial matters such as the civil war. The only accounts that were acceptable were those depicting general suffering, loss, war victims and portraits of North Koreans as evil and merciless. No alternative versions were allowed and Pak wrote her stories in line with the prevailing narrative permit- ted by the South Korean regime.60 In fact, Pak had not been able to speak her mind, and by writing these autobiographical novels in the 1990s and dwelling

57 Sin Kyôngsuk (b.1963) became one of the most successful and acclaimed female writers in the mid-1990s and was awarded several prestigious literary prizes, including Han’guk Ilbo’s literary prize in 1993 and the Manhae literature prize in 1996. In her autobiographical novel Oettan pang (An Isolated Room) published in 1995, a writer in her 30s looks back on her teenage years as a poor country girl who in order to make a better future for herself moves to Seoul and works at a factory while attending high school at night. This coming-of-age story about a girl who dreams of becoming a writer is set during the 1970s and addresses the drawbacks and socio-political implications of South Korea’s rapid industrialisation and economic development, such as oppression and exploitation of workers, migration and urbanisation. The novel was published in an English translation in 2015 with the title The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness. 58 Kim and Yi, “Narrative on Women’s Self-discovery,” 195. 59 Ibid., 209. 60 Cho Misuk,“Pak Wansô sosôrûi chônjaeng chinsul pangsik ch’aijôm yôn’gu: ‘Ômmaûi malttuk’, ‘Mongmarûn kyejôl’, ‘Namok’, ‘Kû mant’ôn singanûn nuga ta môgûssûlkka’, ‘Kû sani chôngmal kôgi issôssûlkka’ûi oppa kwallyôn sôsurûl chungsimûro” (A study on Difference in Testimony on the War in Pak Wansô’s Novels: Focusing on the Description of the Brother in “Mother’s Stake”, “A Thirsty Season”, “The Naked Tree”, “Who Ate up All the Shinga?”, “Was the Mountain Really There?”), Han’guk munye pip’yông yôn’gu 24 (A Study on Korean Literary Criticism) (2007): 227-228.

24 on her painful memories again, she could finally articulate her true experiences without being afraid of repression anymore. She was no longer in need of self-censorship. Cho exemplifies this change in the author’s attitude to the war and the implication of political censorship and anti-communist sentiment reflected in her works by focusing on how her depiction of her brother and the circumstances surrounding his death changed as time progressed. In her earlier works, the political standpoint of the socialist brother is not even mentioned and the death of the family member is described as merely accidental. In The Naked Tree from 1970 and A Thirsty Season from 1978 the presence of a love story involving the main character enhances the feeling of fictionalisation and mitigates any tension that might be provoked by dealing with a sensitive issue. Even when the ideological position of the brother is mentioned, the brother himself regrets his choice of action, or the protagonist makes it clear that she does not share her brother’s ideas and criticises him.61 What Pak Wansô ap- parently meant and wished to do, by repeatedly returning to the civil war and the events concerning her brother and his activities, was not only to problematise his death but to openly and without restrictions reveal the vanity of ideologies which only divide a nation and result in fellow countrymen killing each other, and to condemn a suppressive society that forced people to choose sides.62 The second subject that researchers have focused on when dealing with Pak Wansô’s works is how the author addresses the negative outcome of the rapid modernisation and industrialisation in South Korea. Old moral and cultural values were no longer valid, and writers had to address the moral degradation and hardening of the political climate under the repressive regimes of Park Chunghee and Chun Doohwan. In Pak’s stories, she often depicted the everyday life of the middle class, their customs, values and prevailing social conventions. She showed how people in their quest for wealth and prosperity lost all sense of human decency and that their actions were governed by greed and materialism. Yi Hwajin chose to focus on the meaning of the “body” and “desire” in Pak’s novels A Staggering Afternoon63 and A Lean Year in the City64. Both novels accurately depict the everyday customs of the middle class and reflect the prevailing values and sentiments on marriage, class and family relationships at the time. The stories are filled with characters who make the wrong choices in life because their actions are solely governed by a never-ceasing hunger for social status and wealth. The characters all end up unhappy and

61 Ibid., 249. 62 Ibid., 251. 63 The novel was first serialised in the newspaper Donga Ilbo from January 1 to December 20, 1976, and later published in book form in 1977. 64 The novel was first serialised in the literary journal Munhak sasang (Literature and Thoughts) from December 1975 to July 1979 and published in book form in 1979.

25 have to pay a price. What Pak Wansô wants to show is that the tragedies are an inevitable result of the prevailing social malaise. Using Marxist theories and the thoughts of Jean Baudrillard as a framework in interpreting Pak’s novels, Yi’s main interest is to illustrate and to problematise the way the body is merchandised and materialised in a modern capitalist society, which leads to the dissolution and destruction of family order and structure. But what is more interesting in Yi’s study is her initial discussion on how to define these novels by Pak. Yi choses to use the term taejung sosôl (popular novel). Novels such as A Staggering Afternoon and A Lean Year in the City were widely read and gained enormous popularity in the 1970s. According to Yi, Pak used the features normally associated with the popular novel genre, such as suspense, las- civiousness and entertainment, to discuss and provide enlightenment on current social issues. Pak depicted the daily routines and customs of ordinary Ko- reans and responded to the desires and ambitions of the masses while at the same time problematising the conditions of capitalism and modernisation, and pointing out problems that prevent people from being happy and realising their dreams.65 Yi argues against the scholars who preferred to use the term set’ae sosôl (novel of manners) when discussing Pak’s works, in order to avoid the negative connotations that the term “popular novel” implies. By doing so, they not only neglected an important aspect of Pak’s intention but also underesti- mated the importance of the popular novel, as it often reflects social changes and gives valuable information on what the masses are concerned with “here and now”, their tastes and values.66 In contrast to Yi, Chông Misuk in her analysis of the novel A Lean Year in the City67 focuses on the narrative and point of view of a young and innocent student, Suyôn, who is the protagonist and narrator. Through the eyes of Suyôn, Pak demonstrates how social ills lead to a distortion in human relations, even between family members, and permeate every aspect of one’s daily life. According to Chông, Suyôn is a narrator who perceives herself as an outsider, and by distancing herself emotionally from her family, she is able to critically observe and comment on her mother’s excessive lifestyle, made possible by stealing and engaging in dubious affairs during the war.68 Suyôn is surrounded by family members and friends of different ages, genders and clas-

65 Yi Hwajin, “Pak Wansô sosôrûi taejungsônggwa sôsa chôllyak: ‘Hwich’ônggôrinûn ohu’ wa ‘Tosiûi hyungnyôn’ûl chungsimûro” (Popularity and Narrative Strategy in Pak Wansô’s Novels ‘A Staggering Afternoon’ and ‘A Lean Year in the City’), Pan’gyo ômun yôn’gu 22 (February 2007): 289. 66 Ibid., 288. 67 The novel was first serialised in the literary journal Munhak sasang (Literature and Thought) from December 1975 to July 1979 and published in book form in 1979. 68 Chông Misuk, “T’aljuûi sôsa: Pak Wansôûi ‘Tosiûi hyungnyôn’” (The Narrative of the Fu- gitive: Pak Wansô’s ‘A Lean Year in the City’), Munch’ang ômun nonjip 35 (A Collection of Literary Works) (December 1998): 320-322.

26 ses, who represent diverse views on love, human relations and life goals. Ac- cording to Chông, by introducing a wide number of characters, Pak demonstrates that there are no simple solutions to the obstacles that face a modern urban citizen.69 A life in the city offers many opportunities and temptations but creates disillusioned people who are left with unfulfilled dreams and ambitions. According to Pak, the city is a place where all things, including humans, are treated as commodities, and the only way Suyôn can be “saved”, i.e. find happiness and a marriage based on love, is to leave her family, and move out to the countryside, back to nature and a less polluted way of life.70 Kim Yônghûi focuses on women’s experiences of modernity, and comments on the fact that when the industrialisation and modernisation process was still in progress during the 1970s, Pak managed early on to shed light on how these changes affected women in particular, raising issues of rural-urban conflict, changes in the family and household structure with an increase in the number of nuclear families, and institutionalised gender-division of labour with stay-at-home mums and its implications for women’s social status.71 Ac- cording to Kim, contrary to parallel developments in the West, the modernisation process in South Korea came about abruptly and created contradictory currents throughout society. Pak convincingly demonstrated in her stories about the daily lives of middle-class women that these women enjoyed the economic advantages and social security provided by the capitalist system and the reinforcement of the nuclear family, while the same system confined them to their homes; hence, they still remained oppressed without any possibility of individual freedom.72 Even though Pak Wansô never perceived herself as a feminist writer, most researchers agree that she was one of the pioneers in depicting women’s reality, whether the stories were set during the civil war or during the industrialisation and modernisation era. In the 1980s, Pak published several works such as The Beginning of Vivid Days from 1980, An Independent Woman from 1985 and Are You Still Dreaming from 1989, where she consciously addressed women’s issues, especially urban middle-class women’s living conditions and the obstacles they faced in a patriarchal system. Inevitably, these works gained attention from feminist scholars, but in their politicised readings, they were not always well received. In these stories we meet women in different stages of life, who are well-educated and privileged in many ways. They are divorced, some of them are committed to professional lives and in their search

69 Ibid., 326. 70 Ibid., 332. 71 Kim, Yônghûi, “Kûndae ch’ehômgwa yôsông: Pak Wansô, Kim Insuk, Kong Sônokûi sosôl” (Women and Experience of Modernity: Novels by Pak Wansô, Kim Insuk, Kong Sônok), Ch’angjakkwa pip´yông 89 (Creation and Criticism) (September 1995): 76. 72 Ibid., 78, 81.

27 for happiness and independence they face barriers that are difficult to overcome. In her analysis of the novel An Independent Woman, Mun Hyewôn raises a critical question of whether Pak Wansô manages to present an alternative solution to women’s independence. The first part of the story focuses on a troubled mother-daughter relationship. Yônji is an independent and strong-minded woman who wants to pursue a professional career as a journal- ist and looks for a relationship in which a man and a woman can be entirely equal. Her mother, who belongs to an older generation, has a traditional patriarchal view of women. She believes a woman should be pretty and agreeable and after graduation should find a suitable marriage partner from a wealthy family who has a good education. Yônji has no intention of taking the advice of her mother, who in her opinion led a miserable life of oppression and self- sacrifice. Against her mother’s will, she marries Ch’ôlmin, a man who is below her in social status. She believes this is the only way they can live in harmony, completely equal in their relationship. But her newfound life is filled with arguments and disputes. When she gets pregnant she cannot bear the weight of motherhood and gets an abortion, which inevitably leads to the end of their marriage. As a divorced woman, she finally realises that even though she rejects motherhood and femininity in order to enter the territory of men, their world will always be closed to her. Men have solely relied on gender privileges and authority to oppress, and women will always be subordinated. It is a social order she cannot change, not even by marrying a man who is inferior to her. Mun admits that Pak is raising an important social issue with this novel, but with flat characters like Yônji and Ch’ôlmin who express excessive opinions and are unwilling to compromise, the novel is quite counter- productive. What Pak Wansô is really saying, according to Mun, is that Yônji’s honourable ideas can only work in theory, and by describing her shortcomings, Pak indirectly condemns women who forsake their families in order to strive for freedom and independence. The author firmly believes in the family as an institution, and to her a wise and intelligent woman is someone who does not disturb the family peace and who maintains a peaceful co-existence between herself and her husband/partner.73 A lively debate concerning how to approach and interpret Pak’s works arose between first- and second-generation feminist scholars, culminating in the “Pak Wansô controversy” at the beginning of the 1990s. In several articles Cho Hyejông criticised literary critics for focusing too much on class differences. According to Cho, when it comes to women’s issues in a capitalist system, the focus has solely been on the exploitation of female labourers. Because

73 Mun Hyewôn, “Chinjônghan namnyô p’yôngdûnge taehan chilmun” (The question on real gender equality between men and women), in Pak Wansô munhak kilch’akki. Pak Wansô munhak 30 nyôn kinyôm pip’yôngjip (In Search of Pak Wansô’s Literary Path. Collection of Critical Essays in Commemoration of 30 Years of Pak Wansô’s Literature) (Seoul: Segyesa, 2000), 324-325.

28 of an underclass perspective and approach, there have been no serious attempts to analyse Pak Wansô’s stories about middle-class women. Cho believed that the main cause of women’s oppression was the patriarchy, and accordingly all women, regardless of class, were victims. Second-generation feminist scholars, among them Chôn Sûnghûi and Kim Kyôngyôn, criticised Cho for her limited middle-class point of view. In their opinion, women’s issues cannot be separated from social movements and underlying confrontations in a society. Women’s oppression was related to class oppression and women’s issues must therefore be regarded as being caused by the capitalist economic system. The true aim of feminist literature was to uncover the fact that patriarchy and capitalism work together, which in their opinion Pak was unable to do.74 There are other works by Pak that have been the object of analysis by feminist researchers, for instance, the short story series Mother’s Stake, focusing on its complicated mother-daughter relationship. As previously mentioned, a great number of research papers and doctoral dissertations on Pak Wansô’s works have been published in Korea. In her PhD dissertation Pak Wansô sosôrûi kaldûng palsaeng yoin yôn’gu (A Research on the Cause of Conflict in Pak Wansô’s Novels)75, Yi Ûnha focuses on the main causes of the protagonist’s sufferings in Pak Wansô’s novels. She divides them into three main external factors: the Korean War, patriarchal oppression, and materialism and greediness in an industrialised and modern society. Yi examines how Pak’s characters react and act when they are faced with obstacles imposed on their inner lives which prevent them from self-realisation. In Pak Wansô sosorûi sôsa konggan yôn’gu (A Study on the Narrative Space in Pak Wansô’s Novels)76, Sin Hyônsun goes beyond the city/country dichotomy and broadens the concept and the meaning of space. She examines the importance of certain physical places and their effect on the character’s consciousness, such as Pakchôk village where the author spent her childhood. Pakchôk is often described as a harmonious place where the author experienced a happy childhood and the process of self-realisation. But it is also a historic place marked by Japanese colonialism and ideological tensions. Sin

74 Kim Kyôngwôn, “Pak Wansô nonjaenggwa yôsông munhagûi nagal kil” (The Pak Wansô controversy and the future path of women’s literature), Wôlgan mal 61 (July 1991), 226-237. For more reading, see Chôn Sûnghui, “Yôsông munhakkwa chinjônghan pip’yông ûisik, Cho Hyejôngssiûi sigagi chinin munjejôm” (Women’s Literature and the True Sense of Criticism- Problems Found in Ms Cho Hyejông’s Viewpoint) Ch’angjakkwa pip’yông 19 (Creation and Criticism), no.2 (Summer 1991): 100-125. 75 Yi Ûnha, ”Pak Wansô sosôrûi kaldûng palsaeng yoin yôn’gu” (A Research on the Cause of Conflict in Pak Wansô’s Novels) (PhD diss., Myongji University, 2005). 76 Sin Hyônsun, “Pak Wansô sosôrûi sôsa konggan yôn’gu” (A Study on the Narrative Space in Pak Wansô’s Novels) (PhD diss., Mogwon University, 2000).

29 also examines other spaces, such as the cultural space and the psychological, inner space. In Pak Wansô sosôl yôn’gu: hyônsil chaehyôn yangsangkwa sôsil pangsigûi chungsimûro (Research on Pak Wansô’s Novels: Focusing on the Aspect of Reproducing Reality and Narrative Technique)77, Sin Yôngji investigates how reality and everyday life is depicted in Pak’s stories. Pak portrays a society of malaise, brimming with disturbed human behaviour caused by external factors such as, first, the war and later, industrialisation. In this way, one can get an impression of what troubles the author and what she perceives as urgent and problematic social issues. In her conclusion and closing remarks, Sin states that Pak and her characters wish to overcome hardships imposed by modern society and long for another existence, in which human beings co- exist with nature, where the poor and the rich are not in conflict and human decency is restored. So far everything in Sin’s analysis seems plausible, but she continues by stating that the author is propagating a patriarchal society, which is debatable.78 In Han’guk munhak chakp’ume nat’anan noin munje yuhyông yôn’gu: Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôrûl chungsimûro (A Study on Different Problems Faced by the Elderly in Korean Literature: Focusing on Pak Wansô’s Short Sto- ries)79, O Chunsim has selected 20 short stories written from 1970 to 2006 to investigate how problems faced by the elderly are being depicted. These stories describe how with age come not only physical problems such as dementia and cancer but also the emotional stress of losing one’s position and importance within the family, which leads to alienation and isolation. In Pak Wansô sosôrûi chendô ûisik yôn’gu. Suhaengsôngûl chungsimûro (A Study on Gender Consciousness in Pak Wansô’s Novels: Focusing on Per- formativity)80, Kim Yunjông uses Judith Butler’s theory on gender performativity and concludes that in Pak’s works, gender is not fixed but constructed, and changes depending on the specific social and cultural context. By studying female characters in works from three periods, the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Kim demonstrates that these women form their identities depending on social demands and they respond in different ways by imitating or refusing gender roles imposed on them. In Pak Wansô sosôrûi sôsulsông yôn’gu (A Study on Narrative in Pak

77 Sin Yôngji, “Pak Wansô sosôl yôn’gu: Hyônsil chaehyôn yangsanggwa sôsil pangsigûi chungsimûro” (Research on Pak Wansô’s Novels: Focusing on the Aspect of Reproducing Re- ality and Narrative Technique) (PhD diss., Sungkyunkwan University, 2005). 78 Ibid., 273. 79 O Chunsim, “Han’guk munhak chakp’ume nat’anan noin munje yuhyông yôn’gu: Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôrûl chungsimûro” (A Study on Different Problems Faced by the Elderly in Korean Literature: Focusing on Pak Wansô’s Short Stories) (PhD diss., Baekseok University, 2009). 80 Kim Yunjông, ”Pak Wansô sosôrûi chendô ûisik yôn’gu. Suhaengsôngûl chungsimûro” (A Study on Gender Consciousness in Park Wansô’s Novels: Focusing on Performativity) (PhD diss., Ewha Women’s University, 2012).

30 Wansô’s Novels)81, Yi Sunmi focuses her research on the narrative aspects of Pak’s works and the construction of her characters. Yi shows that women in Pak’s stories are oppressed and alienated, and unable to talk about their experiences and emotions. She argues that a typical narrative device used by Pak Wansô is the ambivalent narrator/character. One common remark about Pak Wansô’s literature is that her books are easy to read. Her stories have characters and settings that are familiar to the reader, and her ability as a storyteller as well as her colloquial style of writing make her works approachable. This argument seems to have influenced academic research as well. An examination of research works produced so far can be summarised as follows: 1. There are relatively few close readings or structuralist analyses of Pak’s texts. 2. There is less research on her early works compared to her later works. 3. Korean scholars tend to cover the whole literary production of an author and by analysing as many works as possible there is sometimes a lack of depth in the analyses.

81 Yi Sunmi, “Pak Wansô sosôrûi sôsulsông yôn’gu” (A Study on the Narrative in Pak Wansô’s Novels) (PhD diss., Yonsei University, 2001).

31 4. Theoretical Outline and Methodology

I intend to carry out close readings of seven short stories. In the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, close reading in the practice of literary studies is defined as “detailed, balanced and rigorous critical examination of a text to discover its meaning and to assess its effect; particularly used in reference to the analytic techniques developed by I.A. Richards in Practical Crit- icism (1929) and by the Cambridge School”.82 According to Richards, one had to differentiate between two uses of language: poetry’s ‘emotive’ language and ‘referential’, scientific language. The everyday language we use, or referential language or statements focus on facts and can be either true or false, but emotive language or statements used by a poet to evoke emotions and attitudes can either be false or true or can be contested. Poetry does not provide knowledge because it speaks to the impulses, but it can fulfil other more valuable human needs than the urge to know.83 The ideas of Richards were later popularised and further developed in American academia by the literary movement New Criticism in the 1930s and 1940s and flourished for several decades. Similar to formalism, basic principles advocated by the New Critics were to put emphasis on text analysis and solely study form and language and the structure of poetry. Close reading was an appropriate tool for fulfilling this purpose. The poetic or literary language characterised by metaphors, tropes, tensions and paradoxes, resisted generalisation and automatisation. It had qualities that could renew and give fuel to our worn out language. And the literary language with its contradictions and ambiguities reflected human existence. The literary work should be valued as an aesthetical object, and thintention of its author or historical and social context or ideology had no relevance to the meaning of the text.84 Although close reading is commonly

82 J.A Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (revised by C.E. Preston), 4th ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 142. 83 According to Terry Eagleton, Richards believed in poetry’s ability to restore social order: “Society is in crisis, Richards argues, because historical change, and scientific discovery in particular, has outstripped and devalued the traditional mythologies by which men and women have lived. The delicate equipoise of the human psyche has therefore been dangerously disturbed; and since religion will no longer serve to retrim it, poetry must do the job instead”. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 39. 84 Atle Kittang et al., En introduktion till den moderna litteraturteorin (An Introduction to Mod- ern Literary Theory)(Eslöv: Brutus Östlings Bokförlag Symposium, 1997), 94.

32 associated with New Critics, it has in fact been practised ever since script was invented and written records from ancient cultures and societies were made readable and interpreted, and even long before philology was institutionalised as an academic discipline. In the introduction to World Philology, Sheldon Pollock gives a historic overview of how philology has been understood and practised in the past and in different world regions. Unlike in its heyday in the nineteenth century, the disparaged and impoverished status of philology in Western academia today is due to the fact that its “subdisciplinary children” such as national literary histories, literary theory, comparative literature and linguistics have “left home”.85 As a result, “the institutional and intellectual fragmentation” led to, on the one hand “theory without practice-literary studies” and on the other hand “practice without theory-philology”.86 Pollock also pays attention to the fact that there are very few scholars who have mastered historical languages and that they are no longer taught at universities. The historical conceptualisation of philology has changed and varied over time, which makes it difficult to give a simple definition of what philology is, but according to Pollock, one can say that “the problem of how to make sense of texts” has been “the lowest common denominator of philological practice”.87 In Philology matters!: essays on the art of reading slowly, Harry Lönnroth expresses the same concern for the future of the discipline but he proposes a rethinking of philology as a broad field within the humanities, not exclusively dealing with historical linguistics, but interdisciplinary. For Lönnroth, philology is all about reading and interpreting, slowly. Philology should be understood “in its widest sense as the profound understanding of language, literature and culture”,88 and as “a love for literature and close reading”.89 According to Lönnroth, in philological research, “closeness” means “continuous reflection on the process of understanding while reading”.90 Thus, as a methodological approach or perspective, philology has the potential to bring together scholars working in different disciplines but sharing the same interest in “linguistic, literary and cultural phenomena in time, or in other words, text, time and interpretation”.91

85 Sidney Pollock, “Introduction”, in World Philology, Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) E-book, 3. 86 Ibid. 87 Pollock, World Philology, 1. 88 Harry Lönnroth, ed., Philology Matters!: Essays on the Art of Reading Slowly, (Leiden: Brill, 2017), xiv. 89 Jan Ziolkowski, “’What is Philology?’ Introduction,” in On Philology, ed. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 11, quoted in Harry Lönnroth, Philology Mat- ters!, xiv. 90 Lönnroth, Philology Matters!, xiv. 91 Ibid.

33 One of the basic discussions that has dominated literary theory in the twentieth century has been about its allegiance and legacy to philology.92 What I would like to emphasise is that regardless of how one would like to define philology or the outlook one takes on a text in terms of theoretical framework, one has to start with the text itself, and must read it well and comprehensively. This is particularly important when you are working with a corpus of material from different periods and cultures. Lönnroth states that “ while the art of reading slowly may go in and out of fashion, it should never be abandoned”93, and I intend to take him at his word and read and reread Pak’s texts slowly with a pencil in my hand. And while reading, certain passages will be under- lined and highlighted in order to disclose and interpret meaning hidden beyond the words and sentences expressed. And the texts will be read in a context. Thus, the methodological approach that I will use is a text and context-based one, or “contextualised close reading”.94 How you tell a story creates a certain narrative mode. One of the choices you make is the degree of participation a narrator should have. According to Genette, all narrative is more or less diegetic, meaning the narrator can never be completely absent:

[…]no narrative can “show” or “imitate” the story it tells. All it can do is tell it in a manner which is detailed, precise, “alive,” and in that way give more or

92 Kittang, An Introduction to Modern Literary Theory, 82. 93 Lönnroth, Philology Matters!, xv. 94 For more examples of contextualised close reading, see Literary Landscapes: from modernism to postcolonialism. This volume comprises 12 essays, dealing with the representation of place and space in fictional works and their importance for characters’ formation and identity. While paying attention to context and history, close reading, or “text-oriented” analysis is con- ducted on works written by modern novelists such as E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and postcolonial novelists such as J.M. Coetzee and Zakes Mda. For instance, in several novels by E.M. Forster, a common plot involves protagonists who set out on a journey to foreign countries, and the travels are understood as a reflection of Forster’s own wish to liberate himself from social constraints and proprieties at home. The Mediterranean setting in his novels, with its relaxed and tolerant atmosphere, makes a striking contrast to the stiff and cage-like English suburban life. By travelling and experiencing different countries and cultures, Forster, being homosexual, hoped for the possibility of finding “cultural, social and sexual liberation”. The same thoughts can be found in a guidebook to Alexandria which the author wrote himself. To be able to interpret a certain text, one looks for the recurrence of themes and patterns in other works but in this specific essay, answers are also found in the author’s diaries, notebooks, and even lectures. A reference is also made to a psychoanalytic reading of Forster’s work. In Zakes Mda’s works, the author mainly uses black experience in different communities to describe the situation in current South Africa. Even though Mda himself claims that he is not advocating political messages in his works, looking at socio-political context and history opens up the texts to “a sophisticated, if often ironic reading of the different responses to specific environments that may be encountered within the broader South African community.” Attie De Lange et al., Literary Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 40, 162.

34 less the illusion of mimesis – which is the only narrative mimesis, for this single and sufficient reason: that narration, oral or written, is a fact of language, and language signifies without imitating.95

In these seven stories by Pak Wansô, one essential narrative component is the use of a homodiegetic narrator who is also autodiegetic, i.e. the narrator is also the protagonist. Pak uses internal focalisation and there is never any shift in focalisation, thus the stories are completely filtered through the consciousness of the narrator. In my opinion this is of the utmost importance and essential in conveying the ideology of the stories and I intend to make use of narratological tools to further explore the meaning of this. However, as many researchers have noted, the traditional formalist-structuralist approach to narrative isolates a text from its historic and social contexts, advocating the notion of a value-free text.96 Genette’s idea of the narrator is not gendered, but in my view gender has a decisive role on how these stories are told and received by the public. Therefore, I have been inspired by the American theorist Susan Sniader Lanser to take a feminist-narratological approach. Grounded in Russian formalism, linguistics-based narrative semi- otics and feminist theories, feminist narratology was a part of the reconceptualisation of narratology which occurred in the 1980s, when it moved away from its structuralist origins.97 Contrary to structuralist studies of narrative, which approached texts as objects that could be analysed in a purely technical manner, the postmodern98 feminist approach posed other questions with the notion that neither a text nor an analysis can be objective or neutral but is

95 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1980), 164. 96 Susan Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of view in Prose Fiction (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1981). 97 In Narratology: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, David Herman introduces the term postclassical narratologies to describe new strategies of methodology and the extension of the classical narratological model. Feminist narratology is an example of practice within postclassical narratologies. See David Herman, ed., Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis (Columbus Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1999). 98 The term “postmodern” or “postmodernism” has a wide range of definitions and meanings and is still constantly under debate. It refers to changes and tendencies which have been going on in literature, art, music, architecture, etc. since the 1940s and 1950s as a reaction against modernism. To put it simply, postmodern philosophy can be understood as a rejection of the notion of an objective reality and an absolute truth. Everything is relational and contextual. Western cultural norms and values are formed and influenced by the ideology of the dominant elite group which serves their interests. Resisting the grand narratives to explain society, instead, one should think that there exist relative truths, i.e. each person is entitled to her/his own truth. For a further explanation on postmodernism, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).

35 always ideologically loaded.99 One of the basic ideas of feminist narratology is the importance placed on contextualisation as a means of understanding the connection between gender and narrative form. In my analysis of Pak Wansô’s works my main interest is the correlation between authority, gender and narrative technique using Lanser’s definition of the terms “authority” and “voice”.100 According to Lanser, “discursive authority” is where the work, author, narrator, character or textual practice strive to attain “intellectual credibility”, “ideological validity” and “aesthetical value”.101 And in order to attain authority the text must relate to different types of audience, individual readers, social norms, aesthetical ideals and power relations within the cultural sphere. Lanser stresses the need for recognising the correlation between social identity and narrative form because “every choice of narrative technique reveals and embodies ideology”. When discussing the term ‘voice’, it carries a different meaning and implication within feminism and narratology. Lanser gives the following explanation:

When feminists talk about voice, we are usually referring to the behavior of actual or fictional persons and groups who assert woman-centered points of view. Thus feminists may speak of a literary character who refuses patriarchal pressures as “finding a voice” whether or not that voice is represented textually. When narrative theorists talk about voice, we are usually concerned with formal structures and not with the causes, ideologies, or social implications of particular narrative practices.102

When these two disparate approaches can be combined, Lanser states that “it becomes possible to see narrative technique not simply as a product of ideology but as ideology itself: narrative voice, situated at the juncture of ‘social

99 Because the term ideology is widely used with different meanings in academia, it should be clarified that when it is employed by Lanser, besides the values and judgements expressed by for example the author/narrator or fictional characters, it should also be understood as follows: “to describe the discourses and signifying systems through which a culture constitutes its beliefs about itself, structures the relationships of individuals and groups to one another, to social institutions, and to belief systems, and legitimates and perpetuates its values and practices,” in Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press 1992) 5. 100 Susan Sniader Lanser had already presented her theoretical outline in The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton 1981). In Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, she uses these findings in studying how specific contexts affect the narrative voice in prose fiction written by women. For further reading on feminist narratology, see Am- biguous Discourse. Feminist Narratology & British Women Writers, ed., Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill 1996), Felski, Rita: Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. Feminist Literature and Social Change (London 1989): Duplesiss, Blau Rachel: Writing Beyond the Ending. Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington 1985). 101 Lanser, Fictions of Authority, 6. 102 Ibid., 4.

36 position and literary practice’, embodies the social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced”.103 The voice is carrying a message at the same time as it functions as a communicator. When studying the point of view or the voice in a text, the narrator’s speech act must be examined in regard to several factors that Lanser subsumes under three categories: the status of the speaker, i.e. the speaker’s relationship to the literary act, the contact of the speaker with the audience, and the stance of the speaker towards the message he/she is uttering. These three components make up the narrative act. And the task of the critic is to “create a profile of the textual point of view or voice by mapping out different points of view of the various fictional characters” and further to “ illustrate the relationship between structures of narrative transmission that bring about this textual point of view and the biographical data, aesthetic conventions and social norms that make up the context of the literary act”.104 In this context, the identity or status of the speaker is a deciding factor, i.e. the author’s, the narrator’s, or the character’s class, age, profession, and gender is the most important component in how the speaker sounds and is interpreted.105 Lanser studies three kinds of narrative modes: authorial, personal and communal voice. Each mode is represented by not only “a set of technical distinc- tions but a particular kind of narrative consciousness and hence a particular nexus of powers, dangers, prohibitions, and possibilities”.106 Contrary to an authorial voice, i.e. heterodiegetic third person narration, the use of a personal voice has more limitations and can also be hazardous when it comes to women writers in patriarchal societies. A personal voice does not carry the “superhu- man privileges”107 of an authorial voice and cannot claim the right to have broader knowledge or make judgements. Its legitimacy and status is very much dependent on how the reader reacts to the actions of the narrator and of the other fictional characters. Thus, a personal voice is only allowed to speak for itself and interpret its own experiences. This is also the reason why the use of a personal voice can have the effect of underlining what Lanser perceives as “the convenient ideology of women’s writing as ‘self-expression’, the product of ‘intuition’ rather than art”.108 Furthermore, a distinction is made between a private voice, which is “narration directed towards a narratee who is a fictional character”, and a public voice which is “narration directed toward a narratee ‘outside’ the fiction, who is analogous to the historical reader”.109 As explained above, social identity and textual behaviour decide how much mimetic authority or the amount of honesty, reliability and competence the

103 Lanser, Fictions of Authority, 5. 104 Lanser, The Narrative Act, 166. 105 Ibid. 106 Lanser, Fictions of Authority, 15. 107 Ibid., 19. 108 Ibid., 19-20. 109 Ibid., 15.

37 reader will grant the narrator. This is another aspect of status that Lanser believes should be considered when analysing texts.110 When it comes to the contact of the speaker/narrator with the readership/narratee the degree of interaction can range from direct to indirect, where direct means that there is a narrator who is engaged in a dialogue with a recipient, addressing a reader, and indirect means the verbal expression between the narrator and narratee is entirely covert.111 I mentioned earlier that one important narrative device in Pak Wansô’s stories is the use of a homodiegetic narrator. Even though a certain amount of direct contact is demonstrated in homodiegetic narrative situations, and that is also the case in Pak Wansô’s stories, it is worth clarifying that the use of an I-narrator does not necessarily lead to a large degree of interaction between the narrator and the narrateee, because contact is rather a matter of how much the narrator acknowledges the presence of a narratee and is consciously narrating.112 I will return to this question later in my analysis of the stories. When discussing the narrative stance, Lanser recognises four different planes where this is being transmitted: phraseological, spatial-temporal, psychological and ideological planes.113 The phraseological plane deals with how the ideological point of view is communicated, and is, according to Lanser, “the most obvious level of stance in terms of surface discourse: it allows us to distinguish various voices within the text and various modes by which textual personae may ‘speak’”.114 A text usually consists of several voices/discourses. Lanser gives examples of different modes which affect how a character is presented and the degree of distance between the narrator and the textual characters. A narrator may speak only from his or her own point of view and voice, or the discourse and specific tone of the narrator can permeate the voice of a character and vice versa. One example of this is the free indirect speech which has an advantage of allowing the narrator to give unlimited access to a character’s inner thoughts and consciousness, but also provides an external perspective and objectivity which is not possible in a homodiegetic narration.115 Consequently, this kind of narrative mode can create a feeling of intimacy between the narrator, the character and the narratee. The spatial-temporal stance also has to do with the narrator’s relationship and the degree of engagement with the textual world. A narrator may choose to apply the spatial perspective of a character or to be positioned “outside” or “within” the scene. To be placed outside implies a distanced and panoramic view of the whole scene, while a spatial perspective within means looking with the character, but the

110 Lanser, The Narrative Act, 169. 111 Ibid., 174-175. 112 Ibid., 176. 113 Ibid., 184. 114 Ibid., 185. 115 Ibid., 186.

38 character can also be seen and described. This mode has a similar effect or advantage as free indirect speech: we get insight into a character’s inner thoughts. Or as Lanser puts it, “a kind of quasi-focalization on the character without violating the limitations of privilege and without necessarily accompanying an access to internal consciousness”.116 In the case of a homodiegetic narrator, only one single person’s vision is possible, thus the “intrapersonal spatial” ordination is not commonly used in a heterodiegetic narration.117 A temporal stance, just like the spatial and phraseological, is important for the overall point of view of the narrator, revealing the ideological and psychological relationship to the textual world. When studying the temporal position of the narrator in relation to the story he/she is telling, Lanser uses Genette’s definition of four possible relationships between narrative time and story time: “subsequent” (narrator talks about something that already happened in the past), “prior” (narrator talks about something that has not happened yet, like a prophecy), “simultaneous” (narrator talks about something that is happening at the moment) and “interpolated” (a combination of subsequent and simultaneous narration).118 According to Lanser, a narrator who retells and reports might have less narrative authority than a narrator who predicts and foretells. Depending on how events are presented in a story when it comes to pace, either through summary or precise and in-depth description reveals the psychological and ideological stance of a narrator. Why is a certain event or content brought to the fore and given substantial space while other events are neglected and overlooked? When a certain event is silenced, does it necessarily mean that it lacks importance? Consequently, every component must be interpreted in regard to the norms of both the text and the cultural context. The phraseological, spatial and temporal stances all provide clues to the psychological stance of the narrator, and there are other features that can be analysed. The amount of information presented about a character, but more importantly the nature of that information, also plays an important role in revealing the psychological stance of the narrator. Lanser refers to Todorov and his definition of “subjective” and “objective” knowledge. Subjective information “reveals the character (temperament, personality, beliefs, responses) of a per- ceiver; it is discourse about persons as subjects. Objective information consists of descriptions about objects or persons-as-objects”.119 The more a character is subjectified, the easier it is for the reader to emphasise with that persona. Another aspect that should be considered is focalisation. External focalisation (instead of focalisation, Lanser uses the term ‘vision’) means the narrator allows the reader to view the character only from the outside, unfiltered. In

116 Lanser, The Narrative Act, 192. 117 Ibid., 198. 118 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 217. 119 Lanser, The Narrative Act, 205.

39 the case of internal focalisation the point of view belongs to a certain character and everything is filtered through the consciousness of that persona. Different ways of representing characters in terms of subjective information and the use of external and internal focalisation demonstrate the narrator’s stance. The more we know about a character’s behaviours and thoughts, the more psychological affinity is created between a narrator and a character (and between a character and narratee).120 The ideology of a text can be expressed in various ways. Lanser differenti- ates between “explicit ideology” and “embedded ideology”.121 Embedded ideology is transmitted through “value-laden lexis, register, and subordinated syntax; and explicit ideology is present on the surface of the text and cannot, therefore, be readily overlooked or misunderstood”.122 When examining the degree of transparency of the message in the story, Lanser discusses whether it is “literally” or “figurally” expressed.123 Among these four planes of stance explained above, for readers, a phraseological and spatial-temporal stance can be easily noticed because they appear on the discourse surface, while for an ideological stance it can be trickier when there are several voices involved and the overall textual point of view is not explicitly expressed. The main aim of this dissertation is to look into how the main ideology behind the stories op- erates on these different levels and how the point of view is structured and conveyed to the reader. As previously mentioned, one important assumption behind the feminist- narratological approach is that a choice of a certain narrative device can never be objective. Furthermore the need for social, political and cultural contextualisation is even greater in this particular case. I expect that this thesis will not only be read by Korean scholars but also by others who have no previous knowledge of either Korean literature or society. Pak is an author who is very much preoccupied with conveying the reality in which she lives, and in particular that of middle-class women like her. Knowing the basics of Korean culture is therefore required. And as someone of Korean descent but having spent the greater part of my life in the West I occupy a liminal space which affords a certain perspective, a double vision of sorts, which informs the way I regard the stories. In my study, the focus will be on some of Pak’s earlier texts because I am interested in the process of establishing oneself as an author and finding one’s voice, and how Pak’s specific writing style was formed as she tried to subvert norms regarding the image of the woman in Korean society. Women’s issues came into focus in Korea during the 1970s, coinciding with Pak’s debut as an author. In order to get a sense of the specific situation and reality of women in

120 Lanser, The Narrative Act, 207. 121 Ibid., 216. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 217.

40 Pak’s works it might be useful to take a look at the obstacles faced by women in the West in the first half of the 20th century, when feminist criticism began in earnest. At an early stage, two prominent figures stood out, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. Woolf’s novels have continuously been the object of study of feminist scholars but she herself also contributed to feminist theory. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Woolf discusses women’s inferior position and status in society and the constraints faced by women writers because of their educational, social and material disadvantages compared to men’s. For a woman to be able to create and engage in literary production she needs a private space of her own but also financial independence. In the same essay, Woolf also proposes the need for women’s literature to investigate female experience and make it significant and important.124 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir like Woolf, highlights women’s economic disadvantages which she perceives as a hindrance to women’s liberation. De Beauvoir also distinguishes between gender and sex. With her most famous assertion “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”, she argues that women are characterised and culturally constructed as the Other, in opposition to men. He is the “One”, the subject, and she is the Other, the object. Women’s inferiority is not justified, but taken for granted. Similar to other first-wave feminists, De Beauvoir denounced biological differences, questioned the notion of femininity, and urged women to break free from the fetters of patriarchy.125 In 1979, in their ground-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic126, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar discussed works by 19th century female writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot and Emily Dickinson and the obstacles they had to cope with when being active in a cultural sphere where aesthetical values, ideals and the very idea of writing were based on male models of authorship. Female writers were faced with patriarchal, stereotypical images of women in literature authored by men: angelic, pure and submissive, i.e. the qualities demanded by society, or mad, insane and uncon- trollable. They more or less adopted and implemented the prevailing dominant literary tradition but they also found innovative and creative ways to resist and challenge these limitations. Thus, according to Gilbert and Gubar, writers such as Jane Austen “ achieved a female ‘duplicitous’ voice by ‘simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards’”.127 As I mentioned earlier, one of the main concerns when studying Pak Wansô’s works, has been to investigate by close reading how “double-voiceness” is used in

124 Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooke, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, Fifth Edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 118. 125 Ibid., 120. 126 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). 127 Selden, Widdowson and Brooke, A Reader’s Guide, 126-127.

41 her text and unravel deeper, hidden layers of meaning. In my view, if belonging to a marginalised group or “subculture” one must always to a certain degree internalise the dominant literary values and forms, and in that process somehow find an autonomous voice. Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, Harold Bloom discussed male po- ets’ ambiguous relationship to their precursors, their “anxiety of influence”.128 These male authors could not be indifferent towards works by their male precursors but at the same time they struggled with fear of not being able to outdo their forefathers, that is, of not being original. In an Oedipal struggle, they had to “kill” their fathers in order to gain authority. Inspired by Bloom, Gilbert and Gubar proposed that female writers, unlike their male counterparts, suffered from “anxiety of authorship”, a fear of not being capable of creating, of being unable to be a proper author because they did not even have forerunners or role models to revise. Female authors must consequently create their own literary tradition and break free from a distorted patriarchal literary heritage. Gilbert and Gubar’s study appeared in the late 1970s and was part of the second-wave feminist movement. More than 30 years have passed since their study was published, and one might think that their findings are outdated today, when female writers have grown in numbers and are awarded prestigious literary prizes. But these questions were indeed relevant when Pak Wansô made her debut in 1970, in her role as a forerunner, paving the way for female writers today.129 Another influential literary critic and feminist who also belongs to the second-wave movement is Elaine Showalter. In A Literature of Their Own, Showalter maps out the literary history of British women writers from Brontë to Lessing, focusing on their careers and lives, but she also draws attention to lesser known writers who have “disappeared” or been forgotten. Showalter shows that women’s writings are indeed different from men’s and that they have a distinct literary tradition of their own, which has been neglected by male critics. The book made an important contribution to feminist criticism when it came out in the late 1970s. Showalter’s as well as Gilbert and Gubar’s research approach falls into the category of gynocriticism, a term coined and

128 Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry was published in 1973. 129 In the essay “Ch’uhan nait’ega silt’a” (I Don’t like Those Ugly Growth Rings), Pak writes about sleepless nights when she lies awake and worries about her children getting involved in student demonstrations or her home being burgled. Among many thoughts occupying her mind, she also asks herself what it means to be an author and expresses fear of not being taken seriously: “Even though I might not become one of those names that remain in history like him [Yi Kwangsu], if you’re an author, you’re destined to feel obliged to step forward and carry the hardships of your time on your shoulders […] to be looked at with pity as someone who used to be an author might not be that bad if you’re a woman, because you would still have your pretty decent lifelong occupation as a housewife […] a woman who used to be an author, someone’s mother who used to be an author, it might not sound so bad […] at the time I was labelled as an author, I did not feel emotional or have any ambitions. The only thing I promised myself was not to become a woman writer, but just a writer.” See Pak, The Ovations I’m Sending,155.

42 conceptualised by Showalter, which means criticism focusing on writings by women and all aspects of their production and interpretation.130 Several feminist-narratological analyses of works by female authors exist where the researchers have studied the correlation between gender and narrative and how female writers have responded to the prevailing traditional masculine narrative form. Nancy K. Miller’s The Heroine’s Text131 and Joanna Russ’ “What Can a Heroine Do?”132 put forward similar views when studying Western literature by concluding that “cultural myths” are indeed male. Con- sequently, female characters have limited options when it comes to plots, myths and choices of action. However, in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics,133 Rita Felski presents a critical review of Anglo-American and European feminist literary criticism, contest- ing the idea of specific feminist aesthetics and avoiding correlation between gender and text. Felski proposes an interdisciplinary approach when analysing literature and when deciding on the political implications and value of literary texts. One has to look at “their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context”134 and study the “social conditions of their production and reception”. 135 By focusing on autobiographical novels, i.e. popular feminist fiction, Felski stresses the need to reflect on the relationship between theory and practice and incorporate social theory in literature studies. In Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers136, 12 researchers conduct close readings of texts by writers such as Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson and Mina Roy in order to examine the role of gender in narrative strategies. Feminist narratology is concerned with “the context of how stories are told, by whom, and for whom”137. This collection of essays not only investigates the ways in which feminist-narratological approaches can be valuable in decoding, locating and interpreting subversion and perplexities in the narrative form and technique, but importance is also attached to the gender of the author, narrator, characters and reader.138 Women’s ability to gain authority and voice in the public sphere is a matter

130 Selden, Widdowson and Brooke, A Reader’s Guide, 127. 131 Miller, Nancy K, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722- 1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 132 Russ, Joanna, “What can a Heroine do? Or Why Women Can’t Write” in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspective, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University popular press, 1973). 133 Felski, Rita, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989). 134 Ibid., 2. 135 Ibid. 136 Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 137 Ibid., 1. 138 Ibid., 2.

43 that has to be considered when studying the early works by Pak Wansô, and this will be the starting point of the present research.

44 5. The Development of Modern Korean Women’s Literature

5.1 Korean Women’s Literature Before 1945 Modern Korean literature emerged during the latter half of the 1910s and 1920s with the publication of Mujông (Heartless) in 1917 by Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950), which is considered to be the first modern Korean novel. During the same period the first generation of modern women writers made their literary debut, represented by Kim Myôngsun (1896-1951?), Na Hyesôk (1896- 1946) and Kim Wônju (1896-1971). These writers proved that it was possible for women to make their voice heard in the public sphere and they boldly expressed their own ideas and opinions about themselves as women, about life, literature and the world. Living in a Confucian society in which women were silenced and confined to the domestic sphere, they stood out with their outspokenness on marriage, motherhood and thoughts on traditional Confu- cian gender roles. They had been educated abroad and were given opportunities most women could hardly imagine.139 Just like their male counterparts, these female writers benefited from a rare moment in Korean cultural and intellectual history, when the influx of modern ideas and different literary discourses from the West, China and Japan created an environment that encouraged vivid and adventurous intellectual and literary activities. In the early 1920s, literary criticism discussed various literary movements such as romanticism, realism, Dadaism and expressionism, as well as diverse writers such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, but also Dante and Walt Whitman.140 At the same time, bold and unconventional ideas on marriage and motherhood, proposed by the Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849-1926) were embraced and attracted the attention of men and women who longed for freedom and independence.141

139 The Japanese played an important role in the development of modern Korean literature. The modernisation movement that swept over East Asia in the late nineteenth century was centred in Japan. Many Koreans, mostly men, but also a few women went to Japan for higher education and came into contact with Japanese translations of Western authors such as Flaubert, Maupas- sant, Dostoyevsky, Balzac and Hemingway. After returning home they put their learning into practice by establishing literary magazines and writing in newspapers. 140 Carolyn So, “Early twentieth-century fiction by women”, in A History of Korean Literature, ed. Peter H. Lee (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 408-409. 141 Ibid., 409.

45 The nationalist movement swept over the country in the late nineteenth century due to foreign aggressions and continued during the colonial period of 1910-1945. One distinct feature in the nationalist movement was the rethinking of the traditional Confucian views on gender and femininity and the importance of women’s education in the struggle for national liberation. In the article “Woman and the Promise of Modernity: Signs of Love for the Nation in Korea”, Sheila Miyoshi Jager gives the following explanation of how women’s oppression was aligned with the nation’s struggle for freedom and independence:

[…]Korea’s early modern literature, by appropriating Western religious and scientific notions about women as “natural” or biological categories, connected traditional Confucian images of woman in family life with the political experience of colonial oppression. What made this political appropriation of the “woman” possible, I argue, lies in the unique way early twentieth-century Ko- rean writers recoded the evolving and dynamic categories of traditional womanhood in Confucian family life into a static and essentialized “sign” for political oppression. The result of this appropriation was the merging of private and public spheres whereby political discourse translated itself through women into the private context of love, marriage, and loyalty. Just as (woman’s) personal happiness (most significantly in family life) was suddenly made the conse- quence of national concern, so her private life was turned into a stage for polit- icizing national desire.142

Miyoshi Jager further explains that this kind of appropriation of woman was not a new phenomenon:

The way Korea’s early modern writers used the new category of woman in their political discourse was, to a very large extent, patterned after traditional narrative configurations about women found in Korea’s canonical literature. Whereas traditional heroines had been revered for their virtuous loyalty to their husbands, that loyalty now shifted to the nation and to the colonized state.143

Women were encouraged to embrace modern ideas but within Confucian gender roles, or as Joanna Elfving-Hwang argues, “while rhetoric promoted women’s rights and education, it also paradoxically worked towards maintain- ing existing gender discourses”.144 Elfving-Hwang also states that:

142 Sheila Jager Miyoshi, “Woman and the Promise of Modernity: Signs of Love for the Nation in Korea,” New Literary History 29, no.1 (Winter 1998): 121-122. 143 Ibid., 122. 144 Joanna Elfving-Hwang, Representations of Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women’s Literature, (Kent: Global Oriental, 2010), 35.

46 […] the survival of essentially Korean cultural values rested […]on the shoulders of self-sacrificial nationalistic woman. Consequently, the main driving force behind the early women’s liberation movements was the need to educate the nation in order to safeguard it. As a result, early Korean feminist movements cannot be seen as simple emulations of early Western feminist movements, since the socio-historical circumstances in which they were fostered centred on ideas of national survival rather than on social or gender equality.145

Nevertheless, at the same time, female writers benefited from these new sentiments, which gave them possibilities to be educated, to participate in public life, and to improve their status. Kim Myôngsun made her literary debut with the short story “Ûsimûi sonyô” (A Mysterious Girl), which won the second prize in a literary contest organised by the literary magazine Ch’ôngch’un (Youth). The story was published in the same magazine in the November issue 1917 and was praised by the judge Yi Kwangsu for its realism and absence of didacticism.146 Na Hyesôk made her debut with the short story “Kyônghûi”, in March 1918 in the magazine Yôjagye (Women’s World, no. 2). Na Hyesôk was born into a middle class family and was given the opportunity to study both at home and abroad, a rare privilege open to very few women. Na was a talented painter and after graduating from Chinmyông Girls’ School in 1913, she studied art at Tokyo Women’s Art College, becoming the first Korean female artist educated in Western painting. It was during her time in Japan that Na was exposed to Western feminist ideas through her involvement in the Japanese women’s movement and a group called Seito (the Bluestockings). In the group’s journal Seito, women were given the opportunity to channel their literary creativity and ambitions. The articles had a clear feminist perspective, and discussed works like Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House.147 Na wrote and published several essays, among them Isangjôk puin (Ideal Women) in 1914, where she discussed (with Nora in mind) a woman’s right to be regarded as first and foremost a human being, not defined by the roles of mother and wife. In another essay entitled “Chapkam-‘K’ônniege yôham” (Miscellaneous Thoughts Addressed to An older sister, K) in 1917, she advocated equal rights for men and women and criticised the Confucian patriarchal oppression of women and accentuated the need for education in order for women to influence their lives.148 Na Hyesôk’s most acclaimed work, the autobiographical

145 Elfving-Hwang, Representations of Femininity, 35. 146 Kim Yung-Hee, ”Creating New Paradigms of Womanhood in Modern Korean Literature: Na Hye-sôk’s ‘Kyônghûi’” Korean Studies 26, no.1 (2002): 2. 147 Ibid., 7. 148 For more reading on the perception and the influence of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House in the gender politics and discourse during colonial era, see Choi Hyaeweol, “Debating the Korean New Woman: Imagining Henrik Ibsen’s ‘Nora’ in Colonial Era Korea,” Asian Studies Review 36 (March 2012): 59-77.

47 novella “Kyônghui” published in 1918, has since the mid-1990s been a fa- vourite research topic among female scholars. The protagonist Kyônghûi is a well-educated woman from an upper-class family who is studying in Japan and is pressured by her family and relatives to give up her studies and get married. She goes against her father’s wishes and refuses a marriage proposal. The story spans over one day and depicts the main character struggling with doubts about whether she made the right decision, and the process leading up to self-realisation and independence. The story has a clear didactic message: the only way a woman can resist predetermined gender roles is through education.149 In 1920, Kim Wônju made her debut with Kyesi (Revelation). 150 Kim Wônju was a feminist activist who was strongly influenced by Ellen Key and Alexandra M. Kollontai (1872-1952). She launched her own literary magazine, Sinyôja (New Women), which was one of the very first journals for women. The magazine, which had a clear feminist approach, functioned as a platform for female writers like herself, Na Hyesôk and Kim Myôngsun to get their work published and to spread the message about the importance of women’s education, women’s rights to dictate their own lives and the need for self-awakening. Like Na Hyesôk, Kim became notorious for her essays, such as “Naûi chôngjo kwan” (My Beliefs on Chastity) published in Chosôn Daily in 1927 where she presented a new morality on free love and female sexuality.151 Contrary to Na Hyesôk and Kim Wônju whose works mostly consisted of essays, Kim Myôngsun wrote fiction, poetry, essays and plays, and translated Western works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s Assignation and Baudelaire’s La Mort des Pauvres into Korean.152 In comparison with her female colleagues, Kim was relatively productive and the only female author who published two anthologies. In Saengmyôngûi kwasil (Fruits of Life) she showed her ability to master different genres and her knowledge of literary movements by experimenting with romanticism, expressionism and mysticism in her poems. Her texts were often autobiographical, confessional stories where she used her own painful experience as a woman born out of wedlock and the prejudices that she had to face from society. In some of her works, Kim also expressed

149 Kim, “Creating New Paradigms,” 28. 150 So, “Early twentieth-century fiction by women,” 408. 151 For more on the works by Kim Wônju, see Kim Yung-Hee, “A Critique on Traditional Ko- rean Family Institutions: Kim Wônju’s ‘Death of a Girl’ “, Korean Studies 23 (1999): 24-33. 152 In contrast to the prevailing literary trend at a time when social issues were brought to the fore, Kim was turning inwards, focused on depicting human emotions in order to understand problems faced by society. By introducing Poe to the Korean audience, Kim Myôngsun hoped that writers would embrace his aesthetics and use of the supernatural. See Theresa Hyun, Writ- ing Women in Korea-Tradition and Feminism in the Colonial Period, (University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 114.

48 her longing for an independent nation, showing anti-colonial sentiments. Sim- ilar to Na Hyesôk and Kim Wônju, Kim Myôngsun criticised the prevailing norms that regulated love, marriage and the feudal family system, which dis- criminated against and oppressed women, preventing them from achieving independence and self-fulfilment.153 With their lifestyles, educated women such as Na Hyesôk, Kim Wônju and Kim Myôngsun were all representatives of the sinyôsông (New Woman). Yung-Hee Kim gives the following definition of a New Woman in the Korean context:

The label sinyôsông was first used to designate a small class of Korean women who received formal education in institutions outside the home, both in Korea and abroad, and thereby gained a certain degree of exposure to foreign culture. Some of them were able to utilize their education by pursuing professional careers, even competing with men in male-dominated professional fields, as these three women did.154

These so-called sinyôsông were supposed to live up to Korea’s modern educational objectives to produce useful and exemplary citizens, exclusively committed to national and civic duties, with disregard for their private interests.155

These women writers, just like their female heroines, revolted against Confu- cian patriarchal views on proper female conduct. A growing number of well- educated women, with their ‘dubious lifestyles’ worried the conservative members of society, and a public debate flourished where the allegedly im- moral conduct of these women was discussed. Soon the term sinyôsông was used in a derogatory way to describe women exposed to harmful Western ideas, indulging in an indecent decadent lifestyle. They were portrayed as violating everything sacred in family values and cultural traditions. Described as selfish and lazy, it was claimed that these women did not even know how to take care of household chores like cooking, sewing and cleaning, a sign of moral decline. In contrast to male writers such as Kim Tongin (1900-1951), Yôm Sangsôp (1897-1963) and Hyôn Chingôn (1900-1943) who are well-established in the literary canon of early modern Korean fiction, these three women writers have been largely neglected and disregarded. One explanation can be found in their short-lived literary careers, the limited number of their works and the fact that as female writers they were considered oddities in a time where women were absent from the public sphere, leading to disparaging criticism of their private lives. Despite their participation in the creation of modern Korean literature they were never accepted by the literary establishment or treated as equals by

153 So, “Early twentieth-century fiction by women,” 410. 154 Kim, “Creating New Paradigms,” 29. 155 Ibid.

49 their male counterparts. Their unconventional lifestyles, with divorces, scan- dalous romantic relationships and personal tragedies, became the target of public scorn and condemnation. To these female writers in the 1920s and 1930s, women’s emancipation had to begin with the abolishment of the strict traditional rules concerning chastity. In her article “Sin saenghwa e tûlmyônsô” (Entering a New Life), published in 1935 in Samch’ôlli (Three Thousand Li), Na Hyesôk propagated free love and women’s right to live out their sexual desires.156 Sexual liberation was an issue that most of the male and female critics had difficulty accepting, and these women did not fit into the socially accepted and prevailing image of the woman as a nationalistic wife who could protect traditional values and cultural heritage. They all became socially ostracised and ended their lives in misery. Kim Myôngsun’s background as a daughter of a secondary wife made it difficult for her to establish herself as a professional writer. When she was accused of plagiarising “A Mysterious Girl” the public’s negative perception of her private life and work deepened. Kim Myôngsun stopped writing and worked for a short period of time as an unsuccessful actress. As an unmarried woman she did not have anyone to care for her and died alone in a mental hospital in Japan in 1951. Similarly, Na Hyesôk ended her life in anonymity at a charity hospital in 1948. Kim Wônju eventually became a Buddhist nun in 1933.157 In contrast to the female writers of the 1920s when the question of women’s emancipation was placed in the foreground, during the 1930s and 1940s writers such as Kang Kyôngae (1907-1943) and Pak Hwasông (1904-1988) turned their attention to social issues and the nation’s suffering under colonial oppression. After the Russian revolution in 1917, socialism and leftist winds swept over East Asia, and Korean intellectuals turned their attention to Russia and formed leftist literary circles like KAPF, Korea Artista Proletaria Federa- tio (Chosôn P’ûrollet’aria Yesul Tongmaeng) (1925-1935), as a result.158 Alt- hough Kang Kyôngae did not belong to KAPF, she had already won recognition as a talented female writer. When the ban on her works was lifted in the 1970s, she was rediscovered by South Korean scholars, and from the 1980s she gained renewed attention from feminist scholars. Kang made her literary debut in 1931 with the story “P’agûm” (The Broken Zither). Other representative works include Ômôniwa ttal (Mothers and Daughters) 1931-1932, In’gan munje (Human Problems) 1934 and “Chihach’on” (Underground Village) 1936. Throughout her entire literary career, Kang depicted, in a painfully realistic fashion, the lives of poor farmers and workers and marginalised people on the lowest social stratum. She often adopted a feminist perspective and portrayed the lives of lower-class women suffering from dual oppression; they were victims of the colonial capitalist economic system but also suffered from

156 Hyun, Writing Women, 45-46. 157 So, “Early twentieth-century fiction by women,” 411. 158 Ibid.

50 the patriarchal oppression. Kang tried to show that gender and class were always entangled, and without class struggle there could be no women’s liberation. In her stories, the family that is supposed to function as a safety net has been shattered, and due to the absence of a breadwinner, women are left alone to fight for their survival in ruthless circumstances. The author herself lost her father at a young age and spent her childhood with her mother in poverty. Kang lived out most of her adult live in a Japanese settler colony in Manchu- ria, Kando, where she wrote most of her works and where her stories took place. “Underground Village” from 1936 is set in a poor country village. The characters in this story are disabled people; the main character Ch’ilsông is partially paralysed because he was denied treatment for his convulsions as a child, and his love interest K’ûnnyôn was born blind. Physical disability is not the result of bad luck but of extreme poverty during the colonial oppression. Their dark and desperate situation is not unique, but a reality for many Kore- ans during the colonial period where wanderers and beggars in the street were a common sight.159 In her seminal novel Human Problems from 1934, Kang depicts the destitute situation of the peasants and the proletarians through the lives of three young people: Sônbi, Ch’ôttche and Sinch’ôl. The first part of the story takes place in a rural village, Yongyôn. The tenant farmers are harassed and exploited by a corrupt landowner (appointed by the Japanese colonial government) who cheats them out of their harvest and keeps them in debt. Sônbi, the female character, works for a vicious landowner as a housekeeper but when he rapes her, she flees to the city of Inch’ôn and starts working at a textile factory. But her move from the countryside into the industrialised city does not improve her situation because the working conditions for the workers are equally severe as those of the farmers’ and they are similarly exploited and deceived by factory owners. Ch’ôttche is also forced to leave the village after losing his right to cultivate his land, and becomes a worker just like Sônbi. In the city he meets a new acquaintance, Sinch’ôl, who is an intellectual and helps Ch’ôttche to gain class consciousness, and together they try to encourage the workers to become politically active. By introducing diverse characters, Kang demonstrates the power relation between the oppressed and the op- pressor. Her message was that the human problem, i.e. social injustice and the exploitation of the underprivileged, was a concern that affected everyone and should therefore be addressed by everyone.160

159 Kwôn Yôngmin, ”Han’guk hyôndae munhaksa 1” (A History of Modern Korean Literature 1) (Seoul: Minûmsa, 2008) 530. For a close reading of Kang Kyôngae’s “Underground Village” and the meaning of the disabled body in Korean colonial literature, see Choi Kyeong-Hee, “Im- paired Body as a Colonial Trope: Kang Kyông’ae’s ‘Underground Village’,” Public Culture 13, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 431-458. 160 Ibid., 530-531.

51 Similar to Kang Kyôngae, Pak Hwasông was influenced by the leftist movement and focused on the class struggle and the sufferings of poor farmers. Pak was the first female writer who to have a novel, Paekhwa (White Flower), serialised in the newspaper Donga Ilbo in 1932-33.161 Pak made her debut in 1925 when her short story “Ch’usôk chônhu” (The Eve of Ch’usôk) was published in Chosôn Mundan. In the story, the protagonist Yôngsin is a poor mother who works at a textile factory and can only just manage to pay tuition fees for her two children. Her already difficult situation worsens when she injures her arm while trying to help a fellow colleague who is sexually harassed by the labour foreman. Without any means to treat her arm, she struggles with the pain and works day and night sewing to save up money for the Ch’usôk holidays. But the next day, the money is taken from her by the landowner. In her works Pak describes women’s vulnerability and sufferings, not only from colonial oppression but also from class inequality. Women’s emancipation was linked to class struggle and national liberation.162 In works such as “Hongsu chônhu” (Before and After the Flood) from 1934 and “Hankwi” (Drought Spirit) from 1935 the poor living conditions of the peasants are described as being caused not only by nature but by a distorted relationship between the landowner and the tenant farmers. In “Chungkûtnal” (An Auspi- cious Day) from 1935 and “Onchônjangûi pom” (Springtime At a Hot Spring) from 1936, farmers lose the right to cultivate their land and are forced to move from the countryside into the city in order to make a living. The women, the mothers and daughters become unwilling victims of human trafficking, and are forced to work in brothels. Thus Pak shows that in a patriarchal society women not only have to endure poverty but also oppression and exploitation from men, and having their bodies commodified.163 Contrary to her precursors, Pak Hwasông was reluctantly accepted by the literary establishment and her works were considered and discussed. Since her literary debut in 1925, for 60 years, Pak continued to produce works almost right up until her death in 1988. She and Kang Kyôngae are the only two pioneering female writers who enjoy a canonical status. Pak Hwasông and Kang Kyôngae managed to broaden the scope of women’s literature by addressing social issues and by being ideologically aligned with their male counterparts. Pak was even accused by her male colleagues of denying her femininity and writing like a man, which shows how difficult it was for female writers to be judged solely by their works.

161 Yi Kwangsu who was the editor of Donga Ilbo showed great interest in Pak Hwasông and helped her to establish herself as a writer by publishing Paekhwa (White Flower) in the newspaper. Pak Hwasông mentioned Yi Kwangsu as her role model and emphasised that he had a great influence on her. Because of their close relationship, there were malevolent rumours that it was actually Yi who had written Paekhwa. See Kim Mihyôn, Chendô p’ûrijûm (Gender Prism) (Seoul: Minûmsa, 2008), 268. 162 Kwôn, A History of Modern Korean Literature 1, 526. 163 Ibid., 526-527.

52 5.2 Women’s Literature After Liberation Until the 1970s When Korea was decolonised in August 15, 1945, after Japan’s defeat in WWII, internal ideological confrontations that had been suppressed and con- trolled during Japanese rule surfaced. The ideological division among writers resulted in the formation of separate associations; the left established Chosôn munhakka tongmaeng (the Chosôn Writers’ Federation) in 1946 and the same year the right formed Chôn Chosôn munp’ilga hyôphôe (the Chosôn Writers’ Association) and Chosôn ch’ôngnyôn munhakka hyôp’hôe (Young Chosôn Writers’ Association). Both these associations were short-lived. When the American military government was established and took power in the South, the persecution and imprisonment of leftist groups led to their disappearance underground, some fleeing to the North.164 In the South the first democratic election was held in 1948 and Rhee Syngman was elected president. In the North, Kim Il Sung became the leader. Thus two separate states were formed before the outbreak of the civil war in 1950. The devastating impact of the civil war and the consequences were far-reaching. Writers and intellectuals were paralysed and traumatised by their experience. They had witnessed atrocities, human depravation and cruelties beyond the imaginable, but somehow they had to come to terms with a new reality in which everything they had believed in was demolished and social order non-existent. When the literary scene began to slowly recover from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s, short stories were dominant, and in the mid-1950s several literary journals were established, such as Hyôndae munhak (Contemporary Literature) and Munhak Yesul (Literary Arts) in 1955 as well as Chayu munhak (Freedom Literature) in 1956.165 In a time of despair and loss of sense and meaning, Korean writers turned their interest to French existentialism and writings by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, which were widely read and discussed. Writers found the existentialist philosophy appealing, with its notion and belief in human beings being totally free, not bound by social norms or higher powers, but responsible for their own lives and how they turn out by the subjective choices they make. They perceived that these ideas embodied the frustration, anxiety and loneliness they felt after surviving a civil war. 166 Contrary to writers who were socially engaged, those who made their debut after the liberation and during the 1950s, such as Kang Sinjae (1924-2001) and Han Musuk (1918-1993), turned their interest inwards, to the private sphere, and portrayed human emotions, and social sentiments and conditions. Their works can be characterised as “fiction of manners”.167 Kang Sinjae

164 Kwôn, A History of Modern Korean Literature, 30-31. 165 Kelly Y Jeong, Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema (Mary- land: Lexington Books, 2010), 56. 166 Ibid. 167 Ch’oe Yun, “Late twentieth-century fiction by women,” in A History of Korean Literature, ed. Peter H. Lee (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 482.

53 made her literary debut in 1949 with “Ôlgul” (The Face) and “Chông Suni”, which were selected by the author Kim Dongni and published in Munye (Lit- erature). During the 1950s, Kang published two short story collections and from the 1960s onwards she wrote over 30 novels, short stories and plays. Some representative works are Imjin kang-ûi mindûlle (Dandelions of Imjin River) from 1962, P’ado (Waves) from 1963 and Onûl-kwa naeil (Today and Tomorrow) from 1966. Kang was awarded the Korean Literature Association prize in 1959 and the Prize for Women writers in 1967.168 Despite the fact that Kang made her debut around the time of the civil war and witnessed and faced a harsh reality she distanced herself from social realism, which had been the dominant literary movement in Korean modern literature. In her stories, the war is never dealt with directly but is only lurking in the background. Kang focused on women’s entanglement in love and marriage. The plots were centred around complicated love relationships, where women suffered from pain and alienation because of social conventions and norms, which they either submitted to or resisted or escaped. They were betrayed by their love interest, and adultery led to death. Kang’s protagonists were women; their inner emotions and the process of self-determination were delicately and sensitively depicted with beautiful, poetical language for which she was praised. Her subtle use of senses, colours and nature to recount emotions is demonstrated in her most famous story “Chôlmûn nût’inamu” (The Young Zelkova Tree) from 1960, a story of forbidden love between two step-siblings. The story is nar- rated from the perspective of a young eighteen-year-old girl, Sukhûi, who does not feel any guilt over her feelings towards Hyôn’gyu who happens to be the son of her new stepfather. Kang does not make any moral judgements on Su- khûi’s and her stepbrother Hyôn’gyu’s behaviour despite the nature of their relationship. Kang often used a complicated love relationship or love triangle to delineate social conditions. The research on the works by Kang Sinjae has focused mainly on the theme of romantic love, thus novels by her and other female authors from the 1950s and 1960s have been accused of escapism and of reproducing a patriarchal value system. Contrary to this view, Song Inhwa proposes an alternative interpretation. In Kang’s stories about disturbing, forbidden love between step-siblings, or the protagonist’s desire for her husband’s friend, Song sees an act of resisting romantic love, a subversive act that not only challenges traditional gender roles but patriarchal norms and ethics.169 During the 1950s and early 1960s, in the Cold War era, the society under the regime of Rhee Syngman became repressive, militant and conservative. In

168 Who’s Who in Korean Literature (Elizabeth, New Jersey: Hollym, 1996), 181. 169 Song Inhwa, ”1960 nyôndae yôsông sosôlgwa ’nangmanjôk sarangûi ûimi - Kang Sinjaewa Han Musugûl chungsimûro” (The Meaning of ’Romantic love’ in Novels by Female Authors in the 1960s - Focusing on Kang Sinjae and Han Musuk), Yôsông munhak yôn’gu 11 (Research on Women’s Literature) (June 2004): 221-250.

54 the post-war, postcolonial nation-building process, women were supposed to return to the home and embrace their traditional gender role. According to researcher Yi Tôkhwa, female authors’ preoccupation with romantic love, which was a common feature in the literature from the 1950s and 1960s, reflected the ambivalence and crisis of women’s identity in a time of uncertainty, when they suffered from isolation and oppression in both the family and society. Yi states that getting involved in romantic relationships and dreaming about ideal love was a way for women to try to regain dignity and self-respect.170 Han Musuk also wrote about romantic love, but according to Yi Tôkhwa, it was often the memory of a lost love that gave the protagonist the strength to keep going and make sense of life.171 Han had made her literary debut during the colonial period, in 1943, with the novel Tûngbul tûnûn yôin (A Woman Holding a Lamp) written in Japanese, which won the first prize in a contest arranged by Sinsidae (New Age) magazine. The real breakthrough came in 1948 when her historical novel Yôksanûn hûrûnda (And So Flows History) won a prize in a literary contest arranged by Kukche Sinbo (National News).172 Han also wrote plays and mastered different genres but she is mostly recog- nised for her short stories and novels.173 Han was brought up in a progressive home and exposed to Western culture. She was a talented painter and was encouraged by her parents to pursue higher education, but she struggled with poor health and had to give up her dreams. Han married into a traditional conservative extended family, which was a cultural shock for her. She was expected to fulfil her duties as a wife, mother and daughter-in-law. She was confined to the home and had constraints imposed on her as a woman. Domestic chores and the repression of her own thoughts and wishes caused her to become intellectually and culturally starved, and she began to question the meaning of life and her value as a human being. Writing was a vent for her frustration and a way to reassure herself.174 According to Yi Tôkhwa, Han struggled to fulfil her role as a woman, mother, and housewife, and her identity as a professional writer. The conflicting emotions she had to cope with and the need for reassurance found a release through her writing. A common theme in

170 Yi Tôkhwa, “Chagi haech’erûl t’onghan chagi kûkpok: Han Musugûi kûlssûgi” (Finding identity through deconstructing identity: Han Musuk’s writing), Hyôndae munhagûi yôn’gu (Study of Modern Literature) 20, (2003): 183-184. 171 Ibid. 172 Chan E. Park describes Han’s novel Yôksanûn hûrûnda (And So Flows History) as “a pan- orama of multigenerational familial romance”. In his analysis, he pays attention to the author’s ability to harmonise oppositional entities, such as modern-traditional, Korean-non-Korean, and the necessity of embracing changes. See Park Chan E, “Flow and Irony: Locating Literary Mo- dernity in Hahn Moo-Sook’s Retrospective Gazes”, Korean studies, Vol.36 (2012), 123-144. 173 Kim, Yung-Hee, “Dialectics of Life. Hahn Moo-Sook and Her Literary World,” in Creative Women of Korea: the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Young-Key Kim Renaud (Ar- monk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 192. 174 Ibid.

55 Han’s works is the exploration of what it is to be a human and to compromise in every facet of life while living through turbulent times in history. In order to cope with obstacles in life, female protagonists in Han’s works dream about romantic love by deceiving themselves or living on the memories and ideali- sation of a lost love in order to escape reality and their unfortunate lot as women. In Han’s works, women may be naïve and foolish and have their hearts broken, but they do not regret their choices despite the sorrow and tragedy. This attitude of contemplation and reconciliation expressed by the characters is a reflection of the author’s own approach in life: to accept one’s destiny and make the best of what lies ahead and to come to terms with the fact that antitheses such as death and life, joy and sorrow, love and hate, past and present, and tradition and modernity inevitably co-exist and are part of life.175 Another important female author during this period is Pak Kyôngni (1926- 2008) who made her debut with “Kyesan” (Calculations) in Hyôndae munhak in 1956. Other representative works by Pak are Pulsin sidae (Age of Distrust) from 1957, Kim jakkugûi ttaldûl (Daughters of Pharmacist Kim) from 1962, and Sijanggwa chônjang (Marketplace and Battlefield) from 1964.176 Her epic novel T’oji (Land) is the work that has gained most appreciation and attention from both readers and researchers. Many research papers and academic works have been produced on this famed and well-regarded epic historical novel, a family saga set in the turbulent 19th and 20th century Korea. The novel begins in 1897, with the Tonghak Peasant uprising, and spans over 36 years of Japa- nese colonialism (1910-1945), ending in 1945 with the birth of the modern Korean state. The novel has been compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace and centres around the lives of five generations in a land-owning clan, the Ch’oes, and the people of all classes who live on their estate in the countryside in the Kyôngsang Province. According to researcher Sowon S. Park who la- bels Pak’s novel “an unknown masterpiece” of world literature, it deals with questions of “freedom and destiny, history and nationhood, change and identity, agency and stoicism, and most of all, about life and love”. The novel consists of 16-20 volumes in Korean, almost 7000 pages, and was written over a time span of several decades, first serialised in Hyôndae munhak in Septem- ber 1969 and completed in 1994. The novel was adapted into a film, TV drama and opera.177 In her works, Pak often depicted the lives of women who had lost their husband and father in the war, and as the sole breadwinner they had to endure all kinds of hardship in a harsh, impoverished society that had lost all sense of trust and humanity. Not only did they have to fight poverty as widows, they had to face discrimination and sexual harassment in a patriarchal society. But the women in Pak’s stories are strong and proud, and regardless

175 Yi, “Finding identity,” 183-205. 176 Kwôn, A History of Modern Korean Literature 1, 126. 177 Sowon S. Park, “An Unknown Masterpiece: On Pak Kyongni’s Land and World Literature”, European Review 23, no. 3 (July 2015): 433.

56 of obstacles they still keep their dignity, and hold on to life tenaciously. Be- cause Pak describes changes in society from the women’s perspective and questions the female gender role and motherhood, her works have gained attention from feminist scholars.178 Unlike other female writers who made their literary debut in the 1950s and 1960s, Pak continued to be productive throughout the 1970s, and her popularity grew even more with the continued publication of Land. Literature cannot be separated from the transformation of society. After crucial events such as the April 19 movement179 that led to the resignation of Rhee Syngman, and the establishment of a military regime in the aftermath of the military coup d’état in May 16, 1961, when Park Chunghee came to power180, a shift in literature occurred in the late 1960s and especially in the early 1970s. Writers began to show a large degree of self-consciousness and awareness. With the improvement of women’s social status and the increasing number of well-educated women, a noticeable number of talented professional female writers entered the literary scene and different aspects of women’s reality emerged as important literary subjects.

178 For more research on Pak Kyôngni’s Toji (Land), see Yi Mihwa, ”Pak Kyôngni ’T’oji’e nat’anan t’alsingminjuûi p’eminijûm yôn’gu: chôhang ûisigûro sayongdoen minjokchuûi, munhwa, ch’ayôn” (The Research on Post-feminism in Pak Kyôngni’s ’Land’: Nationalism, culture and Differance as Resistance), Han’guk munhak nonch’ong 49 (Publications on Korean Literature) (2008): 139-162. See also Yi Sangjin, “Pak Kyôngniûi ’T’oji’e nat’anan yugyo kajok yulliûi haech’e yangsanggwa kû chihyangjôm” (The Aspect and Meaning of the Dissolution of Confucian Family Ethics in Pak Kyôngni’s ’Land’), Hyôndae sosôl yôn’gu 20 (Study of Modern Novels) (December 2003): 325-345. 179 The 19 April revolution in 1960 (also known as the “April revolution” or by the date of the peak day of the revolt “4.19”) was a student-led demonstration against the repressive authoritarian regime of Rhee Syngman. The revolt started after Rhee Syngman of the Liberal Party was re-elected president in the March 1960 election, which was obviously rigged. On April 11, after a mass protest in Masan, the dead body of a young high school boy who had taken part in the demonstrations was found in the bay around Masan. Despite the government’s efforts to cover up the incident, the cause of his death (he had been killed by a tear gas canister and his body was dumped by the police) became known to the public and shocked the nation. This incident became the starting point of the uprisings that culminated in the mass student protest in April 19, 1960, which ultimately led to Rhee’s resignation in April 26 the same year. See Carter J Eckert et al., Korea Old and New: A history (Seoul: Ilchokak Publishers for Korea Institute, Harvard University, 1990), 354-355. 180 After the overthrow of Rhee Syngman, South Korea had a new democratically elected government for one year before power was taken over by a group of military officers, led by Park Chunghee in a coup d’état in May 16, 1961. Park ruled through a military junta, the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction (SCNR), which he later took control over. Martial law was imposed and in a military tribunal, thousands of politicians, bureaucrats and other “unwanted” people were removed through arrests and forced resignation. During Park’s one party regime from 1961 until his assassination in 1979, South Korea underwent remarkable economic growth but at the expense of human rights and democratisation. See Eckert, Korea Old and New, 360.

57 6. South Korean Literature in the 1970s

The literature of the 1970s is commonly known as “the literature of the industrial period” since it dealt with the downsides of the country’s rapid industrialisation, which started in the late 1950s.181 South Korea underwent rapid social and economic changes during a relatively short period of time, and the country was transformed from a rural into a modern industrialised society. The implementation of the Yusin constitution (1972-79) laid the groundwork for an authoritarian state, and the government used the national division and the policy of anti-communism to spur economic development. Along with the national division, rapid industrialisation is often mentioned as one of the most important factors shaping South Korea after the Korean War. The exploitation of low-wage workers was crucial to economic development and resulted in a massive relocation of people from the countryside to the cities. The gap between the rural and urban areas and between the working class and the ruling class widened. Living conditions and lifestyles changed, and severe socio- economic injustice prevailed as a result of these new conditions. People had to endure many years of repressive military dictatorship and political instabil- ity as well. A political battle among intellectuals was fought in the literary scene during the 1970s and 1980s. Voices became politicised and combatant and writers such as Pak Wansô, Yi Mungu, Ch’oe Ilnam, So Chôngin and Yun Hûnggil “attempted to render a sense of life in the modernising decades, looking at it, as it were, from inside, from the midst of life as it is lived in its quotidian diversity.”182 In April 1960 Rhee Syngman’s regime was overthrown by popular protests and out of this turbulent period a new generation of politically active intellectuals arose, called the 4.19 generation (named after the student demonstrations of the 1960s) or the han’gûl generation (the first generation educated in hangûl after the colonial period). The vast transformation of the country strongly influenced writers and was reflected in their works and in the active and flour- ishing debate about the role of literature in the literary field. Critics attempted

181 Kwôn, A History of Modern Korean Literature, 245. 182 Kim Uchang, “The Agony of Cultural Construction: Politics and Culture in Modern Korea” in State and Society in Contemporary Korea, ed. Hagen Koo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 180.

58 to define what made “good literature”, the general opinion being that a writer should be driven by moral and ethical obligations and should act as spokes- person for silenced and suffering victims of the oppressive authoritarian government. Consequently, the literary production of the 1970s tended to have a didactic focus.183 These discussions were a continuation of a debate that engaged the intellectuals during the 1960s, the question of ch’amyô munhak (engagement literature) opposed to sunsu munhak184 (pure literature). Older writers who started their career during the colonial period and survived the horrors of the Korean War in the South were reluctant to move towards a literature with an ideological stance and instead advocated pure literature. The 4.19 generation objected to the perceived social passiveness upheld by these established writers. Influ- enced by Western philosophy and the Sartrean notion of littérature engagée, they came to the forefront in formulating a new direction in literature.185 They stressed the importance of placing Korean literature within the context of Ko- rean literary and social history. Jongyon Hwang explains in the essay “A Post- national Turn in Contemporary Korean Literature” that nationalism “has played a formative role in Korean vernacular literature: the majority of twentieth-century Korean writers believed their mission was to create a national literature and to lay the foundations for a national culture”.186 The idea of national literature or literary nationalism had already been debated in previous times of social and political changes. So in the 1970s when Korea underwent a period of industrialisation, the negative impact of rapid modernisation and economic development had to be addressed. The importance of a literature based on an understanding of historical conditions and current realities was once again brought to the fore. Kwôn Yôngmin gives the following explanation:

In particular, as Koreans entered the decade of the 1970s, the crisis in the social and political situation, confrontation and discord among social classes, and the withering of spiritual culture prompted a realistic awareness of the fact that the autonomous being of the nation and the equilibrium of life for most of its con- stituents were facing an absolute threat; and, in the field of literature, a realistic basis for literary nationalism was naturally established in response to a need to search for the total meaning of the life of the nation and the recovery of its

183 Kwôn, A History of Modern Korean Literature, 246-247. 184 The term sunsu munhak carries different meanings. The word sunsu (pure) can refer to an aesthetical idealism contra commercialism but historically, the term has also represented a political stance against any ideological commitment on the part of writers. 185 Park Sunyoung, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and its Contemporary Manifesta- tion,” Positions 14, no.1 (Spring 2006): 170. 186 Hwang Jongyon, “A Postnational Turn in Contemporary Korean Literature,” World Litera- ture Today 84, no.1 (January-February 2010): 50-52.

59 wholeness in order to counter this threat. Therefore, in the context of the state of the times during the 1970s, literary nationalism took its place as an exceed- ingly dynamic notion that embraced the whole of literature and society.187

Quarterly journals like Munhakkwa Chisông (Literature and Intellect), established in 1970, and Ch’angjakkwa pip´yông (Creation and Criticism) established in 1966, created a platform where critics who advocated the principles of the 4.19 demonstrations could formulate a new logic for national literature. Literary critic Paek Nakch’ong was influential in defining the theoretical out- lines of literary nationalism. In the seminal essay “Minjok munhak kaenyômûi chôngnibûl wihae” (Toward a Concept of National Literature)188 he presented the definition of a national literature that was less ethnocentric, adding histo- ricity and an international perspective. A national literature not only meant nationalistic literature but a literature that appeared as a response to a particular historical period, in a time of national crisis, when a nation’s independence and its people’s well-being were under threat. The task of national literature was to stress the nation’s right to self-determination, which can overcome national division and the people’s right to lead a dignified life. National literature had an important role in shaping people’s consciousness. In an authoritarian state with strong censorship, the literary arena became a place for resistance where intellectuals were able to shed light on social and political injustice. When male writers and critics had the power to decide and define what was “good literature”, in everything from form and expression to the choice of topics, it could be difficult for female writers to produce fiction for a wide audience. Women’s rights were ignored by the literary establishment, and literature dealing with women’s struggles in a male-centred patriarchal society was labelled pulp fiction.189 During the 1970s and 1980s the number of well-educated female writers with an awareness of current social issues increased. For the first time in Ko- rean literary history, women writers found a voice of their own, and Pak Wansô contributed by showing that a woman’s everyday experience could be an incentive for writing. Pak was one of the pioneers in describing the harsh realities of women’s lives in fiction. At a time when male writers were occu-

187 Kwôn Yôngmin, “Minjok munhangnonûi nolliwa silch´ôn” (The Logic and Practice of Na- tional Literature), in Han’guk minjok munhangnon yôn’gu (Studies in Korean Literary Nation- alism) (Seoul: Minûmsa, 1988), 521, quoted in Marshall R. Pihl, “The Nation, the People, and a Small Ball” in South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence, ed. Kenneth Wells (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 210. 188 Paek, Nakch’ong, “Minjok munhak kaenyômûi chôngnirûl wihae” in Minjok munhakkwa segye munhak 1 (Korean Literature and World Literature) (Seoul: Ch’angjakkwa Pip’yôngsa, 1978). 189 Joanna Elfving-Hwang, Representations of Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women’s Literature (Kent: Global Oriental, 2010) 45.

60 pied by political and social issues, female writers, including Pak Wansô, discussed the same topics as their male contemporaries but from a woman’s perspective. Pak often found her material by searching into her own personal life and it is hardly a controversial statement that her works could only have been written by a woman. Regardless of topic, whether it is the Korean War, the downsides of industrialisation and capitalism, or patriarchal oppression in family life, she relates her stories to the reality of women. Pak was careful not to engage herself in gender politics, and although almost every single narrator in her stories is a female character she never took a firm stance or was outspoken about women’s rights. When Pak made her literary debut in the 1970s, female writers were still in the minority and their works were measured by a set of male values or standards more applicable to a masculine literary tradition. By aligning questions of gender inequality with the struggles for democ- racy and the tensions between social classes, Pak managed to establish herself as a writer who was acknowledged for her creativity, and she still holds a solid position in the nation’s literary canon today. Like her male counterparts, Pak adopted the political aims of the oppositional cultural movement. Hypocrisy and materialism of the middle-class Ko- reans are subjects that engaged authors during the 1970s, within the framework of critical realist fiction. From the 1990s onward, realism as a literary trend lost its importance due to the new world order that emerged after the end of the Cold War (such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the demise of the Soviet Union and East European communism) and the first elected civil government in South Korea in 1992. This created a different intellectual climate in which writers could distance themselves from political literature and turn their focus to the inner life without being burdened by tradition or fixed social expectations.190 However, realism cannot be left aside because of the importance it has had in the literary sphere for so many decades, from the 1920s to 1930s and from the 1970s to the 1990s. Contrary to a Western conceptualisation of realism, Korean realism is an ideological attitude in literature, a support for the cause of the Korean people’s struggle against foreign intrusions and oppressive domestic regimes.191 The contemporary Korean critical discourse of realism emerged in the early 1970s. In the essay “Minjokchôk riôllijûmûi kwaje” (The Task of Korean Realism) from 1971, Im Hônyông coined a new nationalist term for the Western literary term ‘realism’ and argued that Korean realism was the only legitimate national literature because of its long historical tradition dating back to the Chosôn period, exemplified in vernacular literature and in the works of Sirhak (practical learning) schol-

190 Cho Namhyôn, “Haebang 50 nyôn, Han’guk sosôl” (Korean Literature after 50 Years of Liberation), in Han’guk hyôndae munhak 50 nyôn (Modern Korean Literature 50 Years), ed. Yun Chongho (Seoul: Minûmsa, 1995)167. 191 Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism,” 169.

61 ars. He argued for the superiority of realism and emphasised that “The aesthetics we should cherish is realism, and the realism we should create is none other than Korean realism. Other forms of abstract art are likely to wrong our history.”192 The long viability of realism was partly due to its non-ideological aesthetic concept, which was well suited to an openly ideological, thematic application in national literature.

192 Im Hônyông, ”Han’guk munhagûi kwaje” (The Task of Korean Realism), in Uri munhagûi nonjaengsa (A History of Korean Literary Criticism), ed. Hong Sinsôn (Seoul: Ômun’gak, 1985), 408.

62 7. Women in the Industrial Period of the 1970s

The role and status of women in Korean society have changed over time. The implementation of Neo-Confucian ideology in the Chosôn dynasty (1392- 1910) led to rigid regulations for women. Confucianism is a philosophy of male lineage; it regards the relation between man and woman as cosmologi- cally sanctioned and the root of all human relations. Heaven (yang) dominates earth (yin) and correspondingly the male has precedence over the female. Ac- cording to the law of nature, women had the inferior position. They had to obey their male family members, who could be the father, the husband or the son. The Neo-Confucian legislators strictly regulated women’s public conduct; they were only allowed to have a status and authority within the domestic sphere. Neo-Confucian ideology devised female roles that called for specific behaviours such as the virtuous wife, the obedient daughter-in-law or the chaste widow.193 The Confucian ideal of filial piety not only served as a model for relations within the family but also for the hierarchies of social status, patriarchal structures of political authority and for gender-based demarcations of the public and private spheres of life. In the 1970s, Korea underwent remarkable rapid economic growth and modernisation and it was a time of contradictions and confrontations between ideologies. During a relatively short period of time many aspects of the lives of ordinary Koreans changed.194 But certain values that for Koreans create their distinctive identity have been firmly preserved, such as the importance placed on the family. As in Western societies, industrialisation and urbanisation brought about a change in the family structure, with an increase in nuclear families. This in turn facilitated the family wage system and implementation of a gender-based division of labour. Men were solely responsible for supporting their families while women stayed at home and took care of the household and the children. But the traditional nuclear family in Korea is different from the Western

193 Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992) 231. 194 At the time of liberation in 1945, 13% of the population lived in settlements consisting of over 50.000 persons. During the 1970s, settlements consisting of more than 100.000 grew by 117% and by 1975 the urban population was 48.4% of the total population. See, Cho Haejoang, “Republic of Korea: those left behind”, in Women in the Villages, Men in the Towns: Women in a World Perspective, ed. UNESCO (Paris, France: Imprimérie de la Manutention, 1984), 195-196.

63 breadwinner model. In Korea, a married woman was responsible for her parents-in-law, in line with the Confucian notion of a woman’s subordination to her husband and his family. With the decrease in extended families, for a woman, marriage and family were the only safety nets. For women, modernisation and economic prosperity thus meant both liberation and oppression at the same time. The transformation from a traditional patriarchy to a modern patriarchy occurred from the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s. As previously mentioned, the increase in nuclear families meant that in the urban, industrialised environments, women were in charge of the domestic domain while men were employed in the public sphere. According to Cho Haejoang, the ideological support for turning women into housewives was not a new phenomenon in the Korean context. During the 1930s, the national pol- icies of Japan designated women new roles as “good wives, wise mothers”. While the husbands were fulfilling their duties and serving the nation in the public sphere, women were supposed to contribute by being suitable assis- tants, taking care of the domestic affairs such as the children’s education and managing the household budget.195 But Cho states that it was not until the 1960s that women began to view themselves primarily as “wives, who orches- trated nuclear households rather than as mothers who were embedded in a larger family collective.”196 Cho continues by describing the generation of women who were born in the 1940s and who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and got married and had a family during the time when South Korea experienced a rapid economic growth, as “aggressive modern wives, the backstage managers of rapid industrialisation”.197 Women in urban areas were educated and exposed to Western culture through television and films, and in their idealised marriage they lived in a nuclear family, with a husband and two children in a newly-built apartment.198 They had the financial means and were econom- ically well off to give their children the best education and make sure they

195 Cho Haejoang, ”Living with conflicting subjectivities: mother, motherly wife, and sexy woman in the transition from colonial-modern to postmodern Korea”, Under construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. Kendall, Laurel (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 173. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid., 169. 198 In her study, Paek Minsuk investigates how gender politics were incorporated in educational TV programmes targeting housewives and women’s magazines during the 1960s and 1970s. See “1960-1979 nyôndae chubu kyoyang p’ûrogûraemgwa t’ellebijônûi chendô chôngch’i. Chubuhwa, t’aljubuhwa, chaegajônghwaûi kajôk ideollogi” (Housewife’s Culture and Infor- mation Programmes and Gender politics in Television in the 1960s-1970s: Discourse on family ideology targeted at re-inforcing and re-domestification of the Housewife), Ôllon’gwa sahoe 23 (Media and Society), no.4 (November 2015): 120-185. Pak Sônga chooses to study representation of women in Sôndaei Sôul (Sunday Seoul), a weekly magazine, published in the late 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s. When the magazine was launched, the country was in the midst of transforming into a mass culture/consumerism society and Sunday Seoul met the demands of the people, fulfilling their inner desires and dreams. Initially Sunday Seoul mainly

64 married the most suitable partners. They did their best to maintain a certain lifestyle and engage in social activities in order to secure their identity as middle class.199 Kelly Y. Jeong in her book Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema discusses the meaning and notion of gender and how it is constructed in the Korean context. According to Jeong, in Korean culture and society the masculine subject is identified with the nation itself. Whenever the nation has been under threat, during colonialism, civil war, industrialisation and re-building of the nation, it has affected the way Koreans experienced modernity and the notion of masculinity, sexuality and gender relationships.200 Modernity was introduced or rather forced upon the country by traumatic historic events in the twentieth century. Male intellectuals who were supposed to be the pillars of the nation had to deal with everything new that came with modernity, and on top of the trauma of losing one’s nation and sovereignty. Jeong investigates the response to these threats in cultural representations of masculinity, gender and nationalism in Korean cinema and literature from the 1930s to the 1960s. She argues that women were often associated with the conflicting and ambiguous emotions they felt towards modernity and western- isation. Hence the pattern in misogynist narratives of “objectifying her addressed a male readership and contained sensational and gossipy articles on sex with semi- nude pictures of women on the cover. But over the years the content became more mainstream, focusing on relationships between men and women and news articles, appealing to a broader readership. Despite the progressive image of the magazine, women who were brought to the fore and idealised were of the type that had traditional feminine qualities and the ability to become a hyônmo yangch’ô (Wise mother, obedient wife). Through proper education they were expected to make an important contribution to the modernisation of the country. What is also noticeable according to Pak is the fact that working-class women are not present in the magazine. The absence of female factory workers who played a decisive role in the economic development is a reflection of the condescending attitude towards them at the time. By being part of the labour force, they were perceived as having given up their femininity/body and were asex- ualised, and consequently not suitable for the role as a hyônmo yangch’ô. Thus, they were no longer attractive or desirable for men. Pak concludes that even in a magazine such as Sunday Seoul designed clearly for entertainment, one can sense the political and social climate at the time, echoing the state-led dominant gender ideology. In “Sôndaei Sôure nat’anan yôsôngûi yuhyônggwa p’yôsang” (The Representation of Women in ‘Sunday Seoul’), Han’gukhak yôn’gu 22 (The Journal of Korean Studies), (June 2010): 159-190. 199 Drawing upon the thoughts of Bourdieu and others that suggest that class is performed not only through social relations but also through “noneconomic symbolic” and “cultural capital”, Nancy Abelmann discusses the important roles played by women through their social, economic and familial activities in order to reproduce and maintain status and class in the Korean context. Abelmann states that women are in charge of “the aesthetical dimensions of life, such as the personal adornment and etiquette of family members or home decoration, and of those institutions central to intergenerational class reproduction, education, and marriage.” See Nancy Abelmann, “Women, mobility, and desire: Narrating class and gender in South Korea”, in Un- der construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Ko- rea, ed. Kendall, Laurel (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), 33. 200 Jeong, Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema, ix.

65 [woman] variously as an infant, a diseased body, or an abject, unknowable Other through oversexualization, thus betraying the nature of Korean women’s victimization as gendered, displayed, and intertwined with the issues of the nation”.201 The process of transforming into a modern industrialised and militarised nation during the 1970s had a profound impact on notions and practices of masculinity and femininity and gender roles. When discussing his novel Brooklyn in a BBC Radio 4 podcast, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín was asked why he constantly returns to the same themes, to his hometown Enniscorthy, writing about people from a particular class et- cetera, and he gave a simple but nevertheless convincing explanation:

You work out of a personal DNA, about what interests you emotionally. And I think the question is then to realise that there really is no rule saying that in each novel you have to do something entirely different, that if you are only one person after all, these things can come back and be allowed back in.202

The same could be said about Pak Wansô. She kept turning back to the same stories and the same people throughout her entire career. There are common narrative features in the following seven stories that I will draw attention to in the following close readings.

7.1 Close Reading of “House of Bubbles” In several of Pak Wansô’s stories, a common theme is the dissolution of the family. The head of the family, the father or the husband, is absent due to the war or because he is earning a living abroad. The 1965 Immigration and Na- tionality act marked the beginning of a trend for a great number of Koreans to move to the US, and in the 1970s and 1980s they were the third largest immi- grant group. In the same period many construction workers went to the Middle East to work for Korean contractors. The government actively promoted the export of manpower.203 Pak Wansô focuses on what happens to the women who are left behind when their husbands are away earning money, and she

201 Jeong, Crisis of Gender and the Nation in Korean Literature and Cinema, 109. 202 James Naughtie, interview with Colm Tóibín, BBC Radio 4 Bookclub podcast audio, July 1, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b86bpz. 203 The fast economic development during the 1970s and the rise of the South Korean business conglomerates, chaebôl, created a need for new projects and markets outside of South Korea. Thus the Middle East became a potential site for expansion for construction companies such as Hyundai, Dong Ah Industrial and Daewoo. Korean construction firms entered the Middle East market in 1973 and they were the only exporters of construction services to bring their own workers with them. See Alan Levkowitz, “The Republic of Korea and the Middle East: Eco- nomics, Diplomacy and Security,” The Korea Economic Institute of America 5, no. 6 (2010): 2.

66 describes the obstacles they face when trying to internalise the patriarchal view of women’s roles. In the short story “P’omarûi chip” (House of Bubbles) the main character’s husband is working for a trading company at their Los Angeles branch when he is called back to the head office. But instead of returning to Korea he decides to stay in the US in search of the American dream. When the story opens, almost two years have passed since the husband left for the US and the rest of the family is still waiting for him to get permanent residency and save enough money so that they can reunite. Meanwhile, confined to home, the protagonist tries to safeguard her family and carry out her duties as a devoted wife, mother and daughter-in-law. But her rebellious teenage son who barely speaks to her, and a mother-in-law who is suffering from dementia make her feel inadequate. She lacks an identity of her own and struggles with the urge to free herself from the imprisonment by her family. The only way to resist and break out from her predetermined roles as mother and wife is to turn to escapism, adultery and psychological disorder. The story spans over one day in the life of a middle-class housewife and opens with a scene in the morning where the main character is preparing a lunchbox for her son Tongsôk, something she probably does every day. This is a common introduction in Pak Wansô’s stories. The reader is invited to a familiar setting but soon something disturbing happens. Just as she is about to press the button on the rice cooker she freezes and is almost paralysed. She realises that she has forgotten to buy barley. Her son specifically told her yes- terday to put more barley in his lunchbox, a strict order from his teacher. He even told her that his teacher threatened to press charges against those parents that did not make proper lunchboxes. The image of the teacher behind her desk, pouting with her mouth like a bottleneck and uttering the word “press charges” had occupied her mind throughout the previous evening but to her great annoyance she managed to forget it anyway. The excessive reaction of fear the protagonist is experiencing is due to the pressure both from the outside world, from the teacher who represents governmental authority, and from her own home. The very first opening lines set the mood for the entire story:

Tongsôk and I haven’t spoken a word to each other for a week. Tongsôk has never been talkative but recently it has got worse. Even though this child who does not talk is mine, I feel intimidated by him.204

The uneasiness she feels towards him is just one of the many signs of her own distress. She runs out from her apartment to go to the grocery store and from

204 Pak Wansô, “P’omarûi chip” (House of Bubbles) in Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôl chônjip 2, Paebanûi yôrûm (Pak Wansô. The Short Story Collection 2. Summer of Betrayal) (P’aju: Munhak tongne, 2006), 63.

67 the moment she steps out of her home, she begins to experience a series of unpleasant and inexplicable events, in the midst of an ordinary situation:

While looking down at the apartment’s stairs I felt a slight dizziness but I kept running. The stairs were crumbling under my feet and the friction from the handrail created electricity under my palm, spreading to the heart […] The headlights from the car coming towards me looked like eyes of a beast but I cast my fear away and kept running forward.205

If I continued like this, apart from the lunchbox, he would probably miss his breakfast. Looking for my apartment I got lost a couple of times. In the darkness of fog slowly dispersing, between countless standing apartments, the wide road over there looked just like the one over here, making me confused.206

Not only does she experience a number of unusual physical symptoms, but the environment outside is described in an uncanny way with high apartments and fast moving cars chasing after her, depicted as monsters wanting to hurt her. The whole experience is described as if she is in a nightmare. In the small hours of the morning, the darkness has not yet dispersed and the streets are empty of people. She gets to the closest rice store only to find it closed with its iron shutters down. She starts to bang on the shutters with her bare hand and the coldness and the sound from the iron is unbearable. She runs from one store to another without any luck. While she is wandering about she keeps thinking about Tongsôk’s teacher with her mouth formed like a bottleneck. The apartments look like matchboxes and after getting lost, she finally distinguishes a grey concrete wall with the number 108 written in yellow. She runs up to the 4th floor and rings the doorbell but instead of hearing the voice of her mother-in-law, this voice belongs to a much younger woman. The door is opened by a woman with hair shaped like a bunch of grapes, probably a neighbour. But she can’t figure out why the woman is in her house, acting like the landlady. She soon realises that on the apartment door in front of her the numbers say 404 and her own apartment has the number 406. The woman is unfriendly and is clearly unhappy to be disturbed so early in the morning. Despite her initial hostility, the main character manages to borrow some boiled barley and the last impression of the neighbour is her bright red coloured nails, which makes the protagonist shiver. After she has returned home and finished the lunchbox, another problem arises. Tongsôk’s school uniform is missing. Her mother-in-law’s dementia has got worse and she has developed a bad habit of hiding things. It could be anything from shoes to food. A short period after her mother-in-law moved

205 Pak, “House of Bubbles,” 64. 206 Ibid., 65.

68 into their household, before they even got to know each other, her husband left for the US. Left at home, by themselves, they have somehow managed to get along but the main character does not feel any affection towards her mother-in-law and her only wish is to have as little interaction with her as possible. And while suppressing her feelings, she continues to make lunchboxes for her teenage son and take care of her mother-in-law by feeding her and taking her to the school for the elderly, noin hakkyo. She internalises the patriarchal family values by taking the role as family protector when the family head is absent. But the sense of meaninglessness is overwhelming and there is no way she can relieve her anguish. The main character’s irrational behaviour and her frightening experience of the outside environment reflect her bleak state of mind. Our impression of her hostile environment is enhanced by the author’s reference to materials like iron and concrete often associated with harshness and coldness. In the same way, the author’s use of colours and numbers has a discomfiting effect. Not only the description of the grey concrete wall but also the female neighbour’s red painted nails have a negative connotation in this context which signals threat and danger. The author also uses the number four, which is thought to bring bad luck and misfortune in East Asian countries and is therefore avoided in public buildings such as hospitals, hotels and apartments. In the passage above, the number four is repeated several times: the main character lives on the 4th floor, the number of her neighbour’s apartment is 404 which contain two fours and there is also a four in the main character’s apartment number 406. After she is done with her morning chores, she has a couple of hours of spare time. For the first time in a long while she rereads her husband’s letters, always written in the same indolent mood, with similar content. She can almost remember them by heart. In his letters, he is always referring to her as Tongsôk’s mother, not even once “Dear Ûnyong” or “Dear wife”:

Just like last month, I’ll send you a hundred dollars. I earn more but I must save up every penny so I can get a store of my own as soon as possible. I can’t be employed by someone else forever. I’ll have my own business within three years. Mark my words and just wait.207

My life here is wearing me out and to be honest I don’t even have time to miss you. You will experience the same hardship at first. But for the sake of Tongsôk we must somehow settle here.208

207 Pak, “House of Bubbles,” 74. 208 Ibid., 75.

69 Her husband’s letters do not evoke any sympathy in her. He is described as a cold and selfish person. She feels bored and wants to experience some excitement. She eagerly waits for a guest to arrive, a male student she met a week ago at an exhibition. Through a flashback, the protagonist recounts what happened that day on her way home from the school for the elderly. She happened to pass by a gallery that had opened in the neighbourhood and even though she was not particularly interested in art she decided to have a look. Students majoring in architecture displayed models of beautiful houses with names like “The House of Professor K”, The Lakeside House” and “The House of the Nouveau Riche”. She found it strange that anyone would want to open an exhibition about houses when everyone’s dream is to live in a fancy apartment. In the corner of the exhibition hall, she noticed a model with the name “The House of Bubbles”. She was intrigued by what she saw:

Foam means water bubbles. Can it be a house made of water bubbles which can be extinguished by a blow […] but looking at the three-dimensional model it was really a peculiar house with rooms in the round shape of water bubbles. And there was a short description. ‘Let us liberate the future houses from the straight lines of the old ones.’ It sounded more like a manifesto than a description.209

The good-looking young man behind the creation did not make any effort to give her an explanation and she was convinced that he looked down on her, thinking that she would probably not understand anyway. In order to gain some courage and make contact, she decided to have the same condescending attitude towards him and imagined that he was a poor country bumpkin from a small mountain town, living in a shack. After a short conversation, she invited him to her home. She found his appearance attractive. His long greasy hair and shabby clothes did not intimidate her at all; on the contrary, his hand- some features stood out even more. He was open-hearted and confessed to her that he was having a hard time paying his tuition fees and he wished to find a rich widow who was willing to support him in exchange for personal services. Maybe the young man thought she was that widow and she did not mind playing the part. Their first encounter only ended in a kiss and was interrupted by her son coming home from school. After recounting what happened on their first meeting, the story shifts back to the present and the protagonist is getting ready for another visit by the young man. She hides the letter from her husband and puts on a revealing dress and makeup. The sexual act can finally be consummated but his lips do not feel as smooth as the last time, and even this time the encounter is a failure because he is not able to perform sexually. But the protagonist does not feel

209 Pak, “House of Bubbles,” 78-79.

70 any disappointment, just emptiness. In the end, the only lasting feeling the young student manages to evoke in her is scorn and pity. The story ends in the evening. The family members are gathered around the kitchen table, having dinner without speaking a word to each other. After finishing the meal, each one returns to their rooms and locks the doors. The main character suffers from insomnia and only a sleeping pill will help her to endure another night. The pills are actually prescribed for her mother-in-law who has developed a bad habit of wandering around in the apartment in the middle of the night. One night the protagonist was woken up by her mother- in-law who knocked on door and with a heart-rending voice repeatedly calling “dear, please open the door”, “dear, please open the door.” Ever since that night when she saw her mother-in-law naked and with her hair loose, she has kept her door locked and tries her best to avoid the degrading sight of an old lady who has lost all her dignity. The relationship between the main character and her mother-in-law is strained and complex. She is struggling with conflicting emotions towards her, both antipathy and compassion at the same time. As a mother and a woman she can empathise with her mother-in-law and her vulnerability, being dependent on a son who does not care about her, which is similar to how her own son Tongsôk mistreats her. But at night, she cannot help thinking about her mother-in-law as a revengeful spirit who sneaks into her room through the keyhole. Despite her fear, she cannot bear to give her the sleeping pills in case it would harm her health. And she cannot trust herself and what she is capable of doing to her. So she takes the pills instead. The last thing she imagines before falling asleep is the contours of her own apartment block slowly blurring out and turning into the shapes of bubbles ready to be extinguished at any moment. In “House of Bubbles” the story is focused on the female protagonist. The narrator/main character is telling her own story so she has the possibility to analyse and reflect on her experiences. Feminist narratology recognises the connection between the social identity of the author/narrator and narrative form. When discussing the status of narrative voice, the question of discursive authority or its absence becomes more important when it comes to women’s roles as authors and narrators, considering the fact that women have for a long time been excluded from the male-dominated cultural sphere. The protagonist perceives her daily routines as frightening, and her hallucination and the physical disorder are later explained as a reaction to the emptiness and isolation in her life. The reader is never left in the dark, because the author always gives an explanation of the main character’s behaviour. By slowly giving insight into the mind of the protagonist, emotional affinity is created between the narrator and the narratee. This is a narrative element which is crucial and decisive in order for the reader to understand and approve of the message of the story. It is important to note this aspect of Pak Wansô’s narrative technique in comparison to another female author, O Chônghûi. O was born in 1947 and

71 made her literature debut in her 20s with the short story “Wan’gujôm yôin” (The Toyshop Woman) in 1968.210 They were both active as writers during the 1970s and depicted the same kind of problems faced by women, about their alienation and vulnerability in a patriarchal society. Thus, literary critics have often compared these two authors to each other. But there are some noticeable differences in the narrative style and technique used by these writers. O often uses variations of viewpoints, stream-of-consciousness, inner mono- logues and stories with ambiguities and unspoken emotions, leaving more space to the reader to interpret. O has been praised for her ability to describe the psychological landscape of the female characters without an ounce of sentimentality but in a rather distanced manner. Similar to Pak’s works, O’s stories are set in everyday life situations but under the surface they are more disturbing and uncomfortable. Because of the use of a single narrator, the ideology is incorporated in the main character’s speech act. There are several examples in the text where this is expressed on the sentence level through the protagonist’s statements, which has been exemplified in the quotations. Pak Wansô wants the reader to know the ideology stance behind the story and does not leave any room for alternative interpretations, in line with realistic literature at the time. Her way is to emphasise a single character’s particular point of view. The consciousness of the other characters in this story is never exposed to the reader and the main character is the only person who is subjectified. The author wants to tell the story of the woman, the housewife and the mother who is left behind, and thus the main character is the only person whose inner thoughts and emotions are revealed to the reader. The only two characters that are given names are the protagonist and her son. One never gets to know the husband’s name, his inner thoughts or how he perceives the whole situation. He is only present in the story through his letters, which the main character reads and immediately interprets and transmits to the reader. He is muted in the story and is never given the opportunity to speak for himself. He is objectified and the narrator does not attach psychological importance to him, depriving him of a voice of his own. This creates an emotional and psychological distance between the narrator and her husband which in turn affects the way readers perceive him. In the first letter she starts to read, her husband wonders if his mother is doing well and asks his wife to take good care of her. In the next sentence she discredits his intentions by interpreting his words as follows:

210 Some of O Chônghûi representative works are Purûi kang (River of Fire) 1974, Chônyôgûi keim (Evening Game) 1979, Yunyônûi ttûl (Garden in My Childhood) 1981, Pulkkot nori (Fire- work) 1995, and Sae (Bird) 1996. Her books have been translated into several foreign languages such as English, French, German and Polish.

72 Every time I read this passage, I’m struck with a strong doubt about whether he really wants her to do well. Because I know for sure that he is not a filial son. When we lived apart from his parents, not even once did he voluntarily ask about their well-being. I had to pay a visit now and then, pretending that their son had sent me, just to ease their disappointment.211

She also questions her husband’s motives in relation to his son and wonders why he has to make such a big sacrifice for his offspring, a son who is un- grateful and does not even speak to his own mother. She does not understand why people continue to live through their children and reproduce old-fashioned values:

For the sake of Tongsôk, for the sake of Tongsôk […] It’s for the sake of Tongsôk we have to settle in the US. When Ch’ôlsu’s parents moved to the US, they said it was for the sake of Ch’ôlsu. When Hyôk’s parents moved to Canada to settle down in this remote foreign country they said it was for the sake of Hyôk.212

I know several facts about the US: that Americans only eat food produced in America and wear only clothes made by Americans. And individualism has gone so far that they treat their fathers and mothers and the elderly as dirt. Why should we, as we are growing older, leave for that place and suffer for the sake of Tongsôk.213

In my analysis of the story “House of Bubbles”, the focus has been on the status of the narrative voice. It has been demonstrated that ideology can be communicated through narrative technique by giving authority to a single character/narrator and to one dominating ideology. According to Lanser, to strive for and to gain authority can be a subversive act by a female author/narrator in a context where women, due to their subordinate position, have been marginalised and silenced. Pak gives Korean women a voice so their stories can be told and legitimised. Explicit ideology is expressed literally throughout the story. For example, the author lets the narrator interpret the title of the story several times in the story, first in the passage, exemplified in the quotation when she visits the exhibition, and second in the final part of the story. After the sexual encounter with the young student has failed, the protagonist watches him as he is leaving her apartment and makes the following statement:

Poor soothsayer. When I’m watching him through the window, disappearing, I cannot help wondering if the future house in the shape of bubbles which he has

211 Pak, ”House of Bubbles,” 73. 212 Ibid., 75. 213 Ibid.,76.

73 drawn is not the image of a building but in fact the image of a future family. If this becomes reality, what a horrible prophecy he made. I shiver.214

Even though the narrator does not address a narratee directly, her thoughts in the form of judgements and interpretations and her actions are explained throughout the story, which means acknowledging the presence of a narratee. There are several examples of the narrator consciously narrating:

There are still five hours left before I have to fetch my mother-in-law from the school for the elderly. I cannot spend these five precious hours being bored. To be honest, I want to have some fun. I want to be unfaithful. A dreamlike affair. A hot affair. Soon, infidelity will knock on my door. I might not open. Maybe the reason I brought out my husband’s letters was to prevent myself from opening the door. But those letters did not possess the power to stop the urge to be unfaithful.215

In the passage above the main character is about to commit adultery. The reason for this action cannot be easily misunderstood because she explains in her own words that it is the outcome of loneliness and boredom. She is even hoping that thinking of her husband, by reading his letters, will prevent her from acting out her desires. But his words have no importance to her. They are weak and so is he, and these lines transmit a feeling of desperation and sadness. Another indication that this potential affair does not mean anything to her is the way she describes her potential lover:

He admired my house with its straight lines. We talked about this and that. About him being poor. He even said that the only hope he has now, being pressured by trying to earn money for his tuition fees, is to find a rich widow for whom he can provide some fun and get paid. He was hoping that I was that widow.216

The sentence “we talked about this and that” means that they are engaged in small talk. The narrator does not bother explaining in detail what they talk about. And in the next sentence, the information about the young man is delivered in the same, nonchalant way. He only wants money and any other motives he might have for his actions are not further discussed. This shows the narrator’s attitude and the fact that she does not have any interest in this person. Despite the fact that for a woman in a patriarchal society, adultery and opposing traditional gender roles might be perceived as controversial and pro- vocative, this act of defiance is carried out explicitly and through sentence level phrasing. The narrator also uses emotive expressions and irony, which is

214 Pak, “House of Bubbles,” 82. 215 Ibid., 76-77. 216 Ibid., 80.

74 done by repeating certain words, like “cutting edge”, “apartment”, “house” in this passage where she describes her neighbours who are obsessed by material things:

No one living in these apartment complexes wants to live in a house. There is no one who does not resent those times when they lived in houses. The dream of making a better life for oneself includes living in a bigger apartment or if not that, a splendid apartment. Not a house. The inhabitants of a cutting edge home like an apartment are immensely satisfied living in a cutting edge home, and they love their cutting edge homes.217

At the beginning of the story, when the narrator wanders around the streets of her neighbourhood looking for barley, she repeats the adjective ‘spacious’, nôltchik, nôltchik to describe the roads between apartment complexes. The adjective itself has a positive connotation, but used in what she perceives as a frightening situation, with cars chasing after her like beasts and lost among apartments impossible to distinguish, this word can be perceived as ironic or mocking. The ideology of the text, which is conveyed on the sentence level, is accompanied by ironic modes of expression. The image of her son’s teacher with a pouting mouth is mentioned several times. It may be interpreted as a sign of fear of authority, but it can also be seen as ridiculing. This kind of textual behaviour where confidence or cockiness is displayed confirms that the ideological stance taken by the narrator coincides to a certain extent with the norms and values of the readers. In this context, the question of mimetic authority is important to consider, i.e. how much credibility, honesty and reliability the reader will grant the narrator. And when using an overt homodiegetic narrator, as in this specific story, mimetic authority is very much decided by the narrator’s behaviour in the text and to what extent his/her actions make sense to the reader. And as I have exemplified above, different narrative modes are used in order to establish contact between the narrator and the narratee. Pak depicts how a country and a society going through major socio-economical changes affect the lives of ordinary Korean women. How the constant struggle for wealth and fortune makes people forget about what really matters and causes the separation of families. “House of Bubbles” symbolises the dissolution of the family, or dreams that can never be fulfilled. The sexual encounter between the main character and the young student is bound to fail, because the main character is not interested in having an affair. It is only a desperate attempt to break free from imprisonment and boredom. Adultery is a motive Pak returns to in several of her stories, for example “Talmûn bang- dûl” (Identical apartments) and it is always related to despair, just like in the

217 Pak, “House of Bubbles,” 77-78.

75 present story. The poor student’s desperate attempt to make a better life for himself ends in failure, and the protagonist’s dream of a harmonious and caring family seems to be unattainable. Contrary to the feminist literature produced from the 1990s onwards, where a common theme is the formation of a female identity and escaping from the patriarchal institution, the female protagonists in Pak’s stories never run away from home, regardless of their suffering. Pak does not question the importance of a family. Moreover, in her story “House of Bubbles”, both the female protagonist and the husband are portrayed as victims of traditional gender structures and old-fashioned customs. Her project is to criticise the patriarchal values that trap men and women into fixed gender roles with only a slight potential to fulfil their real dreams and ideals. In most of Pak’s short stories from the 1970s the author uses a homodiegetic narrator and the most important task is to transmit the message and the ideology behind her stories to the reader. Thus the literary and aesthetic qualities came second. Pak’s approach is quite different from the one we see in contemporary postmodern literature, where writers strive to produce texts free from political and cultural nationalism, and constantly questioning the deep-rooted dichotomies national-cosmopolitan, modernist-realist and high- low.

7.2 Close Reading of “Identical Apartments” In several of Pak Wansô’s stories the female characters suffer from physical conditions such as nausea, dizziness and hallucinations in the midst of an ordinary, everyday situation. In “A study of hysteria in the women of Pak Wansô’s fiction - repression of desires in a Confucian patriarchal system”, Diana Hinds discusses the use of hysteria as a way for the female protagonist to escape from patriarchal oppression.218 According to Hinds, the use of madness is a well-debated concept in literary criticism. Important works that have been the object of feminist literary studies are concerned with the figure of a madwoman, for example Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dallo- way, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. But compared to their Western counterparts, the women in Pak Wansô’s works turn their frustration or anger inward and suffer in silence. In “Talmûn pangdûl” (Identical Apartments)219

218 Diana Hinds, “A study of hysteria in the women of Pak Wansô’s fiction - repression of desires in a Confucian patriarchal system” (Master’s thesis. Seoul National University, Korea, 2001). 219 Pak Wansô, “Talmûn pangdûl” (Identical Apartments) in Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôl chônjip 1, Pukkûrôumûl karûch’imnida (Pak Wansô. The Short Story Collection 1. I Teach You Shame) (P’aju: Munhak tongne, 2006). I have used Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s English title of the short story. The literal translation of the original Korean title is “Identical rooms”. Quotations in this

76 the narrator is a middle-class housewife and mother of twin sons. She lives in an extended household with her elderly parents, two younger brothers, an older brother and his family, and her husband and children. She is miserable and discontented with her life, and the main reason seems to be her inability to free herself from her large family. Finally, after seven years, her husband has saved enough money so they can move to an apartment - a home of their own. In the 1970s, during the construction boom and period of fast economic growth, the ultimate symbol of wealth, success and of a modern lifestyle among the younger generation was to live in an apartment. But the change of milieu and the female narrator’s newfound freedom do little to ease her agony, and as time passes she slowly begins to feel the same kind of discontent and anxiety as before. Pak’s stories often open with an indoor scene in a domestic environment where the female protagonist is doing a household chore. In “Identical apartments”, the story opens in the evening. It is just after dinnertime and the main character is surrounded by her extended family, each of them engaged in different activities. As opposed to the short story “House of Bubbles”, the main character still lives in a traditional Korean family with three generations under the same roof.220 Over the sound of kids playing and the noise from the television, she tries to distinguish the faint sound of the doorbell, so that she can open the gate for her husband when he comes home from work. On the surface, everything seems to be in order but similar to a “House of Bubbles”, the tensions are built up early in the story by the main character’s remarks. For some unknown reason she finds the task of opening the door for her husband difficult, and even repulsive. The obsessive and excessive aversion she feels towards this simple act could be a result of the boredom and meaninglessness in her life. Because the main character’s mother and the housemaid take care of everything in the house, the only obligation she has in the family is to open the gate for her husband every evening:

Mother is that good to us. We’re not really put out in any way. Mother and the maid know how to take care of us, and except for letting in my husband in the evening, there’s nothing for me to do. But that only duty of mine is dreadful. Just how dreadful is something I would like to tell my husband.221

chapter are also from Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s translation of “Identical apartments”, published in Wayfarer. New Fiction by Korean Women (Seattle: 1997). 220 A traditional Korean family only in the sense that it is an extended family with three generations living in the same household. It is a common practice in Korea that women after marriage live with their in-laws. So the fact that the main character still lives with her own mother and father make this family not traditional but different to the norm. 221 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 142.

77 […] I wish I could appeal to my husband to ease my suffering. I wish he could be more sensitive to what I go through living with my family. But somehow I have managed to put up with seven years of this solitary suffering.222

Though she has a comfortable life and no reason to complain, she wants to free herself from the strain of family obligations. Her inability to express her feelings to anyone, even to her husband, makes her lonely and isolated. She does not have an identity outside that of a mother and wife, and no other pur- poses in life except for her family duties. After moving away from the extended family, left alone with her husband and two children, the protagonist’s need for self-fulfilment becomes more apparent. And as the story progresses, the root of her problems is revealed. As previously mentioned, during a relatively short period of time with rapid industrialisation and an influx of Western ideas, Koreans came to be exposed to new economic structures, social relations and cultural environments. Alt- hough the focus on family has always been an enduring characteristic of South Koreans and the importance of family was unquestioned, different views on family ideology in terms of values and norms have coexisted depending on the generation, region, gender, and educational background to which people belong. The main character is part of a younger generation eager to embrace the new ways of living. Her mother on the other hand has a hard time understanding why her daughter wants to move to an apartment. In her opinion, people confined to small spaces are only concerned about their own privacy and lose their sense of humanity. She is convinced that food and worries should be shared with neighbours, and that dehumanisation is the main cause of all the murder cases in apartments they read about. Although it is an ironic comment made by the protagonist’s mother, the same kind of resentment or a feeling of uneasiness towards apartment living is present in “House of Bubbles”. Before the 1960s, apartments or multi-storey buildings were not common in Seoul. The six storey apartment complexes in Map’o, built between 1961-1964 became the starting point of the construction era. According to researcher Andrei Lankov, contrary to what one might think, these apartments were hard to sell and did not appeal to Koreans because of the simple fact that they had no experience of living in high buildings. The new modern way of living, where radiators replaced the traditional floor heating ondol and with a lack of storage space for kimch’i, was also perceived as problematic. It was not until the 1970s that apartment construction began to increase and gained popularity among Koreans after it had been adjusted to the Korean way of living with a heated floor in every room.223 In “Identical Apartments”, the mother as a member of an older generation expresses a negative view on the changing living patterns

222 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 142. 223 Andrei Lankov, The Dawn of Modern Korea (Seoul: Ûnhaeng namu, 2007).

78 among the urban middle class which are difficult for her to adjust to. Similar to the previous story, the apartment symbolises modernity and a break from traditions and the past. But it is often described as an inhospitable place, a prison where the protagonist is faced with her shortcomings and struggles with self-realisation. The main character’s desperate need to move is also related to the fact that her husband lives with his in-laws, which is a social stigma in Korea. A proper man should be able to care for and support his family and not be financially dependent on his in-laws. By moving to a home of their own, she does not have to worry about malicious rumours from the neighbours. In the second part of the story the main character finds herself in a new apartment with her husband and children, living the life she longed for. She immediately strikes up a friendship with a neighbour, a housewife next door. Mesmerised by “Ch’ôri’s mother”, her new acquaintance, she is struck by feelings of being lost and her own lack of self-identity. She makes Ch’ôri’s mother her role model and starts decorating her home like her, going to the same stores and buying the same food. She copies her to the point of cooking the same food for her family and imitating her behaviour to an absurd degree:

[…] I immediately form a good impression of the woman. Her apartment is cozy and inviting. It looks like something out of a fairy tale. I want to decorate our apartment just like hers. I bashfully ask her help with furniture and interior decoration […] I make up my mind that my apartment will be decorated more tastefully than the woman’s, but in the end it is similar in furniture layout and even the color of the curtains.224

But the sameness starts to bother her, and her frustration is slowly shown in her negative remarks on how much she hates Ch’ôri’s mother’s cooking skills and how she is disgusted by the food she makes. The intense feeling of aversion is shifted to her husband. When he returns home from work and she sees him through the peephole, his appearance intimidates her:

Whether it’s exhaustion after a day’s work or the light from the bulb, his face looks so pale and heartless that it frightens me. It’s the face of someone who’s hiding a length of cord in his pocket to strangle me with. It’s the apartment murderer that Mother worries about! That’s always my first reaction, but after I’ve jumped back from the door, I realize it’s my husband. Some of that initial fear and disgust remain, though, while I’m opening the door and helping him off with his clothes.225

She would like to pour her heart out to her husband and tell him about her fears, but she does not feel confident that she can do it without hurting his

224 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 146. 225 Ibid., 147.

79 feelings. In the past they understood each other without words, but things changed. She nostalgically remembers the times when he would look at her with warmth and tenderness. All the housewives in the neighbourhood live in the same kind of apartments, imitating each other in order to relieve their boredom by buying new things to outshine each other. But the satisfaction does not last, because as soon as someone has bought a new washing machine or an American electric frying pan, everybody does the same. The main character is disgusted and fed up with this lifestyle, but she sees no way out of her prison. She looks out over the apartment complexes with their countless households, wondering how many people like her have to endure the same dull existence. Her mental state becomes more and more unstable; she sees the sameness she despises in her twin sons and becomes unable to tell them apart:

When I have to ask them, I feel so miserable I want to die. The boys seem to find this hilarious. They giggle and say, ‘Mom, I’m older’ and ‘Yeah, I’m younger.’ I’m sceptical about their quick answers and end up asking something stupid like, ‘How do you boys know that?’226

I’m sure the two rascals have hatched a plot: the younger will call himself the older, and vice versa. My suspicions pain me and leave me with a bad taste. If the boys keep fooling me, perhaps the day will come when they’ll forget who I am. I’m convinced of it. I panic and call them to me; I won’t give them any opportunity to trick me.227

Her slowly deteriorating mental state is a reaction of despair to a reality she cannot change or escape. In the final part of the story the main character makes one last desperate attempt to break away from her tedious life by committing adultery. When Ch’ôri’s mother is away for a night visiting her parents, she sneaks into her neighbour’s apartment and makes love to her husband in the dark, with him mistaking her for his own wife. She is startled by the fact that he is wearing the same pyjamas as her husband, and he even smells the same:

His lovemaking is nervous, weak, but sadistic. He makes me feel like a public toilet. His skin gives off an unpleasant metallic odor, the kind that makes you jerk back in disgust. In all of these respects he resembles my husband.228

Their resemblance is striking and for a moment she does not even believe she is being unfaithful. When the lovemaking is over she feels neither guilt nor

226 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 152. 227 Ibid., 153. 228 Ibid., 159.

80 pleasure, just emptiness. Returning home she sees her reflection in the bathroom mirror:

I go into the bathroom and turn on the light. I’m momentarily blinded. I want to see bright and clear what an adulteress looks like. I stand before the mirror. There I am. A woman flush with despairing innocence. A woman who looks like she’s spoken with no one, consummated no relationship, in all her life. It’s odd: my mood is one of pure despair, and yet I feel like a virgin. Here I’ve played the role of a wife for almost ten years, I have two children, just now I’ve committed adultery, and I feel like a virgin. A virgin like that is dreadful, but that’s how I feel.229

The protagonist is a grown-up woman but she perceives herself as a virgin, someone who has not experienced anything - pure and childlike. She has dutifully fulfilled her roles as wife, mother and daughter but she has no clue about who she is. As in the previous story, infidelity is just an act of desperation, in order for the protagonist to escape a reality she cannot accept. She does not have any tender feelings towards this man and infidelity is not something she has planned or anticipated. In contrast to “House of bubbles”, the sexual act is consummated, but considering the circumstances it can hardly be considered anything but a failure. The lack of communication is often a hindrance and a source of agony and despair in Pak Wansô’s stories. The female characters are incapable of expressing their emotions and wishes. The people surrounding them, like family members and husbands, often remain unaware of what is going on in their minds. The reader is the only one who has access to the main character’s inner thoughts, and an emotional bond is thus created between this character and the reader. The author makes it easy for the reader to feel sympathetic towards her protagonists by using certain narrative devices. Even though several people are introduced in the story, for instance the protagonist’s husband, old mother, twin sons and the neighbour Ch’ôri’s mother, there are no dialogues or scenes in which the point of view is shifted. The story begins with the main character giving an account of what is going on in her home an ordinary evening. The scene could take place in any family, and on the surface it is a pleasant and cosy, harmonious setting:

To give you an idea of the commotion, it’s prime time on the television in my parent’s room; my younger brother strums the guitar in his room across the way; and farther down the hall my youngest brother listens to an FM station. My children, who are about the same age as my nephews, cry, laugh, and squab- ble, then chase each other from room to room playing hide-and-seek. Adults, children, and kitchen maid, all doing their own thing, produce a chorus of jolly

229 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 160.

81 outcries rising to a peak of commotion that reminds me of a huge pot of motley stew cooked to perfection.230

But during the short time span, from the moment when her husband leaves for work in the morning until he gets back home in the evening, many troubled thoughts pass through her mind. She fears and detests the sound of the doorbell. She complains about her living situation and describes her ambivalent feelings towards her husband, a man she once loved but now sees as hard and cold. The other family members living under the same roof are introduced to the reader, but neither their appearances nor the house itself are described in any detail. The protagonist’s mind is so preoccupied with her own worries. When the husband returns home, his mother-in-law is eager to serve the best food to him. A conversation takes place between them; their words are presented with quotation marks interwoven in the main characters account:

The dinner served to Father and Elder Brother is a smart, appetizing presentation, and my husband’s is no different. But Mother follows it in to make sure none of the side dishes has been left out. And then comes the standard apology: “It’s not much, but help yourself.” “Please,” my husband says, “You make me feel like a guest.” To which Mother replies, “My son-in-law will always be an honoured guest in our house.” And on occasion she brings out from hiding a bottle of Western liquor that has the most beautiful color : “Now I want you to try some of this.” My husband accepts Mother’s playing up to him as a matter of course, always proud, sometimes indifferent, never overwhelmed or even fazed by her show of favor.231

In the passage above, not only does the main character “interfere” in their conversation, she interprets it and tells the reader that the husband’s show of modesty is not to be trusted. He is a cocky person who sponges off his in-laws but lacks a sense of gratitude. Throughout the story the husband remains muted, and the reader is entirely dependent on what the protagonist tells us about his nature. In Pak’s stories, the men who are supposed to take care of their families and be their safety net are often stunted; they have weak characters and are unworthy of trust. The main character is unable to speak to her husband about her worries or confide in him emotionally. The only time she actually tries to tell him that she is suffering from neurosis, she is dismissed. In her eyes, her husband is a failure as a man, someone who only deserves her pity:

Before my husband married me he was a tall, strapping man, but whenever I saw him I felt sorry for him. This feeling came from my heart, and not for a moment did I think I was demeaning him.232

230 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 139. 231 Ibid., 142. 232 Ibid., 155.

From a far distance I was able to pick him out among a throng of people. He was different from the others. And that differentness was what made me feel sorry for him. That feeling of pity deepened as I got to know him.233

[…] he displayed the softest, deepest skin a person could have, warm, gentle skin, and I pitied him for that. While others protected themselves, he was vulnerable, and I felt sorry for him. And so I enjoyed waiting anxiously as he drew near. I enjoyed feeling sorry for him, grievously sorry.234

Lacking an identity of her own, throughout the story, the main character tries to find fulfilment through others, and she ascribes her shortcomings to other people, as a kind of projection. Because the reader has full access to the mind of the protagonist, the author is able to create a person who is multi-layered and complicated. She struggles with feelings of reluctance and does not always act reasonably. To the reader, it is not clear in the beginning why she is so discontent with her life when she seems to have everything she wants. As the story progresses, the real cause behind her misery is slowly revealed. Hav- ing a fancy home and material things is not the answer to her problem when she is struggling to find herself, to find an identity of her own, an identity outside of her family. She is not always likeable, but she is very much like a real human being. It is in the negative remarks about Ch’ôri’s mother, the reader notices that the mental state of the main character begins to deteriorate. Boredom is slowly killing her and she desperately tries to find some purpose in life. Ch’ôri’s mother, whom she used to admire so much, is now a competitor and someone she wants to outshine at any cost. Once she asks her neighbour to come over to her home so they can apply face masks. On the outside she is civil and friendly, but on the inside she has bad and disdainful thoughts:

Ch’ôri’s mom is bored with herself and she chatters to me. She picks the most ridiculous stories to tell. Her aim is to make me develop wrinkles first; does she think I don’t know this?235

And then Ch’ôri’s mom cackles for the longest time. She hopes I’ll laugh too. But I don’t. Not because of wrinkles, but because the story isn’t funny.236

233 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 155. 234 Ibid., 156. 235 Ibid., 154. 236 Ibid.

83 Now it’s my turn to help Ch’ôri’s mom. I do unto her face as she does unto mine. A wife lying on her back with an egg facial in bright daylight looks ugly and shabby. Like a cheap, synthetic rag. I feel bored with myself too.237

She sees her own image reflected in Ch’ôri’s mother’s miserable face, making it impossible to like her. She is dependent on her, but the more discontented she is with herself the more her aversion towards her neighbour grows. While she sees Ch’ôri’s mother lying there with the egg mask on her face, she just wants to hurt her in any way she can. She suddenly wants to brag about how she met her husband and how they used to court each other, just to make her jealous. Before she and her husband were married she was a carefree person who seemed to have sincere feelings towards her partner. This is reflected in the vivid account she gives of places they used to go to, and in the use of colour and scent:

There are places that reek of manure, but if you go toward the foothills, the smell is diluted to something savory. And we enjoyed the sweet scent of green things: the emerald grass, wild edibles, and vegetables that filled the green countryside fields. The green of the low, near mountains turning bluer in the distance, the higher mountains far, far off, spreading out like a blue haze, the poplars along the embankments in the paddies, the ancient trees with the magpie nests at the entrance to a village, the gently winding footpaths […]238

For the first time in the story there is a description of events taking place outdoors, giving it a sense of peace. But it can be questioned whether the narrator is describing an actual landscape or a romanticised scene that reflects the protagonist’s longing for a time when she was free and unfettered. The I-narrator in this story has access to the consciousness of both the younger I-character and her older narrating self. She is no longer the same person as she was before marriage. There is also another outdoor scene in the story but that only takes place in the main character’s imagination. One day she discovers that Ch’ôri’s mother, to lessen her boredom, plays the lottery every Friday evening. In her delusion the protagonist fantasises about her neighbour picking the winning lottery and depriving her of something that was intended for her:

She’ll build a cozy home with an attic and a pointed roof. That kind of house should be mine. Ch’ôri and his sister Nani can sit in the den in that attic, listen- ing to the raindrops falling on the roof and reading A Dog of Flanders. My boys should be doing that. I want them to be doing that. That woman’s going to steal it all away from me and give it to her children. She’ll plant grass in the yard, grow roses and lilacs, and make Ch’ôri and Nani their own vegetable patch. She’ll plant peas and corn and show the children the miracle of their sprouting.

237 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 154. 238 Ibid., 156.

84 She’ll say, “This plant is a dicotyledon and this one’s a monocotyledon,” and she’ll smile the self-indulgent smile of a model mother.239

When comparing these two outdoor scenes the first one depicts a familiar traditional Korean landscape with mountains, paddies and poplars. And the appearance of magpies which in the East symbolise good luck, matrimonial bliss and long-lasting fortune promises a bright future. In the second outdoor scene, there are no descriptions of colours or scent and it gives a feeling of an artificial setting, a scene out of a fairy tale. The narrator fantasises about a Western- style house and the children are reading A Dog of Flanders, a 19th century English children’s book. She is mimicking what she believes is a modern, Western way of living. In contrast to the bright description of the countryside where the author uses references to colours, plants and smells, the protagonist’s home environment is sterile. Physical descriptions that appeal to the senses are absent, except for the time when she notices a sickening metallic odour from the man with whom she commits adultery. A similar reference can be found in the previous story, “House of Bubbles”, where the author uses iron and concrete to enhance the feeling of hostility and coldness. Pak depicts a woman who constantly deceives herself and pretends to be something she is not. She hides her emotions and personality in order to fit in and to live up to social demands. As previously stated, descriptions of characters’ physical appearances are infrequent. The scene in which the protagonist and her neighbour apply face masks, disguise themselves and are engaged in a meaningless role play is telling and illustrates the core message of the story. In a nation struck by economic and social malaise women are unwillingly taking part in a desperate hunt for wealth and fortune because they are expected to behave in certain ways. In that process the lack of self-identity and self- fulfilment and the need to live a meaningful life with true values becomes more obvious. In the final lines of the story, the main character stands in front of a mirror, engaged in self-examination. Similar scenes can be found in Pak Wansô’s novel A Staggering Afternoon where the main character Ch’ohûi stands in front of a mirror - observing and scrutinising herself. Ch’ohûi is putting on and removing her makeup and it is only when she is bare-faced without disguise that she reveals her inner emotions and conflicting thoughts to the reader. When the main character in “Identical apartments” looks into the mirror, she finally sees her real self. The mirror functions as a gateway to her true inner self.240

239 Pak, “Identical Apartments,” 151. 240 In Ingmar Bergman’s movies, mirror scenes appear frequently. Thus researchers have discussed the mirror as a motif and symbol in his works. Bergman often posed existential questions about death, religious faith, and sexuality. In his films, the mirror functions as “a painful vehicle of self-awareness” and characters “often find themselves in such states, between seeming and

85 What Pak manages to do in this story is to illustrate how larger social changes in the form of modernisation and economic development in the public sphere percolate into the very private domestic sphere, affecting the lives of women. The story has two levels. It deals with the excessive lifestyle of the middle class, where materialism and consumerism have gone to too far, but more than that, the story problematises women’s inability to define themselves outside their predestined roles.

7.3 Close Reading of “An Outing” In “Ôttôn nadûri” (An Outing) the story spans over one day and opens with an ordinary scene in the morning where the main character, a housewife, is sending her husband off to work:

While my husband ties his shoelaces I pretend to brush off the dust from his suit. He goes down the stone steps and walks two metres to the front gate. Have a nice day. Yeah. I quickly close the gate with my elbow and while leaning against it, I take a deep breath. Two metres from the stone steps to the front gate, or at most three metres… Nobody knows how long that distance in the morning feels like for me. With the gate against my back I feel proud of myself for being so good at enduring.241

Pak invites the reader to a familiar setting where a woman is engaged in household chores. In the very first sentences, a tension is noticeable. The main character “pretends” to brush off the dust from her husband’s suit and she tells the reader that nobody knows how difficult this short, simple procedure is, to watch her husband going to work. By giving this information a psychological closeness is formed between the narrator and the reader early on. After a few lines, it is revealed that the main character is suffering from alcoholism. In the form of an interior monologue, the first part of the story depicts the protagonist’s inner struggle to stay away from the bottle:

Now I’m finally alone. But I won’t do it right away. The very thought that I can do it any time I want, has somehow eased the thirst I felt right up to five minutes before my husband left for work. But I have a cunning mind: I should try to

being, made-up or not, and the mirror becomes (as it does for Alice in Wonderland) a portal between fantasy and reality. See Maaret Koskinen, “ Spel och speglingar. En studie i Ingmar Bergmans filmiska estetik” (Game and Reflections: A Study of Ingmar Bergman’s Cinematic Aesthetics) (PhD diss., Stockholm University, 1993) 241 Pak, Wansô, “Ôttôn nadûri” (An Outing) in Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôl chônjip 1, Puk- kûrôumûl karûch’imnida (Pak Wansô. The Short Story Collection 1. I Teach You Shame) (P’aju: Munhak tongne, 2006), 37.

86 endure as long as possible. So I pretend to be indifferent to my bottle, waiting for me in that secret, dark place.242

The protagonist tries to find things to keep her occupied by cleaning the house and taking care of the laundry. But there is not enough work and the desire for drink becomes more and more unbearable. In Pak Wansô’s stories, middle-class women live meaningless lives and that is also the case in this story. The cause of the main character’s anxiety and illness is that she is no longer needed by her family. Her husband provides for the family, so she does not have to worry about things like the children’s tuition fees or whether there is food on the table or not. On the surface he is depicted as the perfect husband who fulfils his duties but her real thoughts about him are subtly expressed on the sentence level, in these lines by describing him in an ironic and unflattering way:

[...] he gives me just a small amount of housework to do. He is rarely talkative and his face never shows any worries or joy. He is just an ordinary man, always wearing his jumper and never bothering to changing his long underwear. If he didn’t take off his socks before he went to sleep, I wouldn’t even have to wash his socks in the morning and offer him clean ones. I could almost miss out on that only task as well.243

The narrator repeats the same adjective little, a bit, chogûm several times to describe the amount of money her husband earns and how many household chores she has to do. The repetition of the word enhances the overall feeling of tininess or smallness in her life. Her children are described in a similar way as the husband, using the word “shellfish”, closed and unreachable. Once or twice a year her mother-in-law comes from the countryside to visit, and every time she scorns and harasses her daughter-in-law, calling her a “gold digger” who managed to snatch a good husband. Her self-confidence has hit rock bottom and she begins to think that her mother-in-law might be right after all, that she is useless and unneeded. In contrast to her husband and the children with their shells, she is skinless and vulnerable. Everything in her life is so predictable to the extent that it is absurd. She knows exactly what to cook for dinner every day and even the salt vendor always turns up just in time before she runs out of salt. The saleswoman, a widow, complains about how difficult it is to support four children and pay their tuition fees but her worries somehow make her life seem richer and more meaningful compared to the protagonist’s vacuous life. She tries to punish herself by repeating her mother- in-law’s words, “you are a lucky bitch” like a mantra in order to restrain herself and somehow fight the urge to drink, but it does not help.

242 Pak, “An Outing,” 38. 243 Ibid., 39.

87 As previously stated, Pak belongs to the middle class and often depicts the lives of women with the same social status as herself. It is noteworthy that working-class women are absent in most of her stories, and feminist scholars have often criticised the author’s “lack” of social consciousness. The appearance of a saleswoman in this story indicates the author’s awareness of class differences and the underprivileged, but the character itself does not have any impact on the development of the story and is primarily used to emphasise the meaningless and boring existence of the main character. Why is this character overlooked? Thus one can argue that the author is reluctant to engage in discussions concerning class. Unlike the previous stories, the protagonist lives in a traditional Korean house, a hanok. Because of the narrow alleys and houses built closely together, she can hardly see the sky between the roofs. In Korea, the hanok usually symbolises familiarity, a safe and cosy place where one can seek comfort. But in this story, the house is depicted more or less as a prison, which makes a striking contrast to the normal representation. While sitting on the porch, she stares at the wall of the neighbouring house and her resentment and hate for that wall grows. She feels like the wall is pressing against her chest and suffocating her:

The wall with a window the size of a seventeen-inch television, it looks like someone has spread a dirty blanket over it. One sees here and there traces of cement the size of a palm, a rugby ball and an unfolded necktie. Until not so long ago one saw mud and sorghum straws through the cracks but it has now been patched like this in haste. How come this hideous wall feels so close? Blocking one’s vision and thoughts. The growing headache is probably all because of that wall.244

The main character’s obsession with the wall bears a resemblance to the female character’s behaviour in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. First published in January 1892, the story depicts a woman locked up in a room by her husband because he believes she is suffering from depression after childbirth. In the past, inactivity was believed to be the cure for “hysterical women” and in their rented summerhouse, she is not allowed to leave her room or engage in mental activities, such as writing, which she enjoys. Isolation and idleness cause her mental state to deteriorate and she becomes obsessed with the colour and the pattern of the wallpaper and even sees a woman crawling behind it, trying to get out. The wallpaper and the wall in these stories symbolise the patriarchal system which deprives women not only of their physical but also their mental freedom.245 The first part of “An Outing” depicts the protagonist’s struggle to stay away from the bottle:

244 Pak, “An Outing,” 43. 245 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper (London: Virago, 1981).

88 I open the cupboard. My hand is shaking. My conscience is already gone. Now I’m just desperate. I don’t have a choice. It’s in the back. Why are you so far back in that corner? Once again my hand is shaking. Shaky, shaky. Suddenly I begin to feel afraid. An addiction? I recall my father-in-law’s hand tremor.246

Soju feels sweet and warm. I enjoy the smell and the taste at the same time. A sticky feeling on the tongue and then it burns the throat while passing down. The heat passing through the throat is spreading and burning like fireworks inside my body.247

After she has indulged herself in a bottle of soju, she feels much lighter. Her father-in-law was a drunkard. After finding his father frozen to death, her husband stopped drinking. Consuming alcohol is something he really loathes, so defying him by drinking every day feels triumphant and even harmless. She is suddenly interrupted by her eldest son coming back from school. The relationship between the main character and her children is disturbed. In Pak Wansô’s works, lack of communication and affection is a common feature not only in the relationship between the husband and the wife but also between the mothers and their children. The protagonist refuses her duties as a mother openly and behaves in ways rarely seen in Korean literature. During wartime and severe privation when the head of the family was absent or disabled, women had to take responsibility for their families. Self-sacrificing and unselfish mothers who are willing to do anything to protect and support their children were common and are also present in some of Pak’s works. But during the 1970s, when the country was going through a major economic development, for the privileged social classes, memories of poverty during colonialism and war were long gone. Middle-class women no longer had to worry about providing for their families. Thus they became more concerned about their own well-being and self-fulfilment and children were not their first pri- ority. The protagonist in this story struggles with the same problems of unfulfilled self-realisation as the main character in the previously discussed stories. Contrary to the saleswoman who is working hard to be able to send her children to school, the main character does not show any tender feelings towards her son and has no interest in his studies, even though he is a high school senior and is preparing for the university entrance exam. She even provokes him. In Korea, this is the most crucial period in a child’s life because the result of the exams will determine one’s future. Good scores will give access to a prestigious university and guarantee lifelong employment, and normally every parent is willing and is expected to do anything to help their children to succeed. With this in mind, the way the main character “dares” to demonstrate this kind of behaviour shows confidence that her actions are to certain extent

246 Pak, “An Outing,” 44. 247 Ibid., 45.

89 approved by the reader. She also explicitly asks the question of why a mother is obliged to care about a son who does not know common decency. Similar criticism is found in the short story “House of Bubbles”. As often in her stories Pak depicts a society permeated by materialism and greed where people have lost their sense of true values. The room of the protagonist’s son is full of books and he takes his studies very seriously, but the protagonist wonders what is the use of an education that does not teach how to behave properly towards your fellow men and respect your own parents. Her son treats her more or less like a lunatic, and a strange conversation takes place where mother and son are mocking each other:

“What is the matter? Why are you home so early?” “I have exams.” His answer is short and brusque. “What kind of school gives exams all the time?” As soon as he enters his room, he tries to close the door so as not to be bothered, but I stand in the way, so he cannot close the door, and pick a quarrel with him. “I have exams beginning from today.” “But you study almost every day.” “I’m a high school senior, am I not?” “Poor thing, poor, poor thing.”248

Her son shows his contempt openly and treats her like an infant, and the lack of respect he shows her makes one suspect that her illness or addiction is something the family is very much aware of. She is the black sheep and no one in the family wants to have anything to do with her. In the previous stories, the female characters have been unhappy and alone but have endured and suffered in silence, and they have still fulfilled their roles as mother and wife dutifully. Their frustration and agony have passed unnoticed by their family members. But in this story, the protagonist is acting out in a way that is unusual, defying her husband and neglecting her responsibilities as a mother. In this conversation between a mother and her son, Pak manages to subtly depict the socio-cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s and the impact they had on traditional values and family relationships. The protagonist needs to liberate herself from a dull existence. With the help of alcohol, she feels courageous enough to defy her husband once again, not only by drinking but also by leaving the house. She even puts on clothes he dislikes:

I change my clothes, quietly but fast. I take out and put on the clothing I bought two years ago when I was going to meet with the wife of my husband’s youngest brother, but haven’t been able to wear because my husband thought the pattern and the colour were too loud. White clothing made of hemp or something, with pink flowers in full bloom, large as bowls and with white pôsôn [Korean traditional socks] on and wearing a plastic bag, I begin to believe that I’m invited to a party.249

248 Pak, “An Outing,” 46. 249 Ibid., 49.

90 They say you usually drink cocktails at parties, where they blend different Western liquors. I should not drink such things. The thing with Western liquors is to blend them together but I don’t want to get addicted so I’m just going to dance. And I will tell this to just a few close acquaintances, that whatever anyone says, when it comes to liquor, the domestic liquor is the best. Because when it comes to domestic liquor, there is no risk of becoming addicted.250

The second part of the story depicts the protagonist’s outing where she wanders about on the streets of Seoul without purpose or destination. She is as excited as a child on her first school excursion. She laughs at people who envy her beautiful outfit and admires the scenery through the taxi window. In front of a tall building she sees a sign saying “Madame K’s private exhibition”. She just has to get into that building so she can meet Madame K and other people she might know:

When I arrived at the entrance, short of breath, I happened to collide with a young man who came walking quickly towards me. I lost my balance, stumbled backwards and managed to cling to a marble pillar in order not to fall completely. While clinging to the cold and smooth marble pillar, I looked into the exhibition hall with the red carpet and all the successful visitors. The marble pillar felt very cold and I was chilled to the bone. The chilliness I felt made me slowly realise that Madame K was not a friend of mine and that we’ve never even met each other. I had only read a book she had written, A Self-Portrait, in which she described her face like a withering eggplant. I, myself with freckles here and there and still stained with a yellowness found in the faces of country girls, resembled an old potato. I immediately became fond of her writings and even felt a kinship. That was all.251

She thinks of herself as an old, rotten vegetable, thrown in a trashcan, worth- less. Madame K’s life bears no resemblance to hers at all, looking noble and queen-like and surrounded by beautiful and successful people. Contrary to herself, Madame K has a richer inner life and can afford to describe herself as a “withering eggplant”. Pak’s stories are set in female environments. But similar to the short stories “House of Bubbles” and “Identical apartments”, there is not an ounce of sisterhood among the women. The main characters often perceive other women as a threat or a source of envy. Also the strained mother- daughter relationship is a common feature in Pak works. When the alcohol is out of her body, she slowly comes to her senses. She notices that people passing her are actually staring at her, not out of envy but due to fascination with her old-fashioned clothes. In an underground shopping arcade she witnesses brisk trade, gentlemen having a meal at fancy restaurants with French names, a young woman on an escalator, putting on lipstick after

250 Pak, “An Outing,” 50. 251 Ibid., 52.

91 having noodles for 50 wôn, and covers of weekly magazines screaming for attention from passers-by. The protagonist in this story can be described as a female flaneur, a flaneuse, an explorer who wanders the streets of Seoul, observing modernity and urban life. The concept of a flâneur in Western literature is traditionally gendered as masculine.252 And it is a well-used trope and motif in Korean literature. In “Kubo on the road. The act of wandering”, Justyna Najbar investigates the meaning of wandering in novels by three different authors. They all use a young male Korean intellectual and writer named Kubo as the protagonist, depicting one day in his life. The meaning of wandering differs depending on the setting of the story, whether it is during colonial Korea, Pak Chunghee’s repressive authoritarian regime in the 1960s and 1970s, or a postmodern Korea in the 1990s. But what these three stories about Kubo have in common is the following point: by observing people and experiencing different incidents, the young man wandering through the streets of colonial Kyôngsông in the 1930s or post-war Seoul not only reflects on his own role as an intellectual and a writer but also comments on social problems and obstacles prevailing in the society. These novels could be about finding one’s place and identity as a Korean belonging to a repressed and marginalised group under Japanese colonial rule or trying to understand the causes behind national division and hoping for unification. According to Najbar, the aim of wandering in Kubo stories is to show social awareness, to shed light on urgent matters existing in the society and to examine the historic past in order to understand the present.253 At the beginning of the protagonist’s outing, she sits in a taxi and sings along with Patty Kim’s famous song Sôurûi ch’angga (Anthem of Seoul). This song was popular in 1969, when the country was at the beginning of the modernisation and urbanisation process. Unlike the songs that were popular at the time, which were mostly about longing for home in the villages in the countryside, the message in this song is to embrace urban life by depicting Seoul as a prosperous place, full of hope for the future. The song opens with the following lines:

252 Deborah L. Parsons describes the city as the “epic text of modernity” and states that “women are rarely present in the city of myth; rather they are personified as the mythic city itself, a landscape for the hero to explore and conquer”, in Streetwalking the Metropolis. Women, the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 222. 253 Justyna Najbar, “Kubo on the Road. The Act of Wandering in ‘A day in Life of Kubo, the Novelist’ by Pak T’ae-won, Ch’oe In-hun and Chu In-sôk.” Proceedings of the 2011 AKSE Conference, Moscow, 2011, 245-251.

92 Clocks are chiming, flowers are blooming, happy faces. My beloved don’t ever leave me. A warm place, a place in our hearts where we met and fell in love. In beautiful Seoul is where I want to live.254

The exaggerated cheerful sentiment in the song and the despair the protagonist feels inside make an ironic contrast. The modernisation project is ridiculed and this is an example of conveying embedded ideology. The main character is observing the city with everything it has to offer, but her excitement or adventurousness soon disappears and in the end she is not tempted or attracted by what she is witnessing. The outing and the wandering as an act has a deeper meaning in the sense that it expresses the protagonist’s urge to liberate herself from a prison-like existence and the oppression of the patriarchy. It is an act of resistance, to defy her husband and show discontent with her life by leaving the house. Pak Chin-yông also discusses the motif of a female stroller or flaneuse but she pays attention to the act and the meaning of night travelling and night wandering. Pak is analysing three works, Kim Sûngok’s story published in the 1960s and the other two by Hwang Chôngun and P’yôn Hyeyông in the 2000s all entitled “Yahaeng” (Night Journey).255 According to Pak, what these three works have in common is that people are leaving home in the night or they are about to leave home at night. Pak draws a parallel with Walter Benjamin’s flaneur but states that in these stories, the city and the urban landscape at night do not appear as a spectacle or anything alluring, and the act of observing, the image of an urban explorer who is on an adventure to discover, and the act of looking are traits that cannot be found in these female characters.256 Leaving the house in the middle of the night and acting against social norms and expectations are provoked by a desperate need to escape social constraints gen- erated by a neo-conservative, totalitarian state. But also in a so-called democratic capitalist society, depicted by Hwang Chôngun, where you have every possibility to decide your own fate, boundaries and obstacles still exist if you are among the abandoned ones, belonging to the lowest stratum, a marginalised group. They live in the outskirts of the metropolis, not owning their own homes, and the high-tech, chic and glamorous city is a world out of reach, a place they cannot belong to. Pak’s conclusion is that these night wanderings,

254 The song was composed by Kim Ogyun and commissioned by the mayor of Seoul. Yun Chu, “Yun Chuûi tosi iyagi. Sôurûi ch’anggaga kûrin tosiûi ôlgul” (Yun Chu’s story of the city. The face of the city drawn by the Anthem of Seoul), Aju kyôngje (Aju Business Daily) accessed in 2017-06-01, URL: http://www.ajunews.com/view/20170530085318801. 255 Pak Chin-yông, “Han’guk hyôndae sosôre nat’anan ‘yahaeng’ mot’ip’wa ‘pam sanch’aekcha’ yôn’gu - Kim Sûngogûi yahaeng, Hwang Chôngunûi yahaeng, P’yôn Hyeyôngûi yaha- engûl taesangûro” (A Study on the Motif of ‘A Night Walk’ and ‘Stroller of Nights’ in Korean Modern Novels, Focusing on the Works of Kim Sûngok, Hwang Chôngun and P’yôn Hyeyông). Proceedings of the International Academic Forum of Korean Language and Literature, 2015, 151-174. Journal of Korean Culture 31, 2015. 256 Ibid.,156-157.

93 i.e. acts of defiance, must be interpreted as different forms of reaction to political and sociological malaise. To look for similarities between the female character in Pak Wansô’s story “An Outing” and the female protagonist in Kim Sûngok’s “Yahaeng” (Night Journey) from 1969 does not seem to be far-fetched. Hyônju, the female protagonist in “Yahaeng” who refuses to go home, wanders the streets of Seoul, ignoring the curfew and waits for a male stranger. She acts in irrational ways, breaking social taboos in order to liberate herself from an existence full of lies and deception. To be able to preserve her middle-class, bourgeois life, she and her husband, who work at the same bank, have to hide the fact that they are married. They are dependent on the money she earns so they keep on pretending, acting as colleagues. She longs for the day when she can quit her job, when she will be able to invite people to their wedding, and show off her beautiful home. She is constantly afraid that they will get caught, and she begins to feel resentment towards her husband for his indifference to their pre- carious situation. When Hyônju is subjected to sexual assault by a stranger, the incident functions as a catalyst, a turning point, making the urge and the need for liberation even more acute and obvious. She begins to leave her house, going on night walks on the streets of Seoul. The woman in Pak Wansô’s story and Hyônju in “Yahaeng” both live in a suffocating environment full of disappointment and unfulfilled desires, but they still try to live up to the social expectations, adapting to what they believe is a perfect middle- class lifestyle. The endings in both Pak Wansô’s “An outing” and Kim Sûngok’s “Yahaeng” are also similar. At least for a short moment the women can fantasise and dream about a different existence but, in the end, there is no place for them to escape. Even though Pak Wansô depicts middle-class women living in an urban environment, there are only a few descriptions of this urban landscape. Most of the stories take place in a domestic sphere, in homes, where housewives spend most of their time, but descriptions of these homes’ interiors are rare. There are also only a few characters in Pak’s stories, like in chamber plays, and most of the events take place in the minds of the characters, in their accounts. In the story “An Outing”, the protagonist is an outsider in her home but the estrangement is also felt outdoors, in the city. The excitement she felt at the beginning of her outing is replaced by a feeling of discomfort. Even though the main character spends much time thinking about Western liquor, going to parties and exhibitions and drinking cocktails, all those things she believes come with embracing a modern, Western way of life, she is a country girl, wearing funny old-fashioned clothes and feels like an outsider and a strange bird in the modern urban environment. Narratives of urbanisation and the process of developing into industrial modernisation are common subjects in Korean literature. In “Seoul and Sin-

94 gapore as ‘New Asian Cities’: Literature, Urban Transformation, and the Con- centricity of Power”257, Jini Kim Watson looks at so-called New Asian cities (NACs) such as Seoul and Singapore in the 1960s and 1970s. She problematises the “Western theorizations of modern urbanism” and proposes that the urban aesthetic in these cities must be viewed in “domestic and postcolonial terms”.258 Contrary to the urbanisation process in Europe, in NAC which are characterised by geographic and resource limitation, the aggressively promoted and rushed military state-led growth, which occurred in South Korea, is expressed by “height, compression, and constant reconstruction”.259 In Cho Se-hûi’s novella Nanjangika ssoaollin chagûn kong (A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf) from 1978, which is regarded as a modern classic in South Korea, the story centres around a dwarf and his family who belong to the urban poor and live in a shack in an unauthorised area on the outskirts of Seoul. His house and the neighbourhood where he lives are demolished by the authorities when the area goes through redevelopment for the construction of tall buildings. According to Kim Watson, in Cho Se-hûi’s novella “architectural forms give representation to otherwise unperceivable social structures”260 and “textual blurring of the human and the architectural”.261 Introducing characters from different social strata and narrative perspectives, the novella deals with class struggle. These massive, high buildings destroy the dwarf’s home and his family but make the privileged class wealthier. The nation’s economic growth and prosperity can only be achieved at the expense of the “little” man. Both in Cho Se-hûi’s novella and the other stories discussed here, the urban city is an uncanny place of alienation and individual despair. Once again, as in “Identical Apartments”, Pak Wansô uses scents to depict sentiments or features in her characters. The scene where the protagonist eats tangerines is described in detail and in a sensual way:

[…] just by thinking of the sourness made my thirst urgent and unbearable. I sucked the juice from the tangerine and my own saliva loudly. And I inhaled deeply the scent from the tangerine peel. More than the juice I desired the bitterness and fresh scent from the peel. I had desired it for so long.262

The fruit symbolises fertility and youth, and the refreshing smell is so different from the odour her husband exudes:

257 Jini Watson Kim, “Seoul and Singapore as “New Asian Cities”: Literature, Urban Transfor- mation, and the Concentricity of Power,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 19, no. 1, (Spring 2011). 258 Ibid., 195. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid., 203. 261 Ibid. 262 Pak, ”An Outing,” 54.

95 I cannot think about my husband without the smoky, nicotine odour. Not only do I sense the nicotine odour from my husband, but also on his clothes, on the furniture, on the walls. A smoky nicotine odour oppresses one’s mind, turning into boredom, contaminating everything. And I’m the one who has been mostly affected by contamination.263

In contrast to the odour from the men the protagonist meets during her cab ride, the narrator uses the smell of tobacco to enhance the feeling of stuffiness and isolation in her life, even affecting her capability to have her own thoughts. It is also a sigh of sexual frustration. The protagonist is unhappy in her marriage and has no tender feeling towards her husband. There is a similar obsession with odour in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” where the female character complains about not only the pattern but also the smell coming from the wallpaper which leaves stains on the skin and the clothes. In Pak’s story “An Outing” the source of the contamination is her husband and he is suffocating her. He is mainly described by referring to a scent, not to his appearance or character. A similar way of using scent is found in “Iden- tical apartments”, in which the main character senses a sickening metallic odour from the man with whom she commits adultery. In the third part of “An Outing”, through a flashback, the protagonist recounts her childhood and the life she had before she married her husband. Coming from a village in the countryside, she longed for a life in the city. She still remembers her childhood home with affection: a beautiful landscape with fertile soil and the West sea nearby, a place without the ugliness and alienation she experiences in the city. As in “Identical Apartments”, the countryside represents a peaceful place filled with nostalgia. Her mother, a widow, was eager to send her only daughter to school and made personal sacrifices selling almost everything she owned and taking every job she could to be able to pay her daughter’s tuition fees. The protagonist, who has different views on motherhood, is wondering whether her middle school diploma was worth all the pain and hardship inflicted on her mother. Her middle school diploma made her worthy to marry the second son of the mill owner in the village. Her husband was admired by the locals for getting a university degree in Seoul and was now working as a middle school teacher in the city. Like in the old times, the marriage agreement was made even before they met each other, an encounter which took place a few days before their wedding. In Pak’s stories, lack of communication and understanding between a husband and a wife is one of the primary sources of unhappiness and frustration in the lives of middle-class women. Not only do they have a different view on motherhood compared to

263 Pak, ”An Outing,” 55.

96 previous generations of women, but also different views on marriage, demand- ing love and respect. In this story, the prerequisites for a happy marriage are never there from the beginning:

I have been alone with him a couple of times but without having a decent conversation with him. I was too sensitive to misinterpret the silence between us as something lovable. Between my silence and his, I felt a deep gap. My silence and inability to express myself was caused by shyness and fear but his silence was caused by emptiness and the fact that he had nothing to say. Even though I felt this gap between us, without finding any solution, I married him and had my bridal night.264

Suddenly, I felt a strong odour from the groom. The same smell I experienced as a child, in the room where my grandfather rested, suffering from a stroke. A room drained with a strong smell of leaf tobacco grandfather used to smoke to ease his anger…265

The sexual encounter with her husband is a disappointment; the same reaction is found in the story “Identical apartments” where the female character describes her partner as sadistic and senses a repulsive metallic odour from the man whom she sleeps with. After wandering through the streets of Seoul, she arrives at a place on a hill where she has a view over the entire city. Her small house of 11 pyông feels insignificant. She notices a young male student in a trench coat whom she becomes physically attracted to. She starts a conversation and makes clumsy advances. She is rejected:

‘Young fellow, you smell like tangerines’. I laugh while saying those ridiculous words. ‘Madame, you smell of alcohol’. ‘Do I? Hahaha’. For a long time, I laughed like I was sobbing.266

In the final lines, the protagonist is alone. The fire inside her body has turned into “ashes”. Similar to “Identical apartments”, this story ends with a feeling of resignation. The protagonist comes to the conclusion that she was happy for a short while but it was all an illusion. The reader is left without a solution:

I have firmly realized that locked up in that place of 11 pyông, I have congealed into iron. This happened a long time ago. A bottle of soju has no miraculous ability to turn iron back into a fluid, molten form.267

264 Pak, “An Outing”, 58. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid., 61. 267 Ibid., 62.

97 I slowly begin to move, without any help, or will or strength. Just like iron is drawn to a magnet, I myself was drawn straight to that place of 11 pyông.268

She has no power or ability to change her life, so she returns home and this is how the story ends. The protagonist describes herself as iron, which is characterised by hardness and stiffness, and is something fixed and unalterable. Her life can be described with the same words. In the previous stories, Pak has used materials like concrete and iron to enhance the feeling of hostility and insecurity, reflecting the minds of the female characters. Iron, with its inani- mate nature, has a negative connotation and describes a state of lifelessness, which is also the case when it comes to the relationship between the protagonist and her family in this story. The way in which the protagonist describes herself as iron can also be interpreted as a loss of self. Except for the odd conversation between the protagonist and her son, the entire story is presented through the main character, using a homodiegetic narrator. The reader has access to the mind of the main character and everything that happens in the story is filtered through her mind. It is through the main character’s eyes and her senses that the reader gets to know about what is going on in her mind and her environment. I have previously mentioned that female characters in Pak Wansô’s stories question the patriarchal view of motherhood. According to Evelyn Nakano Glenn, motherhood is socially constructed and “occurs within specific social contexts that vary in terms of material and cultural resources and constraints”.269 Ideologies shape our culture’s view on motherhood. In Korean literature and fiction by male authors, mothers are seldom the subject of narratives but are figures on the periphery, and are more or less objectified. And the dominant ideology on motherhood has been the traditional patriarchal view, i.e. the unselfish, sacrificing nurturing woman who is willing to put her own needs aside for the sake of the family’s well-being even if it means enduring all kinds of hardships. This popular image of the angelic mother is also depicted in recent works by women, for example Shin Kyung-sook’s award- wining novel Ômmarûl put’akhae270 (Please Look after Mom). Park Sonyo, a 69-year-old woman, and mother of four children gets lost at a train station in Seoul. While the family members are searching for her, they are struck by remorse and guilt realising that they have been too busy living their own lives and the mother has been neglected. She is a woman who once had dreams of her own but forsook them and suffered in silence in order to make a better life

268 Pak, “An Outing,” 63. 269 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Social Constructions of Mothering: a Thematic Overview, in Moth- ering. Ideology, Experience and Agency, Nagano Glenn, Evelyn, Chang, Grace and Rennie, Linda, ed, (London: Routledge, 1994), 3. 270 The bestseller novel published in South Korea in 2009 was an immediate success and the English translation of the book was awarded the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011.

98 for her children, caring for them, loving them unconditionally. The disappearance of the mother functions as a catalyst where sorrows and disappointments in life come to the surface and where each of the characters is forced into self- questioning on family love. What is exemplified in Pak Wansô’s stories is that motherhood is never uncomplicated. On the surface the female protagonists submit, but on the other side they also resist the dominant patriarchal ideology on motherhood. In several of the stories discussed in this dissertation, for example in “House of Bubbles” and “An Outing”, the main characters openly question their role as mothers, by acting with indifference towards their children.

7.4 Close Reading of “A Walker with a Camera” The short story “K’amerawa wôk’ô” (A Walker with a Camera) was published in February 1975 in Han’guk munhak. As in Pak’s earlier works this story depicts the lives of women who have been victimised by the war and the sacrifices they have to make in order to survive. It also deals with the exploitation of workers and people in the lowest stratum of the society and women’s experiences of modernity. The narrator in this story is an ordinary housewife and mother. The tension and ambiguity starts building from the very first lines with the protagonist’s statement:

I have a nephew. Every time I think I might love him more than my own children, I have to remind myself of the Civil War which I experienced at the age of twenty and my nephew at the age of four months.271

What kind of a relationship does the protagonist have with her nephew, Hun, to merit the statement that she might love him more than her own children? This is obviously a controversial comment. And why does she feel the need to explain and justify her feelings? She then reveals that the deaths of her brother and his wife have made her the guardian of the nephew, and through describing episodes from the past, she gives an explanation of why her affection for her nephew is so strong. The love or responsibility she feels towards him seems to have no limits, and their special relationship is highlighted through the narrator’s recollection of an incident which happened during the war.

271 Pak, Wansô, “K’amerawa wôk’ô” (A Camera and a Walk), in Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôl chônjip 1, Pukkûrôumûl karûch’imnida (Pak Wansô. The Short Story Collection 1. I Teach You Shame) (P’aju: Munhak tongne, 2006), 352.

99 When the motherless child was suffering from malnutrition, in an act of desperation, his grandmother tried to breastfeed him. While witnessing the scene, the main character experienced an unusual physical reaction:

Suddenly, the small veins in my breasts started to react and feel tense. No, it wasn’t the veins but the mammary gland. I was sure of it.272

Just when my nipple was about to touch the dry lips of the child, mother roughly pulled him away from my arms. The look on my mother’s face showed anger and shame just as if she had witnessed adultery. ‘For crying out loud’! What an indecent thing to do for an unmarried woman. This thing cannot happen. ‘Never ever happen’.273

The female characters in Pak Wansô’s stories often react physically to what they perceive as threats.274 The narrator explains that among the many traumatic and painful events they had to endure during the war, this specific incident is the one she remembers in detail. Judging by the grandmother’s reaction, one understands that by “breastfeeding” her nephew, the protagonist is doing something inappropriate. She somehow sacrifices her purity and chastity in order to save the child, who is the only male heir and the only one who can keep what is left of the family intact. Pak often gives women the role of breadwinner when the head of the family is absent, and shows the sacrifices they have to make in order to restore what is left of a shattered family. The main character works as a housemaid at an American military base in order to feed her nephew with the best milk from America, and there is nothing she is unwilling to do for Hun. She does not even care about her own reputation and what the neighbours might think about her, an unmarried woman with a child. The excessive concern for the boy continues even after she marries and has children of her own. She raises Hun as if he were her own and pays him even more attention after the birth of her own child so he won’t feel neglected. In the first part of the story, the protagonist keeps informing the reader about how much she cares about her nephew Hun. As he gets older, he reminds her very much of his father, the protagonist’s brother, who lost his life during the war. As previously mentioned, the loss of a brother is a recurrent and important theme in Pak’s stories, and the circumstances surrounding the death of a brother or another family member are often somewhat shrouded in mystery.

272 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk,” 353. 273 Ibid., 353-354. 274 In the previously discussed stories “House of Bubbles” and “Identical Apartments” the protagonists suffer from dizziness and hallucination.

100 In “A Walker with a Camera” the protagonist’s brother is described as a gentle, highly educated man, who happens to be a “commie”, involved in the leftist movement:

My mother got upset when I told her about brother being a commie. Mother got him married immediately. The reason was of course the necessity of grandchil- dren. But more than that, she sincerely hoped that once he got married with wife and children he would begin to feel a sense of duty, get a job and refrain from dangerous behaviours.275

Her brother dreams of a better world, and when the war breaks out, initially everything seems to go his way. But later he is betrayed by a friend and gets killed. For the main character and her mother his cause of death is not important to investigate or discuss, because the only thing that really matters is the fact that he got killed and was of no use to the family. For the main character, her brother invokes reproach and resentment. Now the women have to put their hope and trust in his son. He should get a good education, a nice job, build a family and live a normal life to compensate them for the pain his father caused them and for all the obligations his father neglected. They hope Hun, unlike his father, will become someone who attains a certain position in society, and that this will allow him leisure, to be able to stroll outdoors with his family on Sundays, carrying a camera. But nothing goes as they have planned or wished for. The main character and her mother are horrified when they find out that in his second year at high school, Hun has decided to major in liberal arts instead of natural sciences. They are afraid that he will follow in the footsteps of his father and get caught up in dangerous ideas. The gender ideology at the time portrayed men as pillars of the economic development project. They were obligated to contribute to the nation-building and at the same time be solely responsible for taking care of the family. For a man, getting the right education, a good job and climbing up the social ladder was their sole mission. Earning enough money to engage in excessive consumption was the ultimate proof of success. In this story, a camera symbolises one’s achievements. The main character tries to convince her nephew of the importance of being an adaptable and accepting citizen, which in actuality means internalising the prevailing masculine norms:

You never think about how to lead a good life. You only think about the meaning of life. You never think about the best way to make money, you only think about why you need to make money. Instead of thinking about whether you should have braised short ribs tomorrow because you’ve had meat soup today,

275 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk,” 360.

101 you think about those neighbours who cannot even afford to have vegetable soup. And you ask yourself why you are the only one who’s having meat soup, and foolishly begin to resent the soup in your stomach. Once your mind starts to go astray you’re forever lost.276

Hun gives in to his aunt’s wishes and applies to the College of Engineering, majoring in construction. He finally passes the entrance exam after several attempts. Thus far in the story, Hun has been muted. He is not allowed to express his opinions, so the reader does not know what he really thinks, except for the information transmitted by the main character. She is preoccupied with worries that her nephew might fall into bad habits or get strange ideas into his head, so she continues to lecture him on how he should stay away from student demonstrations and focus on studying, getting a secure job at a big company, getting married and enjoying his leisure time with a camera in his hand. After graduation, Hun has a hard time getting a job and he even proposes to go abroad. Even though Hun does not speak his mind, the reader understands that things are not going his way. It is difficult to succeed in a society where one is dependent on the right connections or an influential relative who can help you. The protagonist convinces the husband of a friend who works as a manager at a construction firm to give her nephew a job as a surveyor at the Yông- dong Expressway construction site. It is just a temporary employment, but she is promised that after six months her nephew will be given the opportunity to return to the head office and become a regular employee. After Hun has left, there is no news from him and the protagonist feels sorry for him and wonders why he is struck by so much bad luck:

Just like mother says, even if Hun did not work, he would still have a house to live in and he would not have to starve. If making a living was the only reason he had to get a job, he would not have to do it. What I really wished for Hun was that through his skills, he would be able to connect with this country, to be able to get friendly with this country.277

In a competitive and hostile society, which demands conformism and where there is no place for people with different values and thoughts, the only way to survive is to get “friendly” with one’s own country, i.e. to adapt. What the narrator also hints to the reader is that getting friendly or adjusting has a deeper meaning for this particular family because of their tragic past. The head of the family got himself killed because of his leftist activities. Just to be suspected of being a communist or associated with someone with the wrong ideas meant that not only family members but even distant relatives could be subjected to persecution and interrogation by the authorities. It is not openly mentioned in

276 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk”, 362-363. 277 Ibid., 369.

102 this story, but the vague remark above reveals the main character’s inner wish: to be accepted as a normal citizen and to erase every trace of the past. Hun’s “dubious” family background is probably the main reason why he has such a hard time getting a job. The protagonist’s obsession with making a decent life for her family has much to do with their painful family history, but the sentiments she is expressing were shared by most Koreans at the time. After years of hardship during the war, people were tired of being poor. The longing for better living conditions coincided with the modernisation project launched by Park Chunghee. Consequently, everybody easily embraced and adapted to the idea that hard work would eventually pay off. The second part of the story takes place away from home, and the shift in milieu also changes the mood in the story. When time passes and Hun does not show up for the memorial service for his parents, the main character decides to pay a visit to the construction site. On her way to the construction site by bus from Seoul, she passes P’aldang, Yangju and Yangp’yông. By naming physical places, the story moves from the inner space to the outer, and realistic depiction is added to the story. Outside the city, the roads are still underdevel- oped. Because of the rain pouring down, the protagonist imagines what would happen if the roadbed disintegrated. The bus would end up upside down in the Han river with her dead:

Suddenly I started to think that if I were to die in an accident right here, I would like everyone to know why I was on this bus in the first place. I even got this dirty and shameful idea that if the newspapers reported about this extremely devoted aunt, the manager of the Y construction would read about it and immediately call Hun back to the head office. I really indulged myself in this dirty and shameful fantasy. After that, I started to think about what would happen to my own children if I died. After a couple of months, they would probably get a stepmother. But my children would never allow themselves to be harassed by her. Instead, they would skilfully harass her and get her into trouble. They would cleverly make their stepmother miserable.278

When the protagonist arrives at the construction site in Yuch’ôlli, near Chinbu, she witnesses men in blue helmets coming back from a day’s work, their bodies covered in dust. They wash their faces in the brooks and hurry to the restaurant. She hardly recognises her nephew because he has lost weight and he too is covered in dust. A conversation takes place between the narrator and Hun, and this is the first time in the story where Hun is allowed to speak for himself. He describes the working condition for the temporary workers as severe. They have to work long hours, even on Sundays, earning a wage they can hardly live on. The management complains that the work process is not going fast enough, indirectly accusing the workers of incurring financial

278 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk,” 371.

103 losses for the company. Under these circumstances the workers cannot even attempt to complain. The protagonist tries to convince her nephew to give up his job and return to Seoul, but contrary to her expectations, he firmly refuses, making the following statement:

I want to become miserable. I want to see for myself what technical skills, silence and obedience, things you and grandmother believe in so highly, will do for me eventually. I want to demonstrate it to you.279

I’m telling you, please do not waste money and lose your pride by engaging in bribery and sponging. What I found out is that despite the fact that they once were promised a permanent job after six months there are many workers who have been wandering around at the site for three or four years. You don't have to give these workers high wages, you can use them even on Sundays, no obligations. Isn’t it great? For the company, it is excellent business rationalisa- tion.280

Diligence and honesty left the nephew with nothing and he cannot see any signs of improvement. While the protagonist is waiting for the bus to take her back home, she makes a last attempt to infuse some sense of pride in her nephew. She talks about how the expressway will shorten the distance from Seoul to Kangnûng, and emphasises his important contribution to the development of the country. Hun scornfully laughs at her comment. Once everything is revealed he does not have to pretend anymore. It is vacation time and tourists on their way to the Wôljông Buddhist temple go past in their private cars. The Yôngdong Expressway will inevitably increase the number of tourist buses and cars and will only benefit those who belong to the privileged class and can afford leisure time and vacations. In the final scene, the protagonist sits on the bus going back home, watching the beautiful landscape passing by outside the window and ponders over why it is still so difficult to “establish oneself in this soil”. She has failed to make her nephew a respectable citizen. She herself had to endure so much suffering during the war and witnessed the country in ruins. Because of these experiences she wanted to give Hun all the right requirements to succeed. She cannot see what she could have done dif- ferently, which makes her sad and full of conflicting emotions. She is left without answers. What distinguishes this story from those previously discussed is the more direct and outspoken social criticism exemplified by the depiction of the work-

279 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk,” 379. 280 Ibid., 380.

104 ing conditions of blue-collar workers. The story is played out in an environment alien to middle-class women.281 In Pak’s works, the reader is usually invited to a homely setting and the private realm of domestic life. It is in the interpersonal family relations where changes in the society, growing materialism and hypocrisy are depicted. In the early 1970s, proletarian fiction flourished. Male authors such as Hwang Sôgyông, Yun Hûnggil, Cho Se-hûi and Yi Mun’gu addressed social problems and confrontations focusing on the living conditions of the exploited labourers. In “A Walker with a Camera”, Pak is adopting the same political agenda as her male counterparts by describing a country and a society where the privileged take advantage of the poor, where the gap between those who benefit and those who are excluded from economic development is clearly visible. Without useful contacts, not even hard work and diligence pay off. There exists a hierarchy within the construction site between the temporary workers who have to work day and night but earn almost nothing and those who can enjoy leisure downtown. Pak also describes the negative impact of the exploitation of the rural areas. The beautiful landscape is slowly disappearing and in this process friendliness and generosity among country people are also lost. Whatever vanishes and disappears in nature, the same things are lost within people. For the owner of the boarding house where Hun is staying, Hun is just one of many customers. The protagonist is surprised and disappointed that the owner does not act like a “coun- trywoman”. Even though the construction site is surrounded by a cornfield Hun complains that he has not been offered a single corncob for free. In this story, Pak once again uses colours to enhance the feeling of uneasiness and disturbance. When the narrator first arrives at the construction site, she makes the following comments on the surrounding countryside:

281 Narratives of working-class women are common in Proletarian literature. In Tales of Seduc- tion: Factory Girls in Korean Proletarian Literature, Ruth Barraclough investigates the use of female factory workers as a trope in Korean literature. Looking back at modern history, women have always made an important contribution and taken an active part in economic development. This was also the case during the 1920s and 1930s when a large number of women entered the labour market and worked in light manufacturing industries. Newspapers often wrote about country girls being fooled into prostitution and female factory workers being sexually harassed by managers. According to Barraclough, these women “embodied key social anxieties about colonial capitalism: the breakdown of the family economy, the modernization of women in the new social space of the factory and the modern brothel, and the colonial subjugation of Korean workers.” Consequently, in proletarian literature at the time, a common theme was poor women working in factories being sexually violated and exploited by foremen, i.e. the dominant class, and victimised by capitalism and Japanese imperialism. Ruth Barraclough, “Tales of Seduction: Factory Girls in Korean Proletarian Literature,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 349.

105 Far at the distance the cornfield during summertime was verdant. The house roofs in the village were coherently coloured in orange and red. The strong colours made me tired and disgusted.282

Nature is often used to reflect the characters’ troubled and ambiguous feelings. The passage describes greenery and verdure, but the strong colours create a feeling of discomfort in the protagonist. She reacts physically, feeling tired and even disgusted, the latter being a strong word of resentment. Thus, in “A Walker with a Camera”, political oppression, socio-economical changes and transformation of traditional values are shown on both personal and interpersonal levels, between neighbours and family members. The role of women and the notion of womanhood/motherhood are once again problematised. The incident where the protagonist is trying to breastfeed her nephew gives a sense of unease, not only because of her mother’s reaction but because the reader understands that the act is carried out under constraint. When recalling this specific moment, the protagonist asks herself if it was maternal instinct she felt at the time. This is an interesting and telling statement. By describing it as maternal instinct, she is trying to convince herself that this kind of reaction is universal, normal, and something women automat- ically experience when seeing a helpless child, and it is not viewed as an obligation she ought to carry out in order to save the only male heir in the family. She is internalising patriarchal values by accepting her role as the protecting and caring mother, but not without questioning it. The female characters in “House of Bubbles”, “Identical apartments” and “An Outing” all problematise their traditional role of motherhood, which they internalise and oppose at the same time. In “A Walker with a Camera”, Pak shows that it is not only women who are victims of fixed traditional gender norms, but also men. There are two male characters in this story: the protagonist’s deceased brother and the nephew. They represent two different types of masculinity and are polar op- posites. On the surface, the protagonist condemns her brother for not taking care of and protecting his family, thus neglecting his duty as the male patriarch. The brother was a decent and kind man but he was a dreamer and had his head filled with the wrong ideas, so he got killed. The protagonist tries to convince her nephew to become a different man from his father, someone who is dedicated to his family, who adjusts to the demands of the society, the kind of man the country needs. But in her efforts to convince Hun to choose the right way, she expresses doubts, asks questions, and makes ironic comments, all of which give the reader hints about her mixed, true feelings. The ideology of the story is transmitted through a single narrator. The narrative device used in this story makes it easy to tie the I-narrator or the focalised character to the author. It is not far-fetched to believe that the narrator expresses the point of

282 Pak, “A Camera and A Walk,” 373.

106 view of the author. As previously mentioned, for most of the story, Hun is the Object, lacking a voice of his own, and the reader has no idea about his thoughts. I would like to return to Lanser’s distinction between explicit ideology and embedded ideology and how it is expressed in the text. When the narrator visits the construction site, she comments on the scenery and the colourful roofs of the houses. This is another way of criticising the rapid modernisation of the countryside, i.e. the Saemaûl undong (New village movement), which was launched by Park Chunghee during the 1970s.283 One distinct feature of the movement was the replacement of old-styled thatched roofs with colourful modern slate ones which changed the country scenery. By making a negative remark about the roofs, the narrator/the author is questioning the ongoing transformation of the countryside. The use of metaphoric and symbolic modes of expression is one way of embedding an ideological stance. The criticism is delivered between the lines throughout the whole story. In the final scene, the protagonist ponders about where it went wrong. She refrains from giving any answers. Instead the ideological stance is actually delivered by Hun, in the second part of the story, when he is allowed to speak his mind. He is the one who explicitly expresses the core message of the story, as exemplified in the quotations above. He criticises the management and explains with clarity that a permanent job is not to be expected and describes the exploitation of the workers at the construction site. He even tells his aunt to stop engaging in bribery. This is an interesting narrative device that gives authority to another character. This could be a way for the author to avoid making statements that can be perceived as controversial by differentiating the opinion of another character from that of the narrator. Another possible interpretation could be that by giving voice to the nephew who belongs to a younger generation and has not witnessed ideological clashes, the author hints that there might be brighter future ahead.

283 Saemûl undong (New Village Movement) was a political measure aiming at reducing the economic gap between the highly industrialised urban cities and the poor rural areas. The basic idea behind the movement was community-led development. With some support from the government, community members, under the guidance of a trained village leader, were encouraged through buzz words such as “self-help”, “diligence” and “collaboration” to actively participate in development projects. Infrastructures were built and houses were modernised, thereby im- proving living conditions. See Ha Seong-Kyu, “Developing a Community-Based Approach to Urban Redevelopment,” GeoJournal Vol. 53, No. 1 (2001): 40, https://www.jstor.org/sta- ble/41147581.

107 8. Pak Wansô’s War Literature of the 1970s

The Korean War (which lasted from 25 June 1950 to 27 July 1953) remains a national trauma and people are still trying to come to terms with the reality of a divided nation. When the armistice was reached and signed in 1953, the cas- ualties were estimated to be approximately two million for the North and one million for the South. Millions of families were separated and found themselves on different sides of the demilitarised zone. Because no peace treaty was signed, the two countries are technically still at war, and throughout the years until the present day deadly confrontations have occurred again and again. Pak Wansô was of course not the only writer who was preoccupied with the war experience. Stories dealing with national division had appeared since the 1960s284 but it was during the 1970s that the so-called pundan munhak (division literature) thrived. One decisive factor behind the development of division literature was the coming-of-age of writers such as Kim Wônil, Yi Tongha, Cho Chôngnae, Yun Hûnggil and Yi Mun’gu who had experienced the civil war in their childhood and used their personal experiences and memories to approach the subject from diverse angles. Despite the differences in their creative expressions they all shared one common notion. What signified their division literature in the 1970s and onwards was the understanding that the war was not a historical event that belonged in the past. They emphasised the importance of discussing and problematising not only the causes of the war but also its psychological and political implications for the present day situation.285 Unlike the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, when writers were still traumatised by the war and suffered from a victim mentality, during the 1970s enough time had passed in order to enable writers to critically deal with the war. Beginning in the early 1970s, there were signs of improved relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and in July 4, 1972, a joint statement by North and South Korea announced that both countries agreed to

284 Representative division literature from the 1960s includes works such as Kwangjang (The Plaza) from 1960 by Ch’oe Inhun, Namudûl pit’are sôda (Trees on a Slope) from 1960 by Hwang Sunwôn, Sijanggwa chônjang (Market Place and Battlefield) from 1964 by Pak Kyôngni and Sosimin (Petit Bourgeois) from 1964 by Yi Hoch’ôl. 285 Cho, “Korean Literature after 50 Years,” 157.

108 work together to improve their relationship, prevent military confrontations and to achieve a peaceful unification based on mutual understanding. This change in political sentiment encouraged and allowed writers to critically deal with the war and its consequences.286 In regard to Pak Wansô’s wartime narratives, researchers have often com- mented on the fact that the author’s main concern is not to explain the causes or deal with the ideological struggles of the war. In her stories, there are no descriptions of warfare or battlefield scenes. Even though the tragedies of the war and the loss of loved ones play a crucial role and have a devastating impact on the lives of the characters, the author is more interested in depicting the human side of historical events or political and social upheavals. Her stories are about women who are rarely at the heart of the action but are nevertheless affected and suffer long-lasting wounds. Their fate is more or less decided by accident or by factors beyond their control. The focus is more on looking back and trying to reconcile with the past and investigating the devastating impact of ideological conflict on the family and relationships between next-of-kin, rather than on offering a new understanding of the historical facts of the war. The same tendency is seen in the early works by Kim Wônil (b.1942), who like Pak Wansô experienced the war during his childhood and dealt with its negative consequences throughout his entire career.287 Kim Wônil’s father defected to the North during the war, leaving a wife and four children behind. As a child, the author had to cope with the aftermath of his father’s actions, not only dealing with the stigma of being associated with a “commie” but also coping with severe poverty. In several of his works, such as the short story “Ôdumûi hon” (Soul of Darkness) from 1973, Kim looks back on his traumatic childhood and the loss of his father with a sense of reproach and longing. The story is set just before the outbreak of the civil war and is obviously based on the author’s own experience. The child narrator, a young boy, has learned that his father has been imprisoned and shot for being a communist. For the ignorant child, his father’s secret activities, during which he suddenly disappeared without anyone knowing his whereabouts, are hard to comprehend. The boy wonders why being a “commie” is such an evil thing that one deserves to be executed. His father’s devotion to an ideology ultimately leading to his death leaves the boy with many riddles he cannot solve.288 But in the end, what goes on in the adult world is of no importance for the young boy.

286 Chông Cherim, Han’guk hyôndae sosôlgwa chônjaengûi kiôk (Modern Korean Literature and Memories of the War), (P’aju: Han’guk haksul chôngbo, 2013), 32-33. 287 Representative works by Kim Wônil include Noûl (Sunset) from 1978, Purûi chejôn (Festi- val of Fire) from 1982 and Kyôul koltchagi (Winter Valley) from 1987. 288 Kan Pokkyun and Kim Myôngjun, “Han’gugûi pundan sosôl yôn’gu: pundan sosôrûi sôsajôk insigûl chungsimûro” (Research on Korean Division Novels: Focusing on the Aware- ness of Description in Division Novels), Uri munhak yôn’gu 18 (Research on Our Literature) (August 2005): 264-267.

109 He has been abandoned by his father, the person who is supposed to take care of the family. He is faced with a harsh reality, thus the only concern for him is to avoid starvation and look after his mother and his two sisters who are now dependent on him. The devastating impact of the war on everyday life, the defenceless and innocent victims, and the meaninglessness of ideological strife which leads to families falling apart, are common themes in both Pak Wansô’s and Kim Wônil’s war narratives.289 According to Miriam Löwensteinová, the lack of discussion on ideology and the unwillingness to critically deal with the war itself is a common trait in post-war literature. She even suggests that the short stories of the 1950s 1970s suffer from “stereotypes” and “common formal features”. One of these traits is the use of an “innocent” child narrator in order for authors to differentiate their own experiences and opinions from those expressed in the stories and avoid the risk of their works being politicised.290 Korean critics have explained this particular trait with the reference to the fact that it was a civil, fratricidal war. Koreans were fighting each other in what they considered a meaningless battle caused by foreign powers. It was not a struggle of good against evil; there were no enemies to blame, no one to accuse and no historical truth to uncover. Under these circumstances, all Koreans were victimised, a standpoint reflected in the war narratives. This dilemma was also accompanied by strong censorship which prevented authors from approaching this controversial subject from diverse positions. All these factors together caused writers to become “paralysed”. It was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that a new development in division literature emerged, where writers made efforts to give a diverse and nuanced picture of the causes of the civil war and present an alternative and radically different perspective of crucial historical facts. They questioned and opposed the often simplified anti-communist viewpoint promoted by the dictatorial regimes which regarded the North as the sole perpetrator and the villain, and the South as an innocent victim struggling for democratisation. In Noûl (Sunset) from 1978, Kim Wônil is no longer an ignorant innocent child but shows a mature and deeper understanding of how his own history, born with low social status in a feudal society, is correlated to the ideological struggle in the form of peasant uprisings and confrontations with an oppressive state during the post-liberation period, ultimately leading to the outbreak

289 For more comparison between Pak Wansô and Kim Wônil, see Jang Huiwôn, “Pak Wansôwa Kim Wônirûi pundan sosôl pigyo yôn’gu: chônjaeng ch’ehômgwa ideollogiûi kuhyôn yangsangûl chungsimûro” (The Research on Comparing Division Novels by Pak Wansô and Kim Wônil: Focusing on War Experience and Aspects of Realisation) (Master thesis. Hanyang University, Korea, 2011). 290 Löwensteinová, Miriam, “Reflections on Korean War and the Limits of Its Expression: Ko- rean Short Stories of the 1950s to 1970s.” Proceedings of the World Congress of Korean studies, 2006, Academy of Korean studies, Vol 1.

110 of the civil war. In his novel Purûi chejôn (Festival of Fire) from 1982, North and South Korea are portrayed as chickens taking part in a fierce fight where they tear each other to pieces, while the owners, i.e. the US and the Soviet Union, are not only controlling their actions but also harvesting the spoils of war. In Cho Chôngnae’s Pullori (Playing with Fire) from 1982, the author, like Kim Wônil, problematises the deep-rooted class conflict that existed in the Korean society and which came to a head after liberation from Japanese occupation, ultimately causing the civil war. In this story, a successful business- man is living with a big secret, unknown even to his own family. He used to be a poor blacksmith in a small village in the Chôlla province, humiliated and suppressed by his landlords. But when he became the leader of a communist partisan group, he took vengeance on his tormentors by killing 38 members of the Shin clan. However, his past finally catches up with him when he is black- mailed by a stranger who is later revealed to be a relative of the Shins. The reader is faced with moral dilemmas of whom to sympathise with and questions on when vengeance is justified. What both Cho Chôngnae and Kim Wônil are proposing is that before unification is even possible, one must first resolve ingrained conflicts and problems existing in the South Korean society and create equal rights and a dignified existence for everyone.291 Except for Pak Wansô and Pak Kyôngni, there were few female writers who addressed the civil war and national division during the 1970s and 1980s. According to Jin-Kyung Lee, the recollection of the war was primarily “a mas- culinist project in South Korean literary history”292 and she continues by stating that it “signifies a transmission of the patrimonial gift of familial-national history through the act of memorizing fathers […]293 Lee draws attention to the previously mentioned short story “Ôdumûi hon” (Soul of Darkness)294 by Kim Wônil in which there is a crucial scene of the child protagonist being forced by his uncle to look at the executed body of his communist father. The message to the reader is a “patrilineal-nationalist injunction” to remember the father, the war and to restore the truth and deeper meaning for generations to come. Lee goes through several works by male authors such as Kim Wônil, Yun Hûnggil and Chôn Sangguk and concludes that women in their works are seldom the subject but are subordinated and have merely “the symbolic function of restoring homogeneity and unity to the divided Korean ethnic nation”. 295 With their alternative war narrative, female writers such as Pak

291 Kang, “Literature and Society,” 20. 292 Lee, “National History and Domestic Spaces,” 64. 293 Ibid. 294 In her paper, Lee has given Kim Wônil’s short story Ôdumûi hon the English title The Spirit of Darkness. 295 Lee, “National History and Domestic Spaces,” 64.

111 Wansô and O Chônghûi296 resist and oppose the androcentric memories of the war.

8.1 Close Reading of “In the Realm of the Buddha” The short story “Puch’ônim kûnch’ô” (In the Realm of the Buddha) was first published in Hyôndae munhak in 1973 and was translated into English in 1996 by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton297 and is one of the earliest works by Pak Wansô. A family is torn apart by the civil war, which caused the death of the father and a brother. Many years have passed since the war ended and for most people the tragic memories have faded and been forgotten. But the female protagonist and her ageing mother are still haunted and traumatised by their tragic past. The story deals with the process of reconciliation and the possibility of healing emotional wounds. Even if one should avoid confusing the author and the narrator, there are similarities between the protagonist and the author that cannot go unnoticed. If the novel The Naked Tree depicts the author’s adolescence years, this story can be regarded as a sequel. It recounts the author’s life as a housewife and mother and the events leading up to her debut as a writer. When the story opens, the main character, a middle-class housewife, has stopped by a shop with her mother to buy candles on their way to a Buddhist temple. In Korea, different religions co-exist and religious practices are inte- grated in the daily lives of ordinary Koreans. People, mainly women, commonly visit a Buddhist temple when they are faced with personal problems or if they just need a place to rest and meditate. So Pak present the reader with a familiar setting, a mother and daughter spending time with each other, but a tension is noticeable:

We left the shop, and all the while we walked, Mother’s face was clouded and solemn. The solemn part seemed mostly an act, and I thought she was overdoing it. Have you ever seen parents teaching games to their kindergartners? They look so earnest and their expressions are so exaggerated. Well, that was how she won me over, and I found myself adopting her solemnness.298

296 For more research on O Chônghûi, see Hwang Togyông, “Twit’ûrin sônggwa pusôjin yukch’e” (Twisted Sexuality and the Destroyed Body), Chakka segye 3 (The World of Au- thors), no. 3 (Spring 1994): 123-141. 297 The story was first published in English in the quarterly Koreana (Vol. 10, no. 2, summer 1996). The quotations are from the anthology The Red Room from 2009. 298 Pak, Wansô, “In the Realm of the Buddha”, in The Red Room. Stories of Trauma in Con- temporary Korea, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 1-2.

112 The main character is moody and states early on that she is suspicious of religious practices and is just accompanying her mother to the temple out of duty. She recalls one time when she was persuaded by her mother to visit a shaman, an experience she remembers with disgust. The protagonist perceives her mother’s reliance on one deity after another and her desperate need to believe and trust in higher powers as odd and irrational. Her first impression of the temple reflects her state of mind:

It resembled a fortress more than a temple, dwarfing the clustered dwellings outside. The ponderous two-story concrete structure with its tile roof, neither Korean nor Western in style, separated the homes from the temple compound, which it enclosed on three sides like a fence. Viewed from the homes, the temple had the severe quality of bare, unornamented concrete. And it possessed an uncertain dignity combined with the absurd incongruity of a traditional tile roof resting on two stories of concrete.299

The 300-year-old temple is one of the biggest sanctuaries for female believers, where one can find a dharma hall, the seven stars shrine and the mountain spirit’s shrine. The compound is a mixture of different architectural styles and faiths such as Buddhism or Taoism, and indigenous religious beliefs reside side by side. Instead of invoking a sense of sacredness, the place looks ridiculous and misplaced, even “conspiratorial” from the outside. But when the main character enters the compound she is startled by the colourful patterns on woodwork and the bright and open rooms without walls. She is also pleas- antly surprised by the invocations and chants from the faithful. She recognises them as the ones she usually hears from her mother’s room every morning. During the whole visit to the temple, the protagonist struggles with mixed emotions. She is a rational person who judges her mother for being supersti- tious, but at the same time she is a fragile human being who is in desperate need of someone or something to liberate her from her agonies. Throughout the story, there is a constant battle going on inside her, reflected in her contradictory emotions. The narrator is homodiegetic and the story is focalised through the female protagonist. The reader has access to the protagonist’s mind, thus she never becomes a two-dimensional character but is someone the reader can sympathise with. An emotional bond is created between the narrator and the narratee. The protagonist comments on the fact that she does not have any faith in Buddhism, nor Jesus or Mohammed for that matter. The smell from the incense suffocates her and she makes condescending remarks about her fellow worshippers who, contrary to Buddha’s saying about liberating oneself from worldly concerns and greed, are bowing a thousand times and giving offerings just in order for their husbands to make more money. Old women are showing off their expensive jewellery and clothes and middle-class

299 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 2.

113 women are depicted as shallow and superficial. Hypocrisy is not only preva- lent among laypeople, but even monks and churchmen become wealthy on people’s desperation. The protagonist half-heartedly makes bows in front of altars, and lights the incenses and listens to the monk lecturing about the mir- acles of Lord Buddha. But the words mean nothing to her. It soon becomes apparent to the reader that the main character’s behaviour, her coldness and nonchalance, and her somewhat excessive and ironical remarks are just a desperate act to keep her emotions in check for what lies ahead for her: a memorial service for her father and brother:

Today, early January by the lunar calendar, was the propitious date selected by the temple to offer a service for good fortune. It was also the twenty-second anniversary of my father’s death. Twenty-two years… and yet today was the first time we were formally honouring his memory, and this temple Mother fre- quented was the place. It would be a day of deep emotion for Mother, for there was a story behind our disregard of that observance until now, as well as behind our decision to hold it…300

The reason behind their visit to the temple, to pay tribute to their loved ones is not revealed to the reader until the latter part of the story when the actual ceremony takes place. The protagonist is so emotionally detached that even when she stands in front of a picture of her deceased father and brother, she is not able to admit that their deaths have affected her to great extent and tormented her for so many years:

Three walls of the sombre, desolate, wooden-floored room were covered with memorial tablets and photographs of the deceased. Those of Father and Brother were among them, side by side, resting on a bed of white-paper lotus blossoms. I had never seen the photographs before.301

Their features had been altered only enough to give their skin the colour of thick makeup and to remove their expressions; as a result they looked idiotic. And the age difference between father and son had been erased, so that the only thing you’d notice was their resemblance to each other. I, who took after Mother a great deal, now wore her sad and solemn expression as I stood facing them. And this was how our family of two decades ago gathered together now. I felt no emotion whatsoever.302

300 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 10-11. 301 Ibid., 11-12. 302 Ibid., 12.

114 Only in that moment when she sees her gaunt and fragile mother on the floor, bowing in front of her own son’s memorial tablet, when she is forced to witness this absurd and bizarre situation, does she realise how much pain this tragic incident has caused and how it has prevented them from having a decent and dignified existence. She finally admits that she feels something and is ready to reveal her family secret. In the second part of the story, through a flashback, the protagonist recounts what happened to her father and brother and why their deaths had to be kept a secret. Not many details are revealed concerning the death of her brother. He was involved in the leftist movement and when the war broke out he seem- ingly engaged in shady activities of which the rest of the family was unaware. As the battles intensified he started to act strangely, isolated himself at home, not taking care of himself, and the family sensed that something might be wrong:

One day Brother had a caller, a “comrade” who visited regularly. The visitor was preceded by an armed man. The three of them - Brother, comrade, and gunman- were out in the yard face to face, speaking in an undertone. It was a quiet exchange and sounded tedious enough to put you to sleep. But suddenly Brother shouted, “No, I won’t!” “No?” asked the other. “Would you rather die instead?” “I told you, I won’t do it!” Life, it seems, can be disposed of with absurd haste. The gunman was for real: he fired. And not just once. A shot to the chest, to the throat, the face, and the forehead.303

The protagonist describes her brother’s death as a “reactionary’s death” and a disgrace for the family. They must pretend that this tragedy never happened and to “devour his death like wild animals consuming the afterbirth of their newborns and lapping up the bloody mess”.304 His death remains shrouded in mystery. When political power shifts in Seoul, her father meets an even more gruesome fate, beaten to death as a communist by his own neighbours. So she and her mother must “swallow” all traces of him as well. Because of the stigma of being labelled as communist sympathisers, their deaths must be concealed even to their relatives. They decide that from now on, father and brother are not dead but “missing”. Therefore, they are not allowed to cry in public and share their grief or behave like other people who are in mourning. The protagonist explains the importance of mourning openly in order to be freed from the deceased:

For three days we put up with people offering condolences, people playing cards to pass the time, beggars enjoying a free meal; we go through the most

303 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 13. 304 Ibid., 14.

115 complicated formalities - bottomless, endless formalities that flare up in arguments with elders and juniors alike - and we perform the memorial ceremonies on the anniversaries of death and during the holiday festivals. And so we, the survivors, are drained; we get fed up, we grow poor serving the deceased, and we become sick and tired of it all, we develop an undiluted disgust with everyone else, including the dead person. And then for the first time we, the living, are freed from those who are dead.305

Instead of being liberated from the dead souls of her father and brother, the protagonist explains to the reader that she has “swallowed” them, and they are “stuck in her innards”.306 She tries everything to get rid of the past. She and her mother move to a new house on the outskirts of Seoul, and she is working and supporting her mother. But she suffers from posttraumatic stress disor- der307 and every night she is tormented by nightmares. Constantly being afraid and unsettled, she longs for normality in her life. So she marries an ordinary man and gives birth to several children, but she is miserable and nothing ex- cites her anymore. And she starts to feel resentment towards these men who have deprived her of happiness:

Instead of fearing that their departed souls would return as bloody ghosts [yuryông] in some dark alley, I came to despise those souls. They hadn’t become ghosts in the first place; they were stuck somewhere, and they were hope- lessly stupid.308

What was truly mortifying, I felt, was not my dead brother and father but the fact of my having to witness their deaths. To think I had seen them, those horrible events, at my age, during the brightest and shiniest period of my life, a period of the most piquant fragrance. To think I had been forced to silently consume them! What vexed me, really and truly, was not them but me.309

In the previous stories, the female protagonists have suffered from different forms of mental disorders. Due to a lack of communication and an inability to

305 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 15. 306 Ibid., 16. 307 Posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD is a medical condition which occurs in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as war, sexual violence, natural disaster and other forms of assault. Disturbing and distressed emotions such as anger, sadness, anxiety and fear are felt long after the event ended and they may relive what they have experienced through flashbacks and nightmares. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, 5nd ed. (Arlington, Va: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), 519. 308 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 16. 309 Ibid., 17.

116 express their feelings, women suffer in silence and their illness passes unnoticed by people around them. The main character in this story is obviously suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, but she does not have anyone to confide in. She is married but her husband is mute. Weak and absent men are common in Pak’s stories. Both the narrator’s father and brother who are the pillars of the family are recklessly gone, thus the vulnerable position of women in a patriarchal society becomes evident. Pak Wansô is not interested in explaining the causes of war or engaging in discussions on ideology or con- fronting anyone. In wars, women and children suffer the most, thus her main concern is to give voice to the marginalised and silenced, who were power- lessly victimised by events beyond their control. The climax of the story seems to be the deaths of these two family members, and the author keeps the reader in suspense by not revealing the secret until halfway through the story. While the main character gives detailed descriptions of the temple compound, the room decorations, the altars and the worshippers the tension slowly builds. This “delaying” also reflects the protagonist’s reluctance to deal with this delicate matter. But when the story finally reaches its climax, the actual deaths are hastily described. Temporal pacing can reveal the narrator’s ideological and psychological stance. The way the narrator avoids explaining the circumstances surrounding those incidents can be regarded as making a statement. She does not want to take sides and pick one ideology over the other because in the end, the ultimate tragedy is not the dead men but the survivors who had to deal with the aftermath of the disaster. This standpoint is also reflected in the bitterness the main character feels towards her father and brother and her unwillingness to defend their actions or describe their deaths as heroic. She rejects ideologies. The main concern of the author is the women and their process of recovering from a traumatic past. The protagonist realises that the only way to find inner peace and get rid of that lump in her body is to put the unspeakable into words, break the silence. But nobody wants to listen to her story. Twenty years have passed since the war ended and times have changed. In a country in the midst of economic development, everybody is busy chasing wealth and fortune and no one has the slightest interest in hearing about times of hardship and sorrow. Once again, Pak Wansô criticises a country hit by economic and social malaise and the loss of humanity. Despite the fact that nobody wants to listen to her, the protagonist’s urge and need to tell is so strong and overwhelming that she decides to put her story down on paper. She gets her first story published, and even though her work did not turn out as she wanted, she has found a way to get an outlet for her repressed feelings:

To a certain extent this failure was probably due to insufficient ability on my part and to my own oversensitivity to the tastes of my listeners and the times in

117 which I lived. But the main reason was that I lacked the perspective to fiction- alize their deaths or, more precisely, the wherewithal to grasp the entire picture. I was still too closely attached to those two deaths.310

I wanted to talk about it so much, it was driving me crazy. I still hadn’t given up on spilling it out. How could I get them to hear me to the end? How could I capture their interest? Or even their sympathy? When I had nothing better to do, I meticulously composed the story in my mind, trying to roughly suit it to the humor of the person who would deign to listen. And then one day I found myself writing it down in story form. I wrote in painful spasms of regurgitation, spasms that offered relief.311

In Pak Wansô’s stories, not only the relationship between husband and wife is disturbed but also that between a mother and her children, and especially mother and daughter. Pak lost her father when she was just a child and her strong-minded mother influenced her life to a large degree. Consequently, many of her stories are focused on the mother-daughter relationship. The women in her stories are troubled by mixed emotions when it comes to their mothers. In the previous short story “An Outing”, the main character’s mother is willing to sacrifice everything she owns just in order for her daughter to get a middle school diploma so she can marry a suitable man. Her sacrifices are not appreciated by her daughter, and the mother’s excessive behaviour makes one suspect that it is not only her daughter’s well-being she is seeking but her own self-fulfilment. In this story the main character describes herself and her mother as “partners in crime” - they had witnessed the gruesome death of two family members and shared this secret for the past 20 years. They have been through hard times together but instead of this strengthening the bond between them, they have become estranged. Mother and daughter are not capable of sharing their inner feelings with each other. During the time they spend at the temple, not once do they actually talk about this tragic incident. The only time a continuous conversation is set out is when the main character overhears some women worshippers talking to each other. She does not interact with them, and their physical appearances are not described, only their utterances. When the main character finally pours her heart out and “forces” her mother to listen to the demons that are haunting her and the troubled angry souls, her mother takes her to a shaman. The bad luck that has come their way is because of these restless souls, and in order for them to leave this world in peace, one must perform a rite, chinogwi. For her mother, there is nothing contradictory about seeking help from both Buddha and a shaman:

310 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 19. 311 Ibid., 18.

118 I returned just in time to witness the shaman summoning Father’s spirit. At the sight of me the shaman hugged me tight and began weeping in a plaintive tone: “Egugu, you heartless thing, where have you been? Egugu, I keep seeing you. I see you in my dreams, I see you when I’m awake. I can’t forget you. Let me touch you one last time, my daughter.” He hugged me, rubbed his cheek against mine, fondled me. I smelled something sour - the man reeked of makkôlli. His hands told me he was up to no good: one arm was around my waist and the other pawed my bottom. I pushed him away and ran off. To this day Mother thinks I did so because of the shock of hearing Father’s spirit complain.312

Their spirits must have been so bitter all this time. And oh, how they must have starved: I wouldn’t be surprised if they went to other people’s memorial ceremonies, bided their time, and had themselves some food - can you imagine a proud man like Father stooping to that?313

There is no doubt in her mother’s mind that the shaman was really in contact with the father, so if they want some peace in their lives, they must not neglect their duties. Therefore it is decided that they should perform a memorial service at the temple at the beginning of every year. Through episodes, the story alternates between the past and the here-and- now. The narrative time spans a day or a couple of hours. The story is told in non-chronological order and the narrator uses analepses314 to recount incidents that happened a long time ago. In Pak’s 1970s stories dealing with the civil war, the reader is usually taken 20 years back in time. Analepses are used to give background information and to explain the protagonist’s present behaviour and state of mind. Pak is applying a circular narrative. In the final part, the narrative returns to the temple and the protagonist watches her mother perform the last bows to her father and brother. Before they go home, they visit the dharma hall, the Seven Stars shrine and the Mountain spirit’s shrine, just as her mother had planned, and pay tribute. The story ends with a scene where the main character and her mother are sitting in a taxi on their way home. Even though the scenery outside is covered in winter gloom, the atmosphere inside the cab is calm and restful. The protagonist engages in self-examination and thinks back on everything that happened during the day. She still strongly maintains that the whole experience at the temple did nothing for her, but at the same time she finds comfort in her mother’s peaceful appearance, the look of someone who has been relieved from her worries:

312 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 21. 313 Ibid. 314 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 40.

119 I made her comfortable in my arms. Was it possible to sleep so deeply? She looked as tranquil and innocent as a baby. She must have been exhausted, but above all her mind was now at ease, and this was the reason she had slipped into a sleep that seemed almost comatose. She really was like a baby. As I held my poor mother, I felt something like compassion soar up from deep inside me, as if I were the mother and she the daughter.315

On the surface, mother and daughter do not see eye to eye. The main character finally finds a way to recover through her writing, a cathartic outlet, while her mother turns to the gods and finds peace through religious salvation. She fails to understand her mother and an emotional gap still exists between them, but the story ends on a hopeful note. If her mother can leave this world with that restful look on her face she might be able to overcome her trauma in the near future. The protagonist in this story condemns her mother for being gullible. But she still participates in the religious rites and ponders over how to get rid of the souls that are stuck inside her. Regardless of religious beliefs and whether one is a rational and intellectual person, the notion of restless spirits and the need to send souls off to the other side through rites is deeply rooted in the mind of every Korean.

8.2 Close Reading of “Winter Outing” In the short story “Kyôul nadûri” (Winter Outing)316 Pak Wansô once again returns to a subject she has delved into throughout her entire career by giving a moving account of innocent victims who have barely managed to survive the war and who are suffering from mental and emotional disorders. By recounting the same topic over and over again she manages to describe the devastating impact of the civil war on people who never wanted to get involved or take part in the ideological struggle. In the previously discussed short stories “In the Realm of the Buddha” and “A Walker with a Camera”, a family member’s activities and involvement during the war have a destructive effect on the lives of the surviving relatives a long time after the actual events took place. In contrast, the protagonist in “Winter Outing” is not haunted by traumatic war memories and has not experienced the death of a family member. But she is married to a former North Korean, and as the story progresses and she encounters a poor war victim, she realises that she cannot escape or be indifferent to the sufferings of her fellow humans and the painful wounds inflicted on them.

315 Pak, “Realm of the Buddha,” 23. 316 The short story has been translated into English by Marshall R. Phil and published in Land of exile. Contemporary Korean Fiction, translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007).

120 When the story opens, the main character, a housewife, is on vacation at a hot spring by herself. She is in a vulnerable emotional state, full of resentment and self-pity. She wishes that the alleged magic powers of the spring water could wash her worries away. The source of her unhappiness seems to be the lack of communication between husband and wife and their inability to reach out to each other, a common trait in Pak’s stories. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that her husband is a refugee from North Korea. He had to leave his parents and his wife behind during the war and fled to the South with his baby daughter. Now he is a successful painter and his daughter is a grown, married woman and a mother herself. The story is set in winter time and Seoul is perceived as cold and hostile. Pak often uses descriptions of environments and landscape to depict the mental state of her characters:

It had been bitterly cold for several days. Through the studio window, I could see the skeletal roadside trees and sparsely peopled, frozen sidewalks below. I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of winter in this dismal city.317

She feels rejected and excluded from her husband’s life. She feels sorry for herself for all the sacrifices she made by marrying an unemployed poor painter from the North without any future, caring for and loving him and his daughter. These feelings of regret and of being wronged are provoked one day when she encounters her husband at his studio, painting a portrait of his daughter. He is preparing for an exhibition and as usual she has brought some food to him. She feels perplexed by what she witnesses:

[…] this painting of a human figure was utterly different from my husband’s usual style. It was dreadfully detailed, vivid, and realistic. Whether an exact likeness was appropriate was secondary; what concerned me most was the sudden loathing I immediately felt. It was as though I were looking at a portrait into which he had moved her soul. Even more sickening was the curious air exuded by a loving father and daughter - that I can understand. But there was something more than father and daughter to their secrecy. It was plain to see that they wanted their intimacy for themselves.318

The painter’s daughter must have been about the same age as her mother, when he left her behind in the North. And looking at this young, beautiful woman who is modelling for her father, the protagonist realises that during all

317 Pak Wansô, “Winter Outing”, in Land of Exile. Contemporary Korean Fiction, translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 135. 318 Ibid., 134.

121 these years her husband has never forgotten about his first wife, and has kept his memories of her in his heart. She is struck by jealousy, but without any possibility to find an outlet for her feelings, she feels empty and disillusioned. How can she ever compete with a woman she has never met and who only exists in her husband’s memories? She has dedicated her entire life to her family, taking care of her husband and caring for his daughter as her own, but has ended up without reward or appreciation. Unaware of her feelings, her husband is startled when she tells him that she would like to spend some time alone, away from home. He thinks she is being hysterical and wonders why on earth she wants to travel in the middle of winter:

More than wishing to leave Seoul or to get away from my husband’s side, I wanted to cast aside like worn-out shoes this life I had fashioned so persever- ingly and to live free and unfettered.319

I left my husband with the mentality of someone who had just discovered that a cherished treasure was a fake and, as a first reaction out of disgust, tossed it aside.320

A lack of communication leading to a life of silent suffering, and a desperate wish to free oneself from a humdrum existence and the imprisonment of the home are common features in Pak Wansô’s stories. The question on women’s emancipation and the search for selfhood is persistently addressed in her stories regardless of themes. What makes the relationship between husband and wife even more complicated in this particular story is the main character’s inability to sympathise with her husband’s tragic past. Without expressing any understanding of the pain he must still be feeling from leaving his family behind and being separated from them, she is very much focused on her own wounded feelings. Her disinclination to address her husband’s past may not only be a sign of ignorance but a natural reaction. She is supposed to be 12 years younger than her husband, thus she may not have had first-hand experience of the war. The protagonist takes the express bus to Onyang, a hot spring town. While the desolation in her heart is reflected in the empty streets of Seoul, the setting in the countryside is equally described as frosty and unfriendly. It is her first time being away from home. She is almost paralysed and does not know what to do with her new found freedom. She does not even know how to spend the big travel allowance her husband has given her and spends her first night at a cheap inn. On the next morning, she goes on a five minutes bus ride to a lake,

319 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 135. 320 Ibid.

122 which is supposed to be a popular tourist spot, but because of the weather and her miserable mood, the scenery is a disappointment:

Solidly frozen, surrounded by a low, bare mountain, it looked gloomy and opaque, as if the sullen sky had simply sat down on the spot. Then, all of a sudden, a jealous wind licked fiercely at the icy surface of the lake and swept up toward me, slapping my cheeks heartlessly like a whip.321

Not even Mother Nature seems to be on her side. And there is no trade going on in the shopping area near the lakeside. The empty streets make her feel even more sad and gloomy. Walking about from one alley to another she finally ends up in front of a house with a sign saying “Lodgings”. It is a traditional Korean house, a hanok, and the owner, a woman in her fifties, greets her with warmth and friendliness. This stranger, whom she encounters for the first time, makes her feel comfortable, as if they have known each other for their whole lives. It feels like her frozen body and heart melt in that moment and her worries disappear. She asks for a warm room to rest for a while and the owner offers her the main room with the best floor heating. The room is dark and cosy but she soon notices that she is not alone:

The desiccated old lady, looking like a mummy draped with clothing, stared at me without expression and shook her head to the left and right. Since her behaviour signalled disapproval, I hung back, feeling awkward.322

Although gaunt, the erected seated old lady possessed a singular elegance: Her neatly combed hair was done up in a chignon, and over her traditional silk jacket with its crisp white collar was draped a soft wool sweater. It was, indeed, an extremely unreal elegance. Compared with what I had seen at first, her head- shaking had abated considerably, now looking more like she was swaying in a gentle breeze. I thought perhaps she might stop after a while, but no matter how long I waited she didn’t stop.323

The appearance of the head-shaking old lady evokes a feeling of curiosity in the protagonist and as the story progresses, the reason behind her odd behaviour is revealed. Even though the narrator is married to a refugee from the North, she does not give the reader any real information about his past and the events leading up to his decision to flee to the South. The sensitive and in many ways com-

321 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 136. 322 Ibid., 137. 323 Ibid., 138.

123 plicated issue concerning national division, the tragedy of families being separated by a gruesome war is not discussed or problematised. The reader does not have any access to the minds of the other characters, such as the husband or the daughter. The main character does not give the reader any descriptions of their personalities or nature, so the aversion and jealousy she feels towards her husband’s first wife and his close relationship to his daughter, but also the estrangement and dissatisfaction she feels in her life are not entirely comprehensible. To the reader, this sudden urge to get away seems to be an act of defiance, and when the main character tells her husband that she wants to go on a trip, by herself, he is taken by surprise and wonders why she is being hysterical. Up to now, the reader has not been given any clues about the dra- matic turn of events that will occur. On her winter outing, the main character accidently encounters this old lady who is obviously suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, and it is through this profound experience that the consequences of the war become real to her. In the final part of the story, the owner of the lodging tells the main character about her husband being shot to death by a North Korean soldier and that the tragic event was caused by her mother-in-law’s mistake. Her husband was the head of the township and when the war broke out he missed the chance to escape. To save her husband’s life, she decided that the best thing would be for him to hide out in her native village near the Kwangdôk Mountain. It was a time of chaos and madness:

[… ] neighbor turned against neighbor, kin against kin, accusing one another of being ‘reactionaries’- the business had so spread that not a day passed without some bloody and ugly incident in one village or another. These were ugly days.324

Simple villagers, hearing only that war had broken out, were killing and being killed by one another as if possessed by the spirit of the legendary Chinese pil- lager Tao Zhi. And, in this village that had never once heard sound of a cannon, suddenly planes had come to strafe and bomb without pause, and for days on end gunfire crackled in the surrounding hills like roasting beans. Then came silence, deep as death.325

To avoid her gullible mother-in-law revealing her son’s hiding place, she tells her that no one is trustworthy and instructs her to always shake her head and say “I do not know”. When Seoul is recovered, her husband returns home thinking that there cannot be so many Reds left in his village. When her

324 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 139-140. 325 Ibid., 140.

124 mother-in-law goes out to the backyard one morning to fetch some pumpkins she stands face to face with some tired and worn-out North Korean soldiers, probably looking for some food and clothing. She screams her heart out, saying “I do not know” over and over again, just like she had practiced so many times. Hearing his mother’s horrifying scream, her husband runs out from his hiding place and in that commotion and without any words being said, one of the soldiers’ rifles is pointed at him. Several shots are fired. After the death of her son, the old lady loses her mind and even though her condition has improved over the years, the head-shaking remains. This traumatised old lady and her tragic family history constitutes the climax of the story but is presented in the latter part of the story. Thus the tension is slowly built up as the story progresses, a common narrative trait in Pak Wansô’s stories. How the event is presented reveals the psychological and ideological stance of the narrator. As often in Pak’s stories, the husbands and sons are absent and the women who are left behind have to pick up the pieces of a shattered family and make the best of the situation. This woman tragically lost her husband during the war but not only is she taking care of her disabled mother-in-law without any complaints, she is also raising her son by herself. Her son is a college student in Seoul and the money she earns from offering rooms and food to tourists goes towards his tuition fees and living costs. Despite these difficult circumstances, she does not show any resentment or anger and tells her story without sentimentality. The protagonist is stunned by the woman’s lack of self-pity:

I closed my mouth in failure as I tried to laugh at the woman’s joke of referring to the endless days of demented head-shaking as a “great undertaking.” Her attitude, after all, was not at all a joking one. Indeed, the woman’s face even shone dimly with the pride and sense of duty of one who was actually assisting wholeheartedly in a great undertaking. A shiver passed down my back as I wondered if perhaps this woman was the one accomplishing the great undertaking.326

The whole trip and meeting these women and hearing their moving story help the protagonist to come to terms with her own life situation. Breaking away from routine and being on her own is frightening, and even though the main character is a grown woman, she acts like a child. She resembles the main character in the short story “Identical apartments” who perceives herself as a virgin who has experienced or seen nothing. But the sense of disorientation and the anxiety she feels at the beginning of the journey slowly disappear and when the story comes to an end she is emotionally ready to reconcile with her husband. She has travelled not only physically but also mentally. This newfound understanding and the transformation she has undergone are subtly in- dicated in the remarks she makes in the conversation that takes place between

326 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 141.

125 herself and the owner of the lodging. Because of the thousand wôn she has paid for the food and the room, the woman is able to travel to Seoul to pay her son a visit:

´With this as my travel money, I shall go to Seoul. Today.´ ´Seoul? On such a cold day!´ Having made this remark about the cold weather, I realized with surprise that I had used the same kind of words my husband had used to me when I told him I was going on this trip. I suddenly wanted to see my husband, to the point of sadness.327

‘So, I guess you’ll be leaving soon.’ ‘Yes, everything’s ready. I asked our neighbor to help with Mother. And now, with the four-thirty bus to the hot springs, I’ll be all set.’ ‘So we’re traveling together!’ ‘Indeed, so we are. You said you’d take the four-thirty to the hot springs…’ ‘No, I mean we’ll travel all the way to Seoul.’ I decided in an instant that I would also return to Seoul that day. And inexpressible peace of mind swept me.328

The owner of the lodging has received a letter from the lady at the boarding house where her son is staying. Instead of coming home during the winter holidays, he remained in Seoul to earn some extra money by tutoring children. Now he has been missing for a couple of days and she is worried. He has witnessed his father being shot but despite the traumatic experience he has done well for himself, has dutifully completed his military service and is now a college student. On the face of it, this episode of the missing son at the end of the story might seem misplaced and off track. The story ends with the protagonist and the owner of the lodging house saying farewell to the head-shaking old lady and the reader remains unaware of what eventually happened to the young man. The lack of closure might be disturbing for the reader, but it could be interpreted as an indirect or embedded way for the narrator to comment on the unsolved question of national division. The narrator does not make any explicit statements of her own about the civil war. Her ideological stance is expressed by telling the story about the head-shaking old lady and the missing grandson. The episode of the missing son and his mother’s reaction and behaviour, show how humans work when one is put on trial or is faced with obstacles too difficult to handle. The woman is worried to death and imagines every possible dreadful scenario about what might have happened to her son. Just as she has decided that taking care of her mother-in-law and raising her son is her aim and mission in life, she finds her own peculiar way to ease her mind:

327 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 142. 328 Ibid., 143.

126 ‘A silly notion, really. I told myself that if a guest came by our inn today, and I used that money to go to Seoul, then I’d find nothing wrong with my son, but if I broke open that tightly wrapped packet of tuition money and used some to cover the travel expenses, then I would find something wrong with my son.’329

The head-shaking lady who lost her son due to the war, and the owner of the boarding house who is looking for her missing son are two characters that mirror each other. Thus, the loss of a male heir is a recurring motif. In the previously discussed story “In the realm of the Buddha”, a mother and daughter are not allowed to openly mourn their loved ones, and constantly live with memories of death and destruction, seeking comfort in different religious beliefs. Eventually they find some peace of mind. People in distress will clutch at straws, and turn to religion or superstition, like the owner of the lodging house in this particular story. Pak Wansô once again demonstrates her understanding of the human psyche and the complexities of national division.

8.3 Close Reading of “The Heaviest Dentures in the World” The short story “Sesangesô cheil mugôun t’ûlli” (The Heaviest Dentures in the World) was first published in August 1972 in Hyôndae munhak. When the story opens, the homodiegetic narrator has found herself in a peculiar situation, stuck on a muddy road on her way to her daughter’s school:

I happened to end up on this muddy road, dressed in long skirt and wearing rubber shoes. I had already given up on the pôsôn [Korean traditional socks] and the shoes, but this muddy road had a stubborn absorption force. That was the problem. It had a firm grip on my feet and had no intention of letting go.330

Fortunately she is offered help by a neighbouring woman who happens to be the mother of Sôrhûi, a girl who goes to the same school as her daughter. Even though they live in the same neighbourhood, they have never spoken to each other before. It is strange that they have their very first encounter on this muddy road since they practically live next door to each other. Every time the

329 Pak, “Winter Outing,” 143. 330 Pak, Wansô, “Sesangesô cheil mugôun t’ûlli” (The Heaviest Dentures in the World) in Pak Wansô tanp’yôn sosôl chônjip 1, Pukkûrôumûl karûch’imnida (Pak Wansô. The Short Story Collection 1. I Teach You Shame) (P’aju: Munhak tongne, 2006), 64.

127 main character goes up to the crocks to fetch soy sauce she can see straight into the woman’s house, into the atelier where her husband is painting pots. In the first part of the story the protagonist becomes acquainted with Sôrhûi’s mother and her character is presented to the reader. In contrast to most of the previously analysed stories, where the main character often perceives other women as threats and describes them as mean and shallow, a deep friendship is established between these two women. Both of them are faced with severe challenges in life and have to make important decisions that will alter the course of their lives. In contrast to the main character, Sôrhûi’s mother is a courageous and proud woman who deals with obstacles in a rational way. She is not ashamed or defeated by the fact that her daughter is disabled. She becomes a person whom the protagonist admires and as the story progresses, she is also a person whom she can confide in emotionally. When they have their second encounter, two months have passed and they have just attended a parent-teacher meeting. The middle school for girls is surrounded by an orchard and the white pear blossoms are in full bloom. For the protagonist who has been brought up in the city, the scenery is impressive and gives a sense of quietness and peace. They are sitting in the shadow of a pear tree and having a nice time when Sôrhûi’s mother starts to recall what happened at the meeting. The head of the school has asked the parents to make a donation so they can build a new front gate, a wall, and make improvements to the schoolyard. The school has been established in haste and is in a poor state even though the management has grand plans to expand. Sôrhûi’s mother is angry with every parent who did not dare to oppose the plans, and swears at the chairman of the board for being shameless and trying to take advantage of them. The frustration that comes from being poor and not being able to meet the demands of the school is projected onto the other parents. The protagonist listens to her friend’s outburst but as a person who is not outspoken with her feelings, she remains silent. Neither of the women is well off and for a short while they allow themselves to be swept away by fantasising about what it would be like if they were wealthy. And Sôrhûi’s mother has only one single wish in life:

After a long while Sôrhûi’s mother grabs my hand with her big, thick hand and says ‘Yôni’s mother, if I had money there is only one thing I would like to do, and that is to take Sôrhûi to the US so she can get surgery…’ I’m moved by her deep sorrow and I feel that we have become closer, not just as neighbours or mothers. And I no longer want to just chitchat but want to open my heart to her. And suddenly a thought I have not dared to think before comes to my mind; what I really want is a divorce, and I am about to say it out loud.331

331 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 71.

128 Sôrhûi’s mother reveals her inner wish to leave the country, and her sincerity brings them closer to each other. And now that the main character has a friend she can confide in, it gives her the courage to think the unthinkable. In the Western culture, the pear tree with its hardy nature and the heart-shaped fruit symbolises hope and long-lasting friendship. Thus it may not be a coincidence that this conversation takes place under a pear tree. In a Korean context, the coolness that emanates from the white colour of the pear blossom is often connected to parting.332 So this scene in the orchard expresses both a sense of beauty and warmth but also sad foreboding. Once the protagonist has begun to think about a divorce, it won’t leave her mind. But she does not know if she can handle the consequences:

By divorcing my husband I can liberate him from “that thing”. And I can be free of his eyes and the way he looks at me, like a normal person would look at a leper, loathing and pitying. I felt relieved by just fantasising about it. But when I thought about being liberated from my duties as a wife and mother of two children I got really scared. Could I be useful for anything else?333

The main character is in desperate need of consolation and would like to discuss her problem with Sôrhûi’s mother. But it would mean that she must reveal her family secret to her friend. How will she react? Similar to the short story “House of Bubbles”, the protagonist feels pressure not just from the outside world, the school representing the authorities, but also in her own home. The fear also comes from the fact that she would not know what to do with her life once she was liberated from her duties as wife and mother. One day in late summer, the main character receives an unexpected visit from Sôrhûi’s mother. She is embarrassed to show off her house in a miserable state. All the flowers in the garden have withered because of the heat and the windows are stained and curtains discoloured. Her home reflects her bleak state of mind. Sôrhûi’s mother seems to be somewhat distracted and her mind somewhere else. Also, her hands are busy crocheting a collar she will sell to provide for her family. Her husband has left for the US to study art and she is solely responsible for taking care of her daughter and mother-in-law. Similar to the short story “House of Bubbles” the family head is absent and the wife takes responsibility not only for her children but also for her mother-in-law, and the relationship between these women is strained. It is chilsôk, July 7th in the lunar calendar, and her mother-in-law has taken money from her savings for a shaman in order to perform a rite. The family barely gets by with the money she earns from her crochet so she ought to be upset. But even though

332 Han’guk munhwa sangjin sajôn p’yônch’an wiwônhoe (Dictionary of Korean Myths and Symbols) (Seoul: TusanTonga 1995), 283. 333 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 72.

129 she feels mistreated and full of anger, she as the daughter-in-law is not entitled to oppose her mother-in-law. The protagonist feels sorry for Sôrhûi’s mother and asks the reader what would comfort her more than hearing about someone who is in a worse state than herself? Someone who is more miserable? She finally finds an opportunity to tell her friend and the reader about her own story. Similar to the short story “In the Realm of the Buddha”, the tension is slowly built up. The main conflict and the secret behind her wanting to divorce her husband are not revealed until halfway through the story. The protagonist is a mother of two children, Yôni and Minsik, and her husband works as a civil servant. Her brother left home during the war as a volunteer soldier in the North Korean army so she had to take care of her mother. She is ashamed and uncomfortable because they still live in her mother’s house without a home of their own. Her mother does not show any gratitude at being taken care of, and her husband is thick-skinned and tells her to wait for the day when he will be promoted. At the beginning his future looks bright when an old friend and a teacher from his university are appointed director and senior chief at the government office where he works, but promotion never comes:

Sometimes my husband was excessively bright and suddenly he could turn de- pressive beyond repair. He seemed to have totally lost control over his emotions. And I was tormented watching him this way. Maybe I sensed early on that something was going wrong. Women have a sixth sense, an ability to an- ticipate bad luck. In the beginning I thought the vague and dark foreboding was because that thing [promotion] was not going as we expected. But one day I noticed that I was being followed and from that moment on my misgivings were slowly shown to be justified.334

She is later taken in by the secret police for interrogation:

Even though the room was dark without enough light he was wearing sun- glasses. Sitting in front of the man from the security police and being questioned I felt naked and was shivering with embarrassment. He was harsh and self-confident and somehow he seemed to know more about me than I knew about myself. He even knew what I had forgotten, the name of the village where my mother’s family lives and where we lived as refugees during the war. And the names of my relatives as far back as the 10th cousin.335

In “In the Realm of the Buddha”, the political oppression is subtly implied when the main character is not allowed to mourn her dead father and brother for fear of being labelled a communist. But in this story, the persecution becomes more apparent when the protagonist and her family, her relatives and

334 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 77. 335 Ibid., 78-79.

130 everyone who ever had any contact with her brother are interrogated by the secret police. Her family background even becomes a burden to her husband, preventing him from getting promoted. In an authoritarian state, no one can be safe and being associated with “the wrong people” can have a devastating impact on one’s life. In Pak Wansô’s stories both men and women are equally victimised under a repressive regime. For example, in the short story “Chip poginûn kûrôk’e kkûnnatta” (Thus Ended my Days of Watching over the House) it is not the wife who is being abused but the other way round. Pak depicts what happens to a middle-class housewife when her husband, a university professor, is taken away for interrogation by the secret police. While he is away, she starts to reflect on her married life and her long-repressed feeling of being neglected and patronised starts to surface. Returning to “The Heaviest Dentures in the World”, while the main character is being interrogated by the authorities, she is informed that her brother who joined the North Korean army during the war has been given secret train- ing in the North and will be dispatched to the South as an agent. And she is instructed to turn him in as soon as he appears. From now on every day becomes a living nightmare. Each time someone knocks on the door she is terri- fied that it might be her brother. And the constant fear makes her wish that the authorities would arrest and kill him, her own flesh and blood. The extreme and immense circumstances dehumanise people. Her husband’s verbal abuse becomes worse:

Slowly my husband became rough and he drank more often. He said that he had wrecked his life because he married the wrong person. With a brother-in-law who is a spy, how can he ever hope for a promotion? He screamed in a loud voice that not only does he tremble with fear of losing his job, he is afraid that one day he might find his brother-in-law, the spy at home, pointing a gun at him. So how can he possibly cope without drinking?336

When Sôrhûi’s mother has listened to her story, she proposes that they should emigrate. But like a true patriot the main character gives a long speech about the wrongness of escaping one’s country. Emigration and studying abroad can only be justified if one returns home and serves one’s country. But this is not what she really feels inside. She would give anything to be able to free herself from the oppression imposed on her. The opening scene in the muddy road is telling. Both women are faced with obstacles, but while Sôrhûi’s mother tries to find solutions to her problems the protagonist remains passive and unable to change her life situation. She remains stuck in the mud, in the dirt.

336 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 80.

131 One day in the autumn Sôrhûi’s mother tells her that her husband has found a job at an insurance company, and during the winter she is busy preparing for the move to the US. By the time pear blossoms are again in bloom it is time for them to part. The protagonist is wondering what to give her friend as a farewell gift. In her younger days, before she got married, she was a sensitive woman who was able to enjoy and embrace beauty in life. She used to visit art exhibitions and saved all the brochures, and in her collection, she finds one from an exhibition for aspiring young artists she attended some ten years ago. And there is a picture of Sôrhûi’s father and a presentation of his works, those pots. She gives the brochure to Sôrhûi’s mother, who is overjoyed. The first time the protagonist sees paintings in Sôrhûi’s father’s atelier, she describes them as serene and calm, something unaffected. She has a hard time imagining him painting these pots in the US and wonders why he has not chosen to go to Paris instead. Sôrhûi’s mother asks the main character to accompany the family to the airport. The scenery on the way to Kimp’o is beautiful with the fresh verdure:

‘Oh, it is so beautiful! Will I ever see this scenery again?’ I told her calmly to stop talking nonsense. And I gave her words of encouragement that they must return after Sôrhûi had her surgery and after her father has taken up his art studies again and achieved great success. She soon stopped crying…337

When the protagonist is left by herself she starts to feel pain in her dentures. Despite the fact that she is only 38 years old, all the molars on the lower jaw have been removed and replaced with dentures. Ever since she got these expensive dentures three years earlier she has been suffering from pains, and the doctor does not seem to know the cause. And every time she is troubled by something her jawbone starts to ache, and today it is worse than usual:

The dentures were pressing against the jawbone so much that it felt like my jaw would fall down. I tried to hold it up with my hand, massage it and even let it hang down so my mouth would be open wide like an animal while saliva was dribbled out. The pain felt like the jaw was crumbling and it did not go away. The pain from the jawbone spread like radiation all over my body.338

In Pak Wansô’s stories, physical disorder is explained as a reaction to oppression from the outside world and from their homes, and to women’s inability to change their hopeless situation. The agony that comes from having to endure in silence makes these women develop different forms of illness, such as hallucination, dizziness, addiction and phantom pains, which is the case in this

337 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 84. 338 Ibid., 85.

132 story. The reader has full access to the main character’s inner thoughts, her struggling emotions. When her pain from the dentures is first mentioned, she states that it often occurs when she is depressed or when she is not feeling well. She does not seem to be aware of the real cause of her pain. In the final part of the story, when Sôrhûi’s mother has left for the US, her pain has worsened. As soon as she arrives home, she takes out her dentures and at first, she experiences a great relief and her pain seems to have disappeared. In that moment, she is so happy that she would not even envy Sôrhûi’s mother. She suddenly notices that someone is knocking on the front door and after a while she hears her mother talking to someone in a low voice. She is strongly convinced that it is her brother:

Poor mother! Maybe that man is trying to persuade her to defect to North Korea or maybe he is threatening her. Or is he not trying to kidnap her? I cannot let that happen. I quickly get on my feet. Whether I live or die with that man, this thing has to come to an end. To me ‘that man’ is not a brother to me. He is just ‘that man’.339

It is not her brother but just a salesman. This incident becomes a wake-up call for her. From that moment on, her pain returns and she can no longer blame it on the dentures. She is devastated. She realises that she has been deceiving herself. In the final lines of the story, the main character is engaged in self-examination. Even though the protagonist has not been able to alter her life, she has undergone substantial growth as the story has progressed. From having been an irresolute and doubting woman she is able to consciously analyse her behaviour as an outsider. She is a rational and irrational person, an observer and the observed at the same time, which makes her a complex character and someone the reader can easily sympathise with:

I finally realized how much I have skilfully deceived myself until now. My pain did not come from the dentures. I was envious of Sôrhûi’s mother. I was envious of her for liberating herself from all forms of restriction this country and its traditions impose. The pain came from the envy and jealousy I felt towards her.340

339 Pak, “The heaviest dentures,” 87. 340 Ibid., 87-88.

133 The dentures and the toothache signify the hardships the protagonist has to face in life, her struggle with conscience, and the pain that comes from realising her shortcomings.341 The dentures, with their artificial and unnatural at- tributes, also embody the unhealthiness in the society as a whole. The story is set during the early 1970s when people lived under the rule of a repressive dictatorship with a strong anti-communist law. The anti-communist National Security law was enacted in 1948 to prevent threats from communist North Korea. The threat of subversion from the North was used to uphold the law and evidently it was also used to silence and control political opposition. In the late 1960s and 1970s several incidents involving North Korean agents occurred, such as the Blue House raid (also known as the January 21 Incident) in 1968 where North Korean agents tried to assassinate South Korean president Park Chunghee. Later the same year, 120 North Korean agents were found landing on the eastern coast of South Korea. Under these circumstances having a distant relative under suspicion of being a left-wing sympathiser would have been enough to be condemned as a criminal and a security threat. In Pak Wansô’s story, it is the protagonist’s own brother who is accused of being a North Korean agent, which makes the situation even more serious. The episode with Sôrhûi’s family moving to the US also reflects a general trend during the 1970s and the 1980s when a large number of Koreans moved to the big country in the West in search of the American dream. It is a recurring theme in several stories by Pak Wansô. The US is mostly described as a place rich in material things but where the celebration of individualism has gone too far and people have lost their sense of true values. Sôrhûi’s father is obviously a talented artist but ends up in a foreign country as a salesman, and most Ko- reans who go abroad eventually find themselves in situations they did not an- ticipate, facing barriers that are difficult to overcome. The dream of economic prosperity and success turns into disappointment and despair. In the short story “Ibyôrûi Kimp’o konghang” (Farewell at Kimp’o) from 1974, Pak Wansô gives a moving account of an old woman who is about to leave her home country and move to the US to live with her daughter. Two sons have already gone abroad to make a better living for themselves and in couple of days she is about to do the same. In the final lines of the story, the illiterate old lady, who has no experience of the world outside her own neighbourhood, sits on the plane about to depart, and is stricken with a deep sense of sorrow:

341 In Lee Bômsôn’s short story Obalt’an (The aimless bullet) from 1959, the protagonist also suffers from toothache. He and his brother live under severe poverty in post-war Korea. Unlike his younger brother who is a jobless thug and ends up in prison for burglary, the main character refuses to compromise with his conscience for any cause. He stands up for his convictions and endures the toothache that torments him day and night. In Han’guk munhwa sangjin sajôn (Dic- tionary of Korean Myth and Symbols) (Seoul: TusanTonga, 1995), 574.

134 The old woman now realized how much she loved this land even down to its shabbiest parts, this land against which her sons had gnashed their teeth in loathing, and from which they had so desperately struggled to escape. As if peering at her own corpse, she imagined again the awful scene in which the giant tree was uprooted and toppled to the ground in a paralyzing terror, its thousands of roots exposed, dry, and withering. She wept in heart-rending grief.342

Pak Wansô is critical of her own country for depriving its people of their sen- sitivity, not allowing them to fulfil their dreams and ambitions. She poses the question of why people feel the need to make desperate decisions to leave the country at any cost for unfamiliar foreign countries and an unknown future. The social criticism is subtly delivered. Pak Wansô skilfully adopts what Roland Barthes calls l’effet de réel, (the effect of reality)343 using descriptions of everyday life, occurrences, and trivial details that on the surface seem insignificant but add a sense of realness and authenticity to her stories - women engaged in household chores such as preparing lunch boxes to their children, sending husbands off to work, attending parent-teacher meetings. Pak also manages to integrate current social and political concerns into the daily lives of ordinary Koreans, enhancing the feeling of veracity. What does it mean to be disabled in Korean society? Sôrhûi’s mother makes a difficult decision to leave her home country and move to the US so her disabled daughter can have surgery. When it comes to raising a disabled child, it is not only a matter of dealing with financial difficulties but also the social stigma of disability. Influenced by Buddhist thoughts on positive and negative karma, people often believe that bad actions in their former lives can have negative effects on their offspring. So physical disability or mental illness is a disgrace brought upon the family and must therefore be kept a secret; thus disabled people are rarely seen in public. In this story, Pak Wansô also addresses the question concerning divorce. The narrator cannot bear the reproach and harassment from her husband, so she even considers divorcing him. In a society with strong patriarchal Confu- cian values, divorce was almost non-existent until the 1970s. Due to urbanisation, with a population shift from rural to urban areas and the increase of nuclear families, living apart from one’s relatives made it somewhat easier to leave an unhappy marriage. But despite the fact that the number of divorces grew substantially for the first time in the 1970s, it was still unthinkable for most women. Being socially marginalised, without any economic means to support oneself, divorce was not a realistic option available for women. Thus the female characters in Pak’s stories remain in dysfunctional marriages.

342 Pak Wansô, “Farewell at Kimpo”, in My very Last Possession and Other stories by Pak Wansô, trans. John M. Frankl, ed. Chun Kyung-Ja (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharp, 1999), 79. 343 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

135 As previously mentioned, the civil war is a recurring theme in Pak Wansô’s works. Comparing her debut novel The Naked Tree published in 1970 with her later works such as Mother’s Stake from 1980 or Was the Mountain Really There? from 1995, one can notice a change in the way the author choses to deal with the war. In her debut novel the young protagonist loses her two brothers due to the war. This alters her life, forcing her to become a family provider by working at an American military base. When her mother, who is devastated by the death of her sons, slowly loses her mind, the protagonist has no one to rely on emotionally. Alone and disheartened, she meets a poor married equally disillusioned painter who draws portraits of American soldiers, and they fall in love with each other. It is a coming-of-age novel set during the war but the war itself is never the main focus and is not explicitly addressed. There are no descriptions of battle scenes or corpses and the war is never really close by. In contrast, these are the opening sentences from the novel Was the Mountain Really There?:

In the main room, my sister-in-law was changing the cloth stuffed in the bullet hole in my brother’s leg. The leg was really skinny but the bullet hole was vivid and deep. The one centimetre wide bandage made by cloth kept coming out endlessly from the hole. When she was stuffing the new cloth into the hole it felt like she was doing it forever. My feelings were enhanced by the suffocating pain I felt while watching this scene. And I was having a hard time trying not to think what would have happened if the bullet had gone through the heart instead. The thought was tense and chilly. My brother asked me if I had seen anything outside. I answered that I had not seen anything or anybody. “It is only our family left here. No signs of anyone. Seoul is empty of people but the North Korean army does not seem to be here”.344

Twenty-five years passed between Pak’s debut novel The Naked Tree and her later novel Was the Mountain Really There? and one cannot help but think that the author’s painful memories were some degree unburdened over the years which allowed her to look back upon her war experience more objec- tively and frankly. In her later works, the war and its consequences are directly addressed, being realistically and vividly described, which makes the narrative more touching and compelling. When studying Pak Wansô’s war narrative from the 1970s, the implication of strong censorship is another factor that must be considered.

344 Pak Wansô, Kû sani chôngmal kôgi issôssûlkka (Was the Mountain Really There?) (Seoul:Woongjin, 2005), 11.

136 9. Summary and Conclusion

Pak Wansô’s stories are easily accessible. On the surface, these narratives are about ordinary women who go on with their everyday lives: the housewife next door, the mother one meets at parents’ meetings, people most readers can easily identify with. But these stories hide layers of deeper conflicts, all connected and intertwined, which I wanted to unfold by close readings of each work. I have selected seven short stories to analyse in this dissertation. The texts were written and received within specific historical and political situations. Thus in my analyses, I have placed them in a larger socio-historic and literary context, providing a framework that can help readers to discern deeper layers of meaning in Pak Wansô’s works. The aim of this dissertation has been to investigate how the changing female gender role is portrayed in the stories, and being a middle-class woman writer in the 1970s in Korea affects the way she writes. I have focused on the point of view and the role of the narrator and how the values and attitudes of the author, i.e. the ideology in the stories, are conveyed to the reader. My focus is not restricted to content but also includes formal structures, because every technical choice a writer makes reveals values and judgements whether he/she is aware of it or not. Pak Wansô’s specific narrative style is born of the tension of being a female writer, speaking about the unspeakable in a repressive society. This complex relationship can only be exemplified and explained by looking at both the textual content and also the narrative act; not only what is said but how. According to Lanser, narrative stance can be transmitted on four planes: phraseological, spatial-temporal, psychological and ideological. Not all of these four levels of stance occur in each of these stories nor do they have equal relevance. But they all have an important role in creating a contact between the narrator and the narratee, which is necessary in order for an ideology or a point of view to be conveyed. When discussing the implications of certain narrative devices, I want to return to Lanser’s thoughts on authorial, personal and communal voice and how ideology works on a phraseological plane. Pak uses homodiegetic-autodiegetic narration. It is the narrative mode she applies in most of her stories. When it comes to Pak Wansô’s narrative, I think that the same limitations Lanser is implying when a female writer uses a personal voice can have the opposite effect, turning disadvantage into strength, because it can create an

137 intimacy and empathy between the narrator and the narratee. The protagonists in Pak’s stories are struggling with different kinds of obstacles and by giving them the right to speak for themselves, she allows them to reflect on their own actions and behaviours, of which the reader is made aware. The reader is co- experiencing events with the protagonist and invited into the minds of the female characters. One gains insight into the process of self-revelation and re- discovery. The narrator/protagonist also has the privilege of deciding what should be excluded, putting women centre stage and making them the subjects of their narratives. The message is delivered on the sentence level, where the protagonist makes judgements, and explains and justifies her actions. The ex- plicitness is combined with irony which is expressed by repeating words. In the story “House of Bubbles” this is done to show the main character’s negative views on modernity. The plot in Pak Wansô’s stories is not always dialogue-driven and other characters’ speech is not always marked by quotation marks, dashes or paragraph breaks. Sometimes it is only conveyed by a single line. The narrators are talkative and the ongoing flow of thoughts and constant self-contemplation give the impression of a diary. There is an interesting dis- crepancy between the talkativeness and the inability to speak about their inner emotions, which highlights the breakdown of communication in their real lives. Psychological stance is dependent on the amount of subjective information the reader has about a certain character. Sympathy and understanding can only be evoked when we know how the protagonist feels. In Pak’s stories there is no shift of perspective. Most of the conflicts take place in the mind of the protagonist. There are no open confrontations among the characters. Most of the stories are set indoors, in the domestic sphere, but there are only a few descriptions of interiors. When it comes to spatial stance, the use of a homodiegetic narrator means that everything is visualised through a single character, which creates closeness and intimacy. Conflicts in society are played out in the most private and intimate spaces. Home is a prison where the female characters are faced with their own shortcomings. The actual physical action in these stories only lasts for a short period of time, sometimes a day or a couple of hours. But through flashbacks, the reader is taken backward and forward in time. The main character often reflects on the past and present. The plot is minimal; it is restricted to the mind of the narrator, where the most crucial action takes place, and reflects the basic and primary theme of the stories, which is women’s quest for self-realisation/selfhood. Temporal pacing can reveal a narrator’s ideological and psychological stance concerning sensitive and crucial subjects, such as the civil war or criticism of repressive authority. In the story “In the Realm of the Buddha” the protagonist mourns the deaths of her loved ones but does not want to take sides in the ideological conflict. This is shown by not devoting much textual space or detailed information to the tragic incident, despite the fact that it had such a profound impact on her life. In the story “A Walker with a Camera” the

138 chronological order of the events plays an important role in conveying ideology. The potentially sensitive criticism is not delivered by the protagonist herself, but authority is given to another character who delivers the message in the final part of the story. I have also paid attention to the fact that Pak Wansô works with dichotomies: nature vs. city, tradition vs. modernity, indoors vs. outdoors. When it comes to the role of nature in her stories, it often reflects the emotional state of the main character. The use of colour and the senses has the same function, to reflect a sentiment or emotion. The countryside symbolises nostalgia, a place of longing, a period in time where traditional values and humanity still exist. And the urban city and its landscape which is the ultimate symbol of modernity and economic progress, and hopes of a bright future is problematised as an uncanny space where people are stuck with their shortcomings, alienated and disconnected. Reference to nature and use of symbol- ism are other ways of conveying a stance, a form of embedded ideology. As I have mentioned above, the four levels of stance are inter-related: the ideological stance is facilitated by psychological affinity created between the narrator and the narratee and this in turn is dependent on phraseology and spatial-tem- porality. Female protagonists in Pak Wansô’s stories are complex characters. They are vulnerable and troubled by conflicting emotions. They suffer from mental illness and disturbing physical reactions as a response to oppression and trauma. They sometimes behave in irrational, inconsistent ways, and find themselves in hopeless situations they cannot control or alter. But even though the stories end the same way, with the women remaining in unhappy marriages, something within them always changes over the course of the narrative. They experience a kind of revelation or understanding about themselves. Pak Wansô once said in an interview that she was not particular interested in discussing whether she was a feminist writer or not. The only thing that really mattered was to create female characters who were just like normal human beings, independent, and with the ability to have their own thoughts. In this context, I would like to return to Gilbert and Gubar, who propose that one of the main obstacles women writers have to overcome is to free themselves of the ingrained, distorted image of women as either angels or monsters which male writers have invented and imposed on them. In order to become a writer, they must create their own tradition and voice by finding autonomy from the aesthetic ideas created by men. On the surface, the majority of the women in Pak Wansô’s stories seem to be perfect examples of how women should behave according to the prevailing patriarchal norms. They play the role of the perfect wife, mother and daughter-in-law, and mimic socially acceptable behaviours. But they are never indifferent to what they experience, and are constantly questioning, doubting and resisting. One could say that there exists a Mad Berta within each of these female characters. Thus, it is not a bold statement to say that these depictions of women were rarely seen in the Korean literature of the 1970s.

139 The seven stories are all set during a time when the country and the society was going through a rapid modernisation process, aggressively promoted by an authoritarian government. Western ideas of capitalism and individualism were implemented in every part of the society and these changes happened over a short period of time. Koreans experienced modernity in a compressed form, leading to confusion and ambiguity. A strong demarcation between the public and private spheres, and the implementation of the breadwinner model resulted in traditional gender roles being reinforced and women being re-do- mesticated. In Park Chunghee’s national modernisation project, the prevailing dominant gender politics advocated the nuclear family and the traditional patriarchal view of gender roles, where men were responsible for supporting their families while women would act as dedicated, loyal housewives and mothers. In re-establishing the nation, housewives were mobilised and were an important factor in the state-led development process of the country. Through mass culture/culture politics, women were educated to behave as modern wives and mothers, adapting a Western lifestyle, and through wise conduct and judgement concerning household expenses and children’s education they supported their husband in the best possible ways. The intervention of the state in people’s everyday life increased. Pak Wansô shows how social and cultural transformations of the society affect women and their self-image by giving the reader access to their very private and intimate space. The uncertainty and anxiety the female characters experience when facing modernity, while at the same time being burdened by the reaffirmation of patriarchal norms, are accurately described in her stories. Several stories in this dissertation deal with women who seem to be leading privileged lives in many ways, but they remain locked in their homes; economic wealth and material success become meaningless in their quest for self- realisation. They are trapped in hopeless situations that they cannot escape but refuse to easily accept. In these narratives, men are also victims of predetermined gender roles which they must submit to and internalise, but they usually fail. They are portrayed as weak and incapable, sometimes even as physically impotent. The Korean War, the rapid modernisation and industrialisation, and socio- economical changes had a major impact on women in their daily existence. The problems faced by these women were not isolated but interconnected. They were further complicated by women’s subordinated position, which made them more vulnerable and exposed. Threats from the outside world led to dissolution of the family structure, i.e. the nuclear family, but the lack of a male patriarch made room for an alternative narrative discourse where women were the subject and traditional gender roles were being questioned and contested. It was only when these profound changes occurred, that women realised what they had lost, and that they had been deprived of something within themselves. In various ways, Pak challenges the patriarchal hegemonic tradi-

140 tion by telling stories about women and making their voices heard and important. Women in her stories are not capable of expressing their emotions to anyone because they are used to always putting other people’s needs first. The anger and frustration build up and lead to physical and mental illness, because this is the only outlet for discontentment. Gender not only affects the reading and interpretation of a text but also the textual poetics themselves. One assumption in “postclassical narratology” is that social position matters, which amounts to a pragmatic approach to the theory of narrative, i.e. contextualis- ing. I have shown that gender has a decisive role in how a text is received and makes a difference to the narratives, but gender is also socially constructed and open to variation depending on culture and historical conditions. For a literary work to be understood and approved by the readers, factors such as culturally shared knowledge, rules, conventions and expectations are important. During the 1970s, the society was struggling with underlying confrontations, modernity vs. tradition, rural vs. urban. Intellectuals lived under a repressive dictatorial rule and the literary scene became a place where the political and social battles were played out. For Pak Wansô, as a female writer and an ordinary middle-class housewife, it was a difficult task to address sensitive issues about women’s vulnerability in a patriarchal society and to bring women’s everyday life experience to the fore in a predominantly male literary scene. Writers were also under pressure from strong censorship that prevented them from openly engaging in social and political criticism. Pak had to a certain extent to adapt to the conventions and objectives of the literary establishment but also to the social norms and values. Consequently, her works have a moralistic and didactic tone. She managed to underscore the feminist slogan “the personal is political” by demonstrating in delicate and subtle ways women’s experience of modernity and how changes in the larger public world were directly reflected in the interpersonal relationships within the family, in a very private, domestic setting. Pak had to find ways to legitimise her right as a woman, a group that had been marginalised and was absent in the public debate, to be heard and make her depiction of women’s experiences and interests important. And in doing that and by influencing public opinion and bringing attention to the social problems of her day, she also gave a voice to women who were silenced and excluded from public discourse. But despite the difficulties, Pak Wansô gained recognition among critics and a large and devoted, mostly female group of readers. Her success was not achieved just by adapting and seeking acceptance but also by challenging and subverting existing literary and aesthetical conventions dictated by men and by finding a unique voice of her own.

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154 Sammanfattning

Kvinnor utan röst - kommer till tals. En feministisk narratologisk studie av Pak Wansôs noveller från 1970-talet

Pak Wansô (1931-2011) är en av Sydkoreas främsta samtida kvinnliga förfat- tare. Hon har inte bara beskrivit sina egna smärtsamma upplevelser av Kore- akriget, men också på ett vederhäftigt sätt skildrat ett land utsatt för genom- gripande sociala, ekonomiska och kulturella förändringar, och hur dessa på- verkade medelklasskvinnornas liv. När Pak debuterade på 1970-talet var hon en av ytterst få kvinnliga författare på den mansdominerade litterära scenen. Som kvinna, och tillhörande en grupp som har varit marginaliserad och ute- sluten från den offentliga debatten, fick Pak hitta olika sätt att berättiga att få sin röst hörd och att göra kvinnors erfarenheter betydelsefulla. Syftet med följande studie är att göra en feministisk narratologisk analys av sju av Paks noveller, utgivna på 1970-talet. Feministisk narratologi är en hybridmetod som lanserades på 1980-talet av Susan Sniader Lanser där man kombinerar traditionell narratologi med feministisk litteraturteori och man studerar förhållandet mellan narrativ form och genus. För att en författare eller text ska kunna vinna acceptans, måste den föra en dialog med den tilltänkta läsargruppen, sociala normer, estetiska konventioner och maktpositioner inom den kulturella sfären. Berättarrösten i en text föds ur denna kontext och härbärgerar både ett visst budskap samtidigt som berättar- tekniken i sig är ett uttryck för ideologi. Föreliggande avhandling visar att ett vanligt förekommande berättargrepp i Pak Wansôs noveller är en homodiegetisk berättare och intern fokalisering där den kvinnliga protagonisten ges rätten att berätta sin egen historia samt reflektera över och analysera sina erfarenheter. Med avseende på kvinnors rol- ler som författare och berättare är frågan om frånvaro också av betydelse. Tro- värdighet/auktoritet kan ges till ett visst synsätt genom upprepning och beto- nande av en enskild persons hållning. Att låta kvinnliga författare/berättarrös- ter komma till tals kan anses vara subversivt, då auktoritet traditionellt inte tillskrivits kvinnor. Genom att studera berättarrösten och belysa olika narra- tiva grepp som Pak använder sig av, visar studien att ideologi även förmedlas genom berättarteknik.

155 Eunah Kim Communicating Female Voicelessness

Communicating Female Voicelessness A Feminist-Narratological Study of Pak Wansô's Short Stories from the 1970s

Eunah Kim

ISBN 978-91-7911-322-3

Department of Asian, Middle Eastern and Turkish Studies

Doctoral Thesis in Koreanology at Stockholm University, Sweden 2020