Representations of Femininity in Contemporary South Korean Women's Literature

REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN CONTEMP...

Author: University of Sheffield Joanna Elfving-Hwang

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REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE

REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH KOREAN WOMEN'S LITERATURE

by

JOANNA ELFVING-HWANG Goethe Universitiit Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University)

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Contents

Acknowledgements Language Note Introduction: Fictions about Women Critical Intersections The Scope of this Book 1.

2.

vii ix 1 4 8 13

Iconic Femininities The Philosophical Origins of Conceptualizing Femininity in Korea Virtuous Femininity Self and Other in Korea Enduring Myths about the Feminine

16 17 19 21

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity Early Modern Women Writers The Discourse of Femininity in Post-war Literature Nation as a Community of Men Women Writers of the 1990s On Hi1igyong Chon Kyongnin HaSongnan Narrating the Feminine Subject Critical Reception of the 1990s Women's Fiction

33 35 42 43 47 49 51 52 53 54

3. Domestic Femininity Romanticized Housewives The Domestic within the Contemporary Symbolic The Inauthenticity of Domestic Femininity Rewriting the Domestic Plot Femininity as a Function of the Domestic Domesticity as Confinement Rethinking Contemporary Domestic Femininity

65 66 69 73 77

80 85 91

Representations of Femininity

vi

4. The Maternal Feminine and Female Genealogies Mother-daughter Relationships Un-motherly Mothers Collective 'Motherlessness' Subverting the Maternal Myth Beyond the Sacrificial Maternal Feminine

98 103 108 115 120 126

5. Female Sexuality

134 142 147 149 153 158

Passive Commodities Passive Bodies Objects of Desire Active Sexualities Reimaging Female Sexualities?

6. Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic Mirror Realities The Feminine Excess The Poetics of Death The Open-ended Feminine

165 169 177 183 191

Beyond Representations Final Thoughts

195 200

Bibliography Index

204 217

Acknowledgements

I have been supported and encouraged by a great number of people throughout the long process of research and writing that have led to the publication of this book. However, first and foremost I want to thank Yun Hwang, whose unfailing encouragement and support has undoubtedly been the main reason why this book was ever completed. I wish to thank some inspirational academics by whom I have had the good fortune to be guided in the course of researching for this book, and who each have had a profound influence on my thinking. In particular, I wish to express my deepest thanks and admiration to Dr Renate Gunther, who was my supervisor at the University of Sheffield, and to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude in more ways than one. I would also like to thank Professor Griselda Pollock, who was my mentor at the University of Leeds during my year as a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, and whose work and ideas helped me to clarify my thinking on some issues presented in this book. I am also grateful to Professor Luce lrigaray for her comments and advice on the application of her theories in the context of non-Western cultures during a seminar discussion series in May 2004 at Nottingham University. I would like to thank Dr Agnita Tennant for introducing me to Korean literature all those years ago; Dr Tim Herrick and Dr Charlotte Brownhill for their much valued critical engagement with earlier versions of the arguments presented in this book; Dr Kuniko lshiguro, Dr Anna Lindkvist and Pat Charles for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript; and Professor Ruth Holliday for her friendship, support and professional collaboration during my fellowship at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds. Some of the original research from which this book grew out of was supported by a grant from the Daesan Foundation in 2002, which is acknowledged here. I am also enormously grateful to the Korea Foundation for providing me with a postdoctoral fellowship

viii


for the academic year 2007-2008 to work on this manuscript at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds.

LANGUAGE NOTE

The McCune-Reischauer romanization for Korean terms and names is used throughout, with the exception of spellings which have become commonly known and used in academic or journalistic writing about Korea in English (e.g. Seoul, Kim Young Sam). In addition, where the authors of works quoted from or referred to have used a preferred romanization style, this style has been adhered to and the alternative romanization according to McCune-Reischauer system has been given in parentheses in the bibliography. Korean names are usually given in the order they are used in Korea- family name first - unless the authors themselves have provided a preferred form (e.g. 'So-hee Lee' instead of 'Yi S6hui'). Korean nouns are often combined into long words in the original hangul. However, in their romanized form words have been divided in shortest possible individual words which still make sense on their own ('munhangnon' as opposed to 'munhak ron'). For the sake of additional clarity, grammatical constructs, apart from topic markers, have been separated from the main word, but not hyphenated ('Nae ane iii', as opposed to 'nae ane-ui'; but 'saenun' as opposed to 'sae nun'). All translations of selected short stories are my own.

Introduction: Fictions about Women

early 1990s witnessed the emergence of a remarkable group Tofhe new women writers whose works soon became immensely popular in South Korea (hereafter Korea). It was not so much their gender that attracted attention to their literary production; after all, established women writers such as Pak Kyongni, Pak Wanso and 0 Chonghui had already forged themselves an unassailable position within the Korean literary canon. What was new, however, was the subject topic that this new group of writers focused on. While the existing women writers, who had become successful in the 1970s and 1980s, often wrote to highlight political or social injustices, the 'new generation' writers (sinsedae chakka)l stirred up unease among the predominantly male critical establishment because of their distinct focus on issues that were perceived specific to women's experience. This is by no means to say that the earlier writers had not written about women, but that even when they did so, they often sought to distance themselves from the mainstream political feminist movements. Contrary to this, the so-called 'new generation' writers, such as Shin Kyongsuk, Un Huigyong, Kim Insuk, Han Kang and Chon Kyongnin (to name but a few), openly turned their attention to describing women's lives in contemporary society with no particular regard to what movement they came to be associated with as a result. Their descriptions of domestic discontent and their unapologetic move towards questioning the validity of traditional patriarchal values in contemporary society struck a chord with an enthusiastic readership. Many wrote about the contradictions of living in a society that expects highly educated (and often financially independent) women to emulate some aspects of traditional ideals

2


of femininity that seemed increasingly outdated. However, their literary works were not simply descriptions of women's actual lived realities aimed at presenting a consciousness-raising narrative about what it 'means' to be a woman in a male-centred society. On the contrary, their narratives emerged as a set of counter-discourses to the essentially fictional male-centred ideas about women and femininity which were seen to affect women's perceptions about themselves. However, these counter-discourses should not by any means be seen as representations of some previously unknown 'truth' about the feminine that the authors had now somehow discovered. After all, since we simply cannot know what such 'essential femininity' might entail in the first place, or even what a woman 'is', the authors could hardly claim to possess such authoritative and authentic vision of the 'feminine condition' either. Having said that, their literary representations of femininity are still significant because Korean authors do still occupy a somewhat privileged status as producers of new cultural meanings. For that reason their literary works are of particular interest to a cultural critic or anyone interested in representations, for that matter. In fact, Korean women writers in the 1990s are a particularly fascinating group in this respect because they were a highly educated group of people who turned out to be very perceptive and witty observers of the society they lived in. They were highly informed about current social trends and societal developments, and attempted to address issues connected to real and lived experiences, often in a highly articulated manner. Their representations of femininity thus have grounding in the lived realities of their contemporaries, even when the writers' aim has not necessarily been to produce 'realistic' portrayals of women's lives as such. Korean women writers of the 1990s, as producers of new cultural meanings, thus engaged with existing gender discourses in an attempt to conceptualize or reconceptualize femininity. It is also on this symbolic contestation of existing representations that this book focuses. It is perhaps useful at this point to explain my usage of the term 'feminine'. The term 'feminine' is often used to describe some physical characteristic of a biological woman, or perhaps in some cases as a description of normative ideas about women at a given historical moment in time. I use the term 'feminine' as a framework to discuss and analyse various discourses and components that inform the meaning of that word in Korean society at a given point in history. My main contention here is, therefore, with the argument that femininity is a fixed, given quality that all women possess to a differing degree, and


3

that literary fiction merely describes these qualities ascribed to the feminine. Instead, I will attempt to show that representations of femininity often prescribe (rather than describe) femininities, and that the forms that they take are heavily informed by dominant ideologies in society at that given time. Femininity is thus always a discursive construct and the spaces of femininity are, as Griselda Pollock asserts, 'those from which femininity is lived as a positionality in discourse and social practice'. 2 'Femininity' should, therefore, not be understood as some innate and fixed quality that all women possess, but a cultural construct open to multiple contestations and fluctuations. In defining 'femininity' or 'woman' in this context, my position again reflects closely to that of Griselda Pollock, who explains: Indeed woman is just a sign, a fiction, a confection of meanings and fantasies. Femininity is not the natural condition of female persons. It is a historically variable ideological construction of meaning for a sign W*O*M* A*N which is produced by and for another social group which derives its identity and imagined superiority by manufacturing the spectre of this fantastic Other. WOMAN is both an idol and nothing but a word. 3 My focus here is therefore decidedly on analysing the symbolic representations of the feminine, and on the position that femininity as a cultural and theoretical sign occupies within the Korean symbolic order, and as well as how this sign is contested in women's literary texts. Accordingly, my readings will be what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms as 'symptomatic'. 4 In other words, I will not attempt to show what the 'reality' of Korean women is like and how it is represented in literature, but rather I want to highlight how representations of femininity in women's literary narratives became symptomatic of the limitations of existing patriarchal representations of the same. Moreover, I will show how it was difficult to even attempt to 'rewrite' femininity when the existing symbolic order only recognized a very limited number of the qualities or roles attributed to the feminine. It is within this context that analyses of representations become significant in terms of feminist politics as well. While I am not concerned with deciding whether these textual representations apply to a particular 'real' woman or even a group of women within a given social class, representations can function as more than simple imitations of reality because of their potential to alter perceptions of that which is considered 'normative'. Theresa de Lauretis asserts that a particular image or idea about the feminine

4


can become powerful if it is internalized and worked within an individual context so that it actually becomes part of a social group's understanding of normative femininity. 5 While representations of femininity are then essentially fictional constructions, they possess the actual power of influencing those subjects who choose to internalize them. Analyses of symbolic representations can therefore help to understand other phenomena that the existing conceptualization of femininity informs, such as gender discrimination which takes certain 'feminine' attributes as a justification for unequal treatment of women in society. My main concern then is that if the very sign 'woman' itself is revealed to be a phantasmal (or indeed fictional) creation within any given socio-cultural context, deconstructing and creating new representations of the feminine can also potentially open up a discursive space within which to expand possibilities for what the sign 'feminine' or 'woman' could potentially mean in the 'real' world. A change in the existing cultural conceptualization of femininity could mean nothing less than subverting the perceived naturalness of the culture-specific gender ideologies which will otherwise continue to reproduce existing gender structures in Korea, which in essence are defined by the binary positioning of the feminine below the masculine. CRITICAL INTERSECTIONS

The theoretical framework that informs my analyses of the selected short stories are by and large read through the prism of existing feminist critical theories on sexual difference and the representation of women within patriarchal symbolic order. Within this context, Luce Irigaray's theoretical corpus is at times particularly illuminating of how femininity is typically represented in patriarchal societies. Given that the hierarchical representation of the masculine above the feminine is so similar in both Western (in the case of Irigaray, French) and Korean socio-cultural contexts, Irigaray's theorizing on femininity and the representation of the feminine is useful in the way in which it exposes how the symbolic order predisposes individuals to a patriarchal mindset. However, I do not assume that patriarchies in the West and Korea are the same, because the ways they are manifested in their particular cultural contexts are clearly very different, as are the strategies that women negotiate within these varying forms of patriarchy. However, I do hold that patriarchies share similar ways of conceptualizing the feminine in the realm of the symbolic. For example, in terms of this book, the familial context in which Korean women's identity formation is located


s

becomes an important point that must be considered. Moreover, Irigaray never argues that women's experiences under different forms of patriarchy are the same. In fact, at the heart of the philosophy of sexual difference is the respect for difference, and thus her work (or mine) is not about transforming the Eastern subject to resemble a Western model. 6 She thus recognizes that the forms that this oppression takes vary 'depending upon [every woman's) nationality, her job, her social class, [and] her sexual experience' .7 This said, I do recognize that when considering that in the 1990s Korean society was still a highly family-oriented structure where individuals understand 'self' in relation to their family units or kinship groups, using Irigaray's or any other Europeanoriginated theoretical framework might in the first instance seem inappropriate. After all, much of 'Western' feminist critical theory has concentrated on sexual difference from the perspective of the male-female couple. Nevertheless, I will show that a great deal of 'Western'-originated feminist theory, and Irigaray's work in particular, becomes illuminating through the way they help to explain how women's assimilation within patrilineal kinship structures will always focus on conceptualizing feminine identities in relation to the masculine. Even though Irigaray's ideas are rooted in traditions informing much of the Western imaginary, her observations on female sexuality and the silencing of women are in my view applicable when discussing contestations of male-imaged femininity as seen in Korean women's fiction. On the level of analysing the symbolic representations of the feminine, it is interesting to note that Irigaray has also observed how the metaphysics that underlie both Far Eastern philosophies and those of the West are remarkably similar because both represent and function within what she refers to as 'elemental economies'. 8 Although Irigaray never discusses elemental economies in the context of Far Eastern cultures, she has expressed an interest in the perceived similarities with the ways in which Far Eastern and 'Western' philosophers have equated Matter with the feminine, and Idea with the masculine. 9 Moreover, she asserts that both traditions have sought to use the basic elements to find paradigms for 'perfect humanity'. 10 Because of this similarity, her critique of male-centred appropriation of elemental economies becomes all the more applicable in the context of Korean cultural representations of femininity. Within this context, and in the same way that Irigaray uses Greek mythologies as a 'mirror' to analyse and explain how the Western imaginary still functions in the modern day, a re-reading of Korean mythologies in the light of her theories also presents a similarly useful framework for analysing

6


how culturally specific myths and legends continue to inform contemporary Korean imaginary. In particular, Irigaray's observation that patriarchal cultures are monosubjective because they fail to recognize the female subject as being of an equivalent value to the male subject strikes resonance with the way femininity is conceptualized in Korea. Yet there is undoubtedly then a need to proceed with caution when analysing femininity as an ideological construct within the Korean cultural context through the prism of Irigaray's theoretical framework. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her critique of French feminism in what she refers to as 'third world contexts', also points to this when she argues that the critic has to be willing to change and modify her approach if the cultural contexts reveal it as problematic: 'The academic feminist must learn from them [the non-Western womenL to speak to them, to suspect that their access to the political and sexual scene is not merely to be corrected by our superior theory and enlightened compassion.' 11 Yet while I think that some tension clearly exists in trying to use Westernoriginated theory in analyses of non-Western literature, there still remains a possibility of mutual rapport. Spivak recognizes this point as well, and while critical of the way in which Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous speak of 'Chinese women', 'Indonesia' and 'India'; she remains sympathetic to Irigaray's non-deterministic approach to the feminine subject. 12 Deutscher notes, furthermore, that in her later work Spivak has attempted to read Irigaray along similar lines, in an effort to find 'the ways in which she works best' rather than simply dismissing her theories altogether on the basis of their Western origin. 13 My own approach reflects this view, and the way I have appropriated Irigaray's theories (or indeed any other 'Western' critical feminist theory that I have found illuminative in my readings of contemporary Korean women's fiction). Rather than prescribing femininity, these theoretical frameworks simply function in my readings as a kind of a 'structuring structure' for textual analyses. There is, therefore, categorically no suggestion that 'Western' women would have something to teach the 'Eastern' subject. On the contrary, my readings function at times as critical intersections between theory and narrative, and suggest that there still exist some blind spots in our critical thinking about sexual difference, which applying the theory into a different cultural context can expose. For this reason, I consider my position as a foreign reader outside the Korean culture as an advantage, in hope of extracting meanings from what a 'native' eye might deem insignificant. This view is supported by Mikhail Bakhtin's assertion that real understanding, or what he refers to as 'creative understanding', is born out of a


7

dialogue between that which is foreign and that which is familiar. According to Bakhtin: Outsidedness creates the possibility of dialogue, and dialogue helps us understand a culture in a profound way. For any culture contains meanings that it itself does not know, that it itself has not realized; they are there, but as a potential [. and] only dialogue reveals potentials. 14 Therefore, although the view that applying Western theories to non-Western literatures may carry the danger of assuming that Western theories are the norm, to reject them on the basis of their difference would simply serve to reaffirm the supposed 'otherness' of the Eastern subject. In fact, I would say that to attack any theories on the basis of their Western origins in the name of cultural particularity carries in itself a danger of valorizing hierarchical gender structures, in an effort to romanticize a tradition that is not necessarily favourable to women and adds to their oppression within the symbolic imaginary of that country. Drawing on Susan Okin's criticism of multicultural politics, Deutscher argues that to think multiculturally does not mean that the 'conservation of tradition is an intrinsic good' Instead she argues that: 'A culture's right to transform its tradition and history must also be affirmed without this transformation becoming a further excuse for disenfranchisement and inequality.' 15 For example, if femininity continues to be defined in conjunction with, say, nationalistic agendas, any possibility of attaining a meaningful feminine subjectivity will continue to be limited by a culturally defined identity. The flaw with a nationalistic focus in particular is that it tends to work towards sustaining existing patriarchal ideologies that allow very little space for manoeuvre for those women who do not, or will not, fit into nationalistic ideals of femininity. 16 My view is then that the geographical origins of theoretical thought have no real significance in the context of this book, and specifically because my aim is not to compare the Western and Korean philosophical traditions, but to deconstruct discourses that produce certain persisting and unfavourable representations of femininity. Accordingly, this book should not be seen as an attempt to define the parameters of 'Korean femininity', and even less so an attempt to define 'new' ideal femininities fashioned on Western paradigms. Instead, it is a reading of Korean women's literature with a clear aim of highlighting the gendered discourses that informed Korean understanding of the feminine in the 1990s, and that challenging it requires more than just simple

8


acknowledgement of women's existence. And this, in my view, starts with recognition of the fictional nature of what the signs 'woman' and 'femininity' currently stand for in the Korean symbolic order of representation. THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

Finally, to avoid any disappointment for those who hope for an introductory work on Korean women's literature. This book is not intended to be one, and not even as an introduction to the general type of literary production that the authors included in the following analyses produced in the 1990s. I engag,e solely with selected works by Chon Kyongnin, Ha Songnan and Un Huigyong, in order to explore intentionally or unintentionally recurring images and their significance within thematic spaces typically associated with the feminine. Through engaging with a number of works by these three very different authors I will show how they, consciously or not, put forward textual and discursive contestations to existing iconic ideas about femininity. Moreover, the reader should not assume that just because my focus is on what have traditionally been perceived as 'feminine spaces', that the thematics of interiority would encompass the whole corpus of Korean women's literary production of the 1990s (particularly since I have left out a number of works which do not deal with the thematic spaces I wish to discuss in this book), or that similar contestations did not take place in many other novels, poetry, drama or cinematic representations. On the contrary, the 1990s Korean cultural scene was extremely diverse and exciting in terms of thematics, subject topics and the ways in which these were expressed in a variety of cultural media. My choice to concentrate solely on the 1990s reflects the importance of this period in terms of heightened awareness of women's unequal position within society, and an increasing willingness to go against existing social conventions in order to challenge it. The decade was marked by rapid and dramatic changes that profoundly affected the society as a whole. In women's literary narratives this is often reflected in the way women writers responded quite aggressively to the totalizing and male-imaged discourses of femininity in differing, and often highly contextualized, ways. To locate my readings within existing ideas about the feminine in the Korean cultural context, the first chapter will contextualize discourses of femininity through mapping out some important historical and ideological junctures that have had a particularly significant effect on femininity as a cultural construct within the Korean symbolic order. The elemental philosophical principles of


9

yin and yang are particularly significant here for the way in which

they were appropriated in the largely political interpretation of Neo-Confucian philosophy, and how these male-imaged ideas of gender (both male and female) have since been appropriated to subsequent discourses about gender and sexuality. Reading the hierarchical Neo-Confucian interpretation of the horizontally positioned yin-yang binaries through Irigaray's theories of difference as a basis for equal and democratic gender relations, I will demonstrate how this cosmic understanding of sexual difference in the Korean cultural context was reduced to what Irigaray refers to as 'the economy of the Same' in which femininity is conceptualized in relation to normative masculinity. These iconic and enduring discourses of ideal femininity continue to inform gender discourses in contemporary Korea. In Chapter Two I will position the woman writer within the socio-historical continuum that affects the field of cultural production as a whole, and highlight how the 1990s women writers had amassed enough symbolic capital to be recognized as producers of new cultural meanings. In the remaining chapters I will discuss textual contestations of existing and iconic ideas of femininity within four textual spaces, namely: the domestic, the maternal, the female body and the fantastic. The discussions in Chapter Three focus on domestic narratives, which in the 1990s tended to concentrate on husband-wife relationships, rather than on traditional relationships between the wife and her in-laws. This is descriptive of how values that informed domestic femininity continued to draw on traditional discourses, even when the social structures within which they were engendered were rapidly disappearing. The often-claustrophobic thematics of interiority that emerge from these readings highlight recognition of how conceptualizing the feminine within the inside/outside dichotomy ultimately disadvantages women in the wider society, because it maintains the myth of domesticized femininity that is hierarchically positioned below the masculine. Chapter Four discusses the idealization of the mother within Korean cultural discourses, and how the existing representations of motherhood and the idea of mo'gwifn or 'mother-power' work to exclude women from other forms of power in alternative capacities. Moreover, despite the eulogization of motherhood in the Korean cultural context, the literary narratives discussed here manifest a very real awareness of the symbolic absence of motherdaughter relationships which is shown to result in difficulty in imagining a positive feminine identity beyond compulsory motherhood.

10


In Chapter Five, I locate the analyses in the thematic space of the 'body', and show how problematic it is for authors to redefine existing paradigms for socially-constructed female sexuality in contemporary Korean society. It is specifically within this thematic space that the authors seem to struggle the most, especially since feminine sexuality had hitherto been understood in terms of male sexuality and reproduction (a tendency not unique to Korea). These narratives reveal a desire to challenge that which is perceived as normative female sexuality defined in terms of lack and the passive body, albeit there is no clear idea of how to do so. Consequently, the narratives question the logic behind accepting rape as an unfortunate side-effect of the predatory male sex-drive, or portray women who have affairs with married men and mimic what is considered equivalent to men's rapacious sexual behaviour. Tellingly, all the narratives discussed here fall short of actually re-imagining female sexuality that would not have its reference point in male sexuality. In fact, female sexuality removed from the reproductive function seems to present a particular difficulty when imagining alternative feminine identities within the existing patriarchal symbolic order. Finally, in Chapter Six I discuss the extent to which the thematic space of the fantastic allows women writers a possibility of challenging the male-centred logic of the symbolic order through disturbing it in one way or another. The feminine imaginary, which has until now been excluded by the masculine imaginary, is, in these stories, represented by introducing elements of the unheimlich that unsettle the narratives. They disturb and contest the reader's received notions about the feminine through locating the stories outside realistic settings, and suggest that an alternative kind of feminine, which has not yet been articulated, is located beyond this reality and can only be approached outside what the symbolic order deems 'rational'. Subverting femininity is thus presented as a journey in which traditional binaries are being demolished and in which female characters seek to take on new definitions of their feminine identities. This journey itself engages with what one might call the 'metaphysics' of femininity through analysing textual incursions 'in' the feminine through describing elements that lie outside existing symbolic representations of the same. It is also within this paradigm that my feminist reading of cultural representations of femininity are an attempt to identify instances of textual resistance that seek to subvert totalizing discourses about the feminine. And it is within these instances that denote difference and outsidedness that there may yet exist a prospect for representing a feminine that is whole and complete without having to be 'completed' by masculinity.


11

NOTES 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

It should be noted that the term itself can be quite misleading, as sinsaede is normally used to refer to the 'Generation X' in society. Within this group of writers, however, some were already in their thirties when they began publishing. As a result, some of them resented being categorized as sinsaede, as it seemed to suggest that they were simply immature. However, since this term gained wider usage, I will use it in this book to refer to a group of writers who made their literary debuts in the 1990s, and whose subject-topics differed from those of the writers who made their debuts before the 1990s. The term is therefore used for purely pragmatic reasons as all of the writers whose works are discussed in this book- namely, Chon Kyongnin, Ha Songnan and Un Huigyong- made their literary debuts in the latter part of the 1990s, and were generally identified as belonging to the group of sinsaede writers. Referring to them as sinsaede chak.ka is therefore to give a generic title to this otherwise diverse group of writers, so as to help to differentiate them from earlier groups of writers. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2003; first published in 1988 by Routledge), p. 93. Ibid., p. 101 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 149. Theresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Indiana: Indiana UP, 1987), p. 3. Luce lrigaray, ed., Key Writings (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 25. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1985), p. 68. In Irigarayan parlance, 'elemental economies' concern the relation between philosophy and the four basic elements; namely, earth, air, fire and water. She argues that Western philosophers have misappropriated or misunderstood the full extent and significance of the basic elements in their emphasis on the importance of defining humanity in their desire to 'complete' the process of achieving 'perfect humanity'. Contrary to this view, lrigaray argues that the 'flowing' or indefinable aspects of the basic elements should be emphasized instead, because defining an ultimate Human Being inevitably cancels out the possibility of other forms of admissible difference. Irigaray discusses the basic elements in her 'elemental' series: The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999); Marine Lover of

12

9

10

11

12

13

14

15 16

Representations of Femininity Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Elemental Passions, trans. Joanne Collie andJudith Still (London: The Athlone Press, 1992). She has planned to add a fourth book to her series, but such work remains forthcoming as yet. lrigaray discusses the Western idea of equating Matter with the feminine in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 168-79. Discussions with Irigaray, Nottingham University 10-14 May 2004. Becoming a 'superior man' was one of the main practical aims of Neo-Confucian philosophy as advocated by its founder Chu Hsi (1130-1200). He argued that one could become a 'superior man' (which in effect meant restoring one's original, and intrinsically good, human nature) through learning to keep the ch'i (ki in Korean) energy under control by perfecting one's knowledge and practice of li (principle). Herrlee G. Creel asserts that in this respect Chu Hsi's ideas resemble those of Plato, who discusses the concept of 'ideas' or 'forms' in his dialogues (Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-Tung (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, reprinted in 1971), pp. 206-10). Spivak, p. 135. Ibid., p. 149. Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004), p. 179. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff', quoted in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation ofa Prosaics, Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 55. Deutscher, pp. 4-5. In the context of contemporary Korean society, an example of this was the drive to persuade women to give up work when the country was hit by mass unemployment in 1997-98. The idea was that since women were 'naturally' more inclined to stay at home anyway, it was women's duty to ensure that men would not be made redundant as the perceived main breadwinners in families. (See: Seungkyung Kim and John Finch, 'Living with Rhetoric, Living against Rhetoric: Korean Families and the IMF Economic Crisis', Korean Studies 26:1 (2002): 120-39.) There seems to have been an assumption that through ensuring men's employment, the country as a whole would pull out of the crisis much quicker as well.

1

Iconic Femininities

you lived in Korea in the late 1990s, you only had to watch the I flatest episode of a popular television drama series to find that representations of femininity were still by and large informed by the discourses and representations that drew on what were considered as 'traditional' images of Korean women. In their various disguises, there were archetypal images of wise mothers and good wives, who despite suffering numerous undeserved hardships would faithfully carry on to eventually win praise for their ability to endure adversity for the greater good of the family. Theresa Hyun, reflecting on idealized images of women in pre-modern literature, summarizes these as the dutiful daughter, the faithful wife, the devoted mother, and occasionally the warrior woman who eventually returns to traditional roles once her exploits are over. 1 What connects all of these is the way in which femininity is exclusively represented through roles and ideals that are always linked to male genealogies. Moreover, they are by and large understood in terms of passivity and absolute complementarity. These supposedly traditional, or more precisely iconic images of women have also featured regularly in twentieth-century Korean literary and other forms of cultural production. Literature in particular has a long tradition of being considered as a vehicle for political and social critique in Korea, and it is within this context that literary fiction must also be understood as a cultural enterprise for creating (and perhaps occasionally recreating) social discourses. Literary discourses can occasionally be didactic in that many fictional representations are presented as valid 'truths' about humankind and human relations, and often emerge as sites to either present or contest these presumed truths. In Korea, they have been very effective in doing so, and even in contemporary context, iconic ideas of femininity are so embedded in the cultural representations of the feminine that there seems to be very few instances

14


where their very fictionality could be contested. Indeed, even many academics have accepted these essentialized notions to such an extent that they simply concentrate on interpreting how these images portray and represent women's actual lived realities in their various socio-historical contexts. Others contest the necessity of expecting women to continue to conform to such outdated ideals, but again without contesting whether these images are based on anything else but patriarchal projections of the feminine. 2 To me this reflects a tacit understanding that these representations must be based on some 'truth' about women, albeit one that merits contestation. While this is a position that I fundamentally disagree with, it presents us with a real problem when it comes to challenging existing patriarchal representations of the feminine: If, in Korean cultural imaginary, femininity is understood as an essential and innate quality that all women possess, any subversive action against what is considered as negative or indeed oppressive representation of women can only be alleviated but not completely overturned. In other words, even though this 'essential' quality is in fact by and large imaginary, there is an assumption that the existing notions about the nature of the feminine represented in, say, myths and historical narratives are ultimately based on some essential 'truth' about it. For example (as discussed in Chapter Three), domestic femininity in contemporary Korea continues to represent the space to which women are perceived to naturally 'belong', no matter whether or not they succeed as career women or, indeed, academics. Traditional Korean discourses about the nature of the feminine must therefore be understood as mythologizing practices that promote imaginary and essentialized representations of femininity. These consistently seek to present the feminine as the negative and hierarchical opposite of the masculine. This binary positioning is not simply to do with describing gender binaries or sexual difference. Rather, the focus is on determining the symbolic value of each gender in relation to the other. Within this discourse, however, the feminine always signifies 'otherness', and is without fail hierarchically positioned below the masculine. This is not to say that female characters in Korean cultural representations never gain positions of power. As a matter of fact they often do. Thematically, however, the 'warrior women' gain their position of power through assuming male characteristics, and typically succumb to more traditional roles as soon as the present crisis is over. What I want to emphasize throughout this book is then that rather than being a description of an essential or innate quality, femininity is always and continuously produced in phallocentric discourses to function as a (negative) point of reference to the masculine.

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Representations of femininity in any form of cultural production (be it traditional or contemporary) should therefore be understood as cultural and ideological constructs that both describe and prescribe feminities at any given historical time. For this reason, representations of femininity in Korean mythology and Neo-Confucian philosophical thought in particular remain crucial to ground my further discussions on the cultural representations of femininity in contemporary Korea, because of the way they continue to gesture towards iconic ideas that essentially aim to describe femininity only in relation to normative masculinity. It is within this context that I find Luce Irigaray's theoretical work on the sexual difference illuminative, because much of her work has focused on the discursive construction of feminine identities in patriarchal societies, and on the possibility of conceptualizing a different notion of the feminine which would not simply be seen in binary terms and in relation to the masculine. In her first philosophical work, Speculum of the Other Woman (Speculum de !'autre femme, 1974), Irigaray introduced her basic argument, namely that the existing symbolic order is organized around patriarchal values in such a way that the feminine can only be symbolized within it as the 'other', the negative opposite of the masculine, or a complement to the masculine. Echoing Jacques Derrida's attack on binary thinking throughout the history of 'Western metaphysics' (to use Derrida's own term), Irigaray has argued that the complementary positioning of masculinity and femininity in patriarchal cultures does not mean that the two are considered of equivalent value. Instead, femininity and masculinity are conceptualized hierarchically, so that woman is seen as man's distorted mirror image, and masculinity is taken as the norm against which femininity is always measured. In her reading of Irigaray, Jennifer Hansen notes that 'the operation of binary oppositions in culture works insidiously to shape our psyches so that we learn that man is the universal, while woman is contingent, particular, and deficient'. 3 Especially in Marine Lover (Amante marine, 1980), Elemental Passions (Passions elementaires, 1982) and This Sex Which Is Not One (Ce sexe qui n'en es pas un, 1977), Irigaray shows how femininity has often been represented as negativity in Western metaphysics. Referring to Merleau-Ponty's work, Irigaray criticizes the tendency in Western philosophy to divide intersubjectivity between two poles, 'a pole of the subject and a pole of the object'.4 Within this, the feminine is associated with the sensible and the immanent, whereas the masculine is required to transcend the sensible to obtain a sense of divinity and god-like authority. However, Irigaray asserts that what women lack within the

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symbolic order is not simply a positive representation of the feminine, and this is also a point to which I will return later in discussing representations of femininity in Korean cultural context. Irigaray argues that women in the patriarchal symbolic order are not represented at all, because patriarchal cultures seek to repress everything that represents difference. The non-representation of the feminine means that it is never perceived as existing in its own right, and thus cannot be conceptualized without reference to the masculine. In Irigaray's words: [P]atriarchal cultures have reduced the value of the feminine to such a degree that their reality and their description of the world are incorrect. Thus, instead of remaining a different gender, the feminine has become, in our languages, the non-masculine, that is to say an abstract nonexistent reality. 5 The feminine is thus always conceptualized as 'the natural pole of a masculine culture', and as such, patriarchal culture itself is monosubjective because it does not acknowledge the existence of two separate subfects. 6 This observation seems particularly applicable to the Korean context, as a similar- albeit not identical- hierarchical positioning can be observed in the Neo-Confucian philosophical thought that still underpins even contemporary Korean representations of femininity. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS OF CONCEPTUALIZING FEMININITY IN KOREA The philosophical basis for the Korean conceptualization of femininity ostensibly draws on the Neo-Confucian interpretation of the yin/yang binaries. The elemental metaphysics of this reading of the Great Ultimate had an enormous effect on the way patriarchy evolved in Korea, and on how the feminine, even to this day, is positioned within the Korean symbolic order. Although it is not certain whether yin and yang originally referred to gender binaries, such a gendered and dualistic understanding soon emerged. In The Book of Changes (ChuyOk in Korean)? these binary concepts already emerge as highly gendered, as yin and yang are discussed in relation to heaven (yang) and earth (yin): 'The way of ch'ien (heaven) constitutes the male, while the way of k'un (earth) constitutes the female. Ch'ien knows the great beginning, and k'un acts to bring things to completion.' 8 While the original ideology appears to have maintained that gender and sexual differences (which yin and yang symbolized) were to be perceived in complementary and equal

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terms, the Neo-Confucian interpretation of the yin/yang principle put heavy emphasis on a hierarchical way of conceptualizing gendered binaries. This interpretation dictated that while yang needed yin to complement itself, yang was also perceived to be hierarchically superior to yin. 9 This interplay of cosmic forces that the binaries were perceived to represent also became a model for organizing human relations in society; while nature is perceived as being in a constant process of change and fluctuation, the change is never ultimately chaotic because it is always subject to the eternal principles of the cosmic yin/yang energies. 10 In practice, this meant that in the social context of the Chason dynasty (1392-1910), during which Neo-Confucianism was accepted as the official social and political philosophy, it was believed that harmonious coexistence between people would equally be achieved through following a strict and proper decorum appropriate to each gender and class. Similarly to the natural world, balance in society was seen to depend on the dynamic interaction of the two elements in a harmonious manner, one of which was the necessity for the negative (feminine) yin to be kept in check by the positive (masculine) yang energies. 11 Further philosophical justification for these regulating gender discourses was based on the ideas of li and ki (ch'i in Chinese). Li referred to the principles that individuals were expected to follow in their daily lives, whereas ki represented the formless, free-floating life-energy that gave human beings their life force and spirit, but which also had to be kept in check through adhering to li. The li principle that informed gender relations in the context of Chason society was patriarchal ideology. just as harmony in nature was seen to come from the cyclical predictability of seasonal changes (unless of course some cosmic imbalance caused natural disasters), it was believed that unless men and women adhered to their respective roles, the society would lose its 'natural' harmony and descend into chaos. In practice, this meant that both sexes were expected to follow clear gender-based rules of behaviour, albeit these kinds of rules were naturally more rigorously enforced among the upper classes than among lower classes. 12 However, what affected women of all social classes was the increasingly widely held view that it was simply 'commonsensical' to regulate women's social and sexual behaviour more rigorously than those of men. VIRTUOUS FEMININITY

It important to note in this context that gender as a category during the Chason dynasty was generally taken for gran ted in that women

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were considered 'essentially feminine'. However, from the early years of the Chason dynasty women were strongly encouraged to become 'virtuous'. This ideal demanded a considerable amount of self-discipline and self-regulation, and a 'virtuous' woman was essentially a chaste mother able to bear sons, who segregated herself from concerns outside her immediate family. Since these ideals were unattainable for most of the female population, 'virtuous femininity' and all that it implied set the upper class women apart from the behaviour models of women in the lower classes. Conversely, since women in the lower classes could only hope to emulate some aspects of the ideal, the realization of feminine virtues represented an attainment of qualities belonging to the upper classes. Women's aspirations for ideal femininity can then be said to have been not gender- but status-driven, while femininity itself was never truly problematized. In other words, women were perceived as, by definition, feminine. For this reason, 'virtuous femininity' in Chason society should, in my view, be considered inasmuch a measure of some essential or authentic femininity as women's desire to engage with aesthetic surgery in contemporary Korean social context can be said to be an attempt to emulate the same. In fact, for this reason I argue that certain contemporary efforts to continuously essentialize feminine ideals adopted by the Chason dynasty as signs or expressions of some kind of 'authentic' Korean femininity are nothing short of mythologizing practices. The discourse of virtuous femininity was also strongly connected to the idea of interiority. For women of upper classes (or for those aspiring to emulate upper class values), the official rhetoric of virtuous femininity demanded that women should not be interested in anything outside the home, and were expected to be content with performing their assigned domestic or maternal duties. In reality, this meant becoming self-sacrificial wives and mothers, whose sole ambition in life was to ensure the success of their male kinP The need to effectively detain women within the domestic in order to limit their potentially harmful effect on society came to pertain to linguistic conventions as well, and the most commonly cited example of this is the way in which women have been until recently referred to as an saram (literally 'inside people') and men as pakkat saram (literally 'outside people'). 14 But this did not mean that women (particularly of lower classes) would sit indoors all day long. In actual truth, the majority of Korean women have always worked outside the home, with perhaps the exception of the more wealthy upper classes. Women in the lower social classes have always been expected to engage in productive labour, including

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working in the fields or in other manual capabilities, and even upper class women were occasionally forced to engage in productive labour if the family had become impoverished. 15 The focus of a woman who aspired to become 'virtuous' was therefore always on ensuring the success and good reputation of her male next of kin. After all, it was only through his success that she could hope to benefit. However, it is paradoxical that it was women who, as the guardians of culture, had to endure great suffering in order to attain feminine virtues while they were in fact guarding a male culture, and one from which they were effectively excluded in roles other than those promoted by the official discourse of femininity. SELF AND OTHER IN KOREA At this point it is also useful to note that these ideals were created in a society within which people's perceptions of self were, and continue to be deeply other- or communal-oriented, in that an individual's idea of self is constructed in relation to those around them in much more profound ways than in cultures influenced by Judea-Christian perceptions of self and other. Such construction of self in Korea is not necessarily specific to gender. Lee Seung-hwan calls this 'the intersubjective gaze', which refers to a Neo-Confucian principle according to which one's existence and position in society is constructed and verified through an individual's social or kinship connections with others. 16 Self, particularly in relation to the next of kin, is always perceived as co-emerging with other subjects within the group. In other words, subjectivity is understood not as a rupture with the other (as in, 'I' is 'not-you'), but as a process in which self-subjectivity co-emerges with the other, always interrelated but without ever losing a sense of singular self. 17 Consequently, for both men and women 'self' may not necessarily be understood primarily in terms of gender, but of family (or even wider clan) association. In pre-modern Korea in particular, subjectivity (for both men and women) was constructed in relation to a family unit or clan within which members of that unit co-emerge as subjects with a recognition and belief that different members of the unit complete the unit as a whole. In the context of contemporary Korean society, there is still a very similar way of relating to the other, albeit the groups within which these co-affective subjectivity formations now take place may no longer be necessarily be exclusively linked to kinship. This does not mean that the co-affective subjectivity results in the recognition of an equal value of each member that make up the group. Returning to my point of conceptualizing self and other in a

20


more traditional kinship context, sexual difference within it always denotes hierarchical difference. In other words, while femininity and the functions that a woman performs within a group are appreciated, they are also symbolically subordinated to the functions of the masculine. Moreover, since the feminine is always connected to the corporeal, it is also subsumed within the male genealogy with which it is associated. Because gender differences are thus conceptualized hierarchically, and despite the strong emphasis on distinct masculine and feminine roles and qualities, these distinctions simply work towards a model of gendered identities within which the masculine emerges as the norm from which the feminine is a deviation. 18 For example, in the context of discussing Neo-Confucian perceptions of the female body, Taeyon Kim notes that within this understanding of self and subjectivity in terms of family unit, women represented the corporeal body 'through which the male line and ki could be perpetuated', because it was believed that women did not possess a life-giving force that could be passed on. 19 While the feminine was associated with and confined to the realm of the sensible, and the physical body in particular, the masculine was seen as able to transcend the limitations of the physical body through excelling in li and thus obtaining a state of a 'superior man'. Women were valued for their ability to nurture offspring in their wombs, and this reproductive ability was recognized as the most significant feminine quality. It is notable, however, that reproductive agency was, however, understood in terms of passivity. Thus femininity was generally conceptualized in terms of nurturing the bodies of others through motherhood, domesticity and chastity- thematics that my readings in later chapters will show as very much alive in the 1990s Korea. In fact, chastity as an expression of 'natural' femininity arises from conceptualizing female sexuality in terms of absolute passivity. Since men's sexuality was conceptualized as active, infidelity was generally considered as stemming from their 'natural needs'. But it was this predatory male sexual prowess that was perceived as a threat to vulnerable women whose bodies, imagined as receptacles, had to be protected to keep them pure. This thinking can again be traced to Chason society where the emphasis on female chastity was connected to the way in which women were regarded as cornerstones of (male) cultural stability, and for that reason their sociat sexual and intellectual freedom was seen as a potential threat to the existing social organization, and ultimately, the nation's stability. As a result, 'virtuous' women were chaste, whereas women who engaged in multiple sexual relationships faced social ostracism

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(this was also the primary reason why female entertainers, or the kisaeng, belonged to the lowest social group). Female individuality and sexuality in its diversity had to be repressed and kept out of sight. While carnivalesque and subversive elements existed in lower classes in terms of women's sexuality, absolute chastity was expected of upper class women or those who aspired to become 'virtuous'. 20 Sexually active women, on the other hand, were considered either unnatural (and often referred to as 'foxes' or you) or just simply vulgar. ENDURING MYTHS ABOUT THE FEMININE

These traditional ways of conceptualizing femininity proved to be very pervasive, particularly because old myths were since revived to inform modern discourses that sought to define Korean national identity. Looking back to a nation's mythical past is a fairly common way to conceptualize the nature of humankind and the historical origins of a society or nation. 21 In post-war divided Korea, the need to create a shared understanding of what (South) 'Koreanness' would mean to its citizens was a particularly pressing task. As the nation was emerging from Japanese colonial oppression and cultural indoctrination, it was the period before the colonial presence that seemed to offer appropriate signs to signify this emerging 'Koreanness' in the modern world. Not only that, the shared historical and cultural heritage with North Korea meant that many of these cultural signs were the same or very similar, but could not be emphasized because there was an equally pressing need to present the North as an 'enemy', or the 'other' of the South. Particularly after the 1961 coup d'etat carried out by General Pak Chung Hee (Pak Chong-hui), whose government was under a real and tangible political threat from the North and from within the South, the role of myths became particularly significant in creating a legitimate, and presumably historically grounded basis for South Korean national identity. In particular because the Northern interpretations of traditional myths were often presented as having been 'tainted' by the communist ideology, in South Korea the process 'unearthing' old myths and legends took an added meaning, as the South was presented (in its own discourses) as the sole preserver of pure and original Korean cultural heritage. What is quite striking, however, is that while traditional Korean myths and fairytales were revived in the search for presumably ideologically untainted Korean identity, they were often also very much informed by patriarchal ideology so that moral lessons in them were also used to justify the imbalanced power relations

22


between men and women. 22 Myths and folktales, often set in patriarchal kinship structures, generally portray women as agents to advance the culture of men. For this reason, they are often represented as intrinsically connected to the animal kingdom; objects to advance the storyline (such as 'wombs' for heroes they beget); and when as agents, in the guise of otherworldly spirits who need to be appeased or captured by the hero; or as role models of 'virtuous femininity' who gain respect and praise through suffering brought about by their moral intractability. They thus persist in dominant discourses of self-sacrificial, desexualized virtuous femininity, and present female characters who become willing victims of different kinds of psychological and physical abuse for the sake of their fathers, husbands or sons, but who, through persevering amidst insurmountable difficulties, somehow retain their moral convictions and save the day. The way these female characters are eulogized for their efforts to maintain cultural ideologies stands in stark contrast to the way virtuous men are often portrayed as loyal subjects of the king, able politicians or conquering heroes. Yet women are also often portrayed as stronger than men when it comes to preserving what is perceived as morally 'right' and are shown to give good advice to their husbands that usually goes unheeded. 23 This representation of femininity in terms of interiority, chastity and the maternal is also represented as symbolically bound to the realm or concerns of the physical body. This locating of the feminine within the immanent also symbolically presents the female body as immovable and static. In fact, in post-war literature this thematic is present in that there is often a sense that in a way similar to how the physical soil of the Korean peninsula is sometimes represented as an immutable and unchanging backdrop to the historical and ideological advances or upheavals that affect male subjects, the immovable female body also emerges as a symbolic location to return to, which guarantees cultural continuity no matter what happens in the 'world of men'. In this kind of cultural imaginary, the ideological 'woman' thus emerges as a trusted and pure body that will remain unwavering even when the men make mistakes and forfeit the nation. But this feminine in transience in cultural representation also demands a consistent image of the feminine that remains the same and is always presented in reference to the masculine. It is perhaps no surprise then that many cautionary tales emphasize an actual need to confine women to the domestic and away from positions of influence outside the home. This confinement is justified in folk tales and myths through a representation of the kinds of catastrophic consequences that follow if women manage to gain influence outside the domestic sphere. 24

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The enduring nature of these myths, and the extent to which they have become embedded even within contemporary Korean imaginary can be explained in part through the way they were utilized in producing the discourse of 'Koreanness' The Tale ofTan'gun, the foundation myth of the Korean nation, is a particularly good example of how tradition-informed, gendered discourses were integrated within the nationalistic discourses and the perceived role that women occupied as patriotic citizens. In terms of representations of femininity, and as Seungsook Moon observes, the myth is enormously significant because within it patriarchal ideology was presented as an irreplaceable part of national identity discourses, or 'Koreanness'. 25 In the myth a celestial male figure, the son of the King of Heaven (Hwan'ung), looks down from heaven and brings culture to people, thus establishing order where previously there was chaos. 26 A female bear and a male tiger come before Hwan'ung, petitioning him to turn them into human form. The two animals are told to eat garlic and sacred mugwort, and spend one-hundred-and-twentyone days27 in a cave for their wish to be made true. Before the hundred days are up the tiger loses patience and leaves the cave, whereas the bear endures patiently in the darkness of the cave and is rewarded by being turned in to a woman. Hwan'ung then marries the Bear Woman (Ungnyo), who utilizes her shamanistic powers in order to conceive a son, and the fruit of this union between heaven and earth, culture and nature, is the mythical founder of the nation called Tan'gun. 28 After his reign as a ruler, Tan'gun is transformed into Sansin (Mountain God), a powerful spirit who according to the myth now guards the Korean nation. 29 A closer analysis of the myth reveals that what is actually articulated about the nature of the feminine in it, is the marked emphasis on motherhood and perseverance for greater good. The Bear Woman's place in the story is justified primarily through motherhood, and she even utilizes her shaman powers to beget a son for her celestial husband. After the birth of Tan'gun, she exits thenarrative and the reward for her suffering is to enter the patriarchal folklore as mother to her semi-celestial son, and to gain a place in his genealogy. The subtext of this story is that since Ungnyo's origins are in the animal kingdom, her only way to humanity is found through aligning herself to the wishes of Hwan'ung. Thus her place in history is confirmed through motherhood even if she cannot quite obtain subjectivity in this culture governed by and for men. In contrast to this, Hwan'ung and his son Tan'gun are both by definition already in the realm of culture as the originators of it. The role of woman, according to the logic that informs this myth,

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is therefore to embrace her suffering as the way to obtain humanity and so a legitimate place in the culture of men. The Tan'gun myth turned out to be hugely influential in connecting Korea's historical past with the present. Hyung 11 Pai notes that 'the national salvation drama of Tan'gun has provided the most compelling and comprehensive narrative defining Korea's ancestral lineage, national spirit, and unified statehood in the postwar divided peninsula'. 30 To me this seems hardly an overstatement, given how firmly the myth has been established within the Korean contemporary cultural imaginary. In fact, even though the actual historical existence of Tan'gun cannot be established, this myth that recounts the perceived semi-divine origins of the nation is occasionally presented as a record of actual historical facts. 31 Moreover, the perceived historical nature of this myth has been used to validate and sustain the nationalistic and patriarchal ideologies that it was used to highlight. Tradition in this context is thus re-imaged as an 'original' or 'natural' state of existence where men and women are assigned roles that are perceived to work towards the common good and to preserve some harmony in nature and society. In fact, the connection between the imagined national identity (or 'Koreanness') and femininity is pivotal to this masculinized understanding of national identity, and in the politically and socially uncertain period from the 1960s to 1980s it proved effective in justifying women's subordination and need to self-sacrifice in order to succeed and gain respect within patriarchy. 32 This is not to say that the myth somehow caused women's oppression. Rather, its wide acceptance is highly descriptive of the extent to which moral and gendered messages embedded in the myth became accepted as part of common knowledge about authentic 'Koreanness' which was seen to have survived the test of time. 33 What is telling in the context of this book is that while old myths and legends, such as The Tale of Tan'gun, were revived in the search for the roots of the nation in order to restore and reimagine tradition as a basis to create a shared national heritage, this myth in particular presents the origins of the nation both divine and masculine, and with the feminine in an instrumental and self-sacrificial role. The nationalistic discourse of femininity firmly places women within the thematic of interiority within which they function as preservers of (what are presented as) existing Korean traditions and culture. What is more, while the Tan'gun myth emphasizes the divine enforcement of monarchic, patriarchal rule and sealed it with a 'heavenly mandate', the significance of the (uncontrolled) female divine has been conveniently forgotten within these discourses. It is particularly telling that although

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goddesses and mischievous female spirits who appear in some folktales and myths are anything but docile and will do all they can to evade masculine control, 34 the mortal female characters suffer serious consequences if they attempt the same. It is also telling that although there are certain ancient Buddhist myths in which women are often portrayed as wise advisers to their sons as well as benevolent co-rulers with their husbands, these myths were never resurrected in the modern times to denote 'true Koreanness'. 35 To me the very insistence on binding the feminine within these very limited loci of representation speaks for the very fictional nature that such construction of femininity relies on. And yet there was (and still seems to be) a persistent assumption that these ideals are supposedly rooted in some kind of 'authentic' revelation of the true nature of femininity. Accordingly, throughout the 1960s to 1980s, cultural representations that drew on these traditional discourses on femininity emphasized women's roles in supporting men in their political or patriotic struggles. The mother, in particular, was imagined as the source of security and comfort in changing times. Chun YoungPaik very perceptively observes that: In the course of the rapid development of Korean society as a whole, the mother was projected as the figure to whom everyone could bring the hurts experienced to this process: a struggle for survival in a harsh and profoundly phallocentric world. As a healer and comforter, she supported the father and the son at the expense of the daughter and herself. After all, somebody in the family had to be sacrificed at the crucial moment in history. 36 While official representations of femininity in the 1970s and 1980s focused on emphasizing docile 'wise mother and good wife' discourses for the sake of greater good of the nation, the easing of political repression in the early 1990s meant that the meaning of 'femininity' as an ideological construct was suddenly opened up to contestation. Yet within the symbolic order of representation, women continued to be represented as submissive 'wombs of the nation', always in relation to man and never truly autonomousY The conceptualization of femininity in the 1990s was made all the more complicated with the influxofconsumeristvaluesthatbecame intertwined with the existing tradition-informed discourses of femininity. Added to the 'wise mother, good wife' rhetoric was an idea of feminine identity that could be defined in a corporeal sense by conforming to increasingly unattainable physical ideals of the feminine body. 38 This new ideal was promoted in advertising and the mass

26


media in the 1990s and presented the 'normal' and desirable feminine body as a 'Eurasian' body, with wide eyes and double eyelids, thin legs and large buttocks and breasts. Since very few Korean women could attain this essentially foreign beauty ideal without aesthetic surgery, it became increasingly common during the latter part of this decade. 39 While engaging in surgical procedures became a way of attaining sexy feminine ideals, and arguably a form of empowerment for many women, the meaning of femininity became increasingly complicated. Motherhood, in particular, as the traditional bodily expression of femininity, seemed at odds with the physical feminine ideals presented in the media. Modern myths about femininity thus continued to emphasize 'traditional' gender dichotomies. They were continuously recreated and reinforced in popular television dramas and films, and the formulaic projections of iconic feminine values still placed women in one of the very narrowly defined roles: that of a mother or a good chaste woman, or a scheming woman, who would in the end all get what they deserved. For a 'good' woman, the reward was of course the affections of a 'good' man; whereas the scheming woman would end up living the life of a sad old singleton. (The only difference now being that all of these characters were dazzlingly beautiful even the sad old singleton.) While these traditional ideas presented in contemporary magazines, television dramas and popular films merit a detailed analysis in their own right, what is significant about them is the consistency in which they continued to gesture towards iconic ideas that were seen to define contemporary Korean understanding of femininity. In this sense, and as Sang Ran Lee points out, ancient mythological imaginaries still influence the Korean discursive imagination in which women are marginalized from positions of power and punished when they take the initiative.40 This is not to say that these images and representations are always taken as given. Indeed, they remain open to multiple contestations in individual contexts. I want to emphasize this point simply because I occasionally detect a tacit - and rather infuriating - suggestion that Korean women are still stuck in a medieval mindset because there still exists a desire to conform and reproduce iconic feminine ideals. In reality, contemporary Korean ideas about femininity and women's self-identity have shifted from emphasizing kinship to being informed by a complex matrix of intersecting and competing influences, such as changing family structures, women's education and employment, and consumerism in its various manifestations. Clearly then, Korean women are under no illusion about any perceived 'honour' attached to emulating some pre-modern values, and yet some pre-modern ideals

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persist. However, there is a continuing difficulty of breaking away from established ways of thinking about gender. Griselda Pollock observes that women in their own specific social, historical and cultural contexts are always products of the culture that they inhabit, and understand the world around them 'within its imaginative and cognitive limits': 'What we are is fashioned within existing ideologies of femininity and our imaginations thrill to implanted plots. '41 And these 'plots' within 1990s Korean imaginary continued to draw on cultural discourses that presented femininity in opposition to masculinity, and were rooted in the traditional, hierarchically fixed gender structures. While women's expectations of gender relations were thus rapidly changing in the 1990s, perceptions and representations of femininity had not. In short, the Korean symbolic order had not caught up with the vast economic development and social change in society. Whereas increasing numbers of highly educated female students and academics spoke up and demanded far more socially and politically active roles for women in Korean society, the old myths about the feminine proved incredibly difficult to overcome. In particular, the idealization of what could be described as 'beautiful suffering', and which was eulogized in popular television dramas, reinforced the idea that there was something 'beautiful' about having to suffer as a woman, and to embrace and endure it with a certain degree of gracefulness. With this in mind, Trinh T. Minha certainly has a point when she observes that 'in this local perspective, the gender divide is always crystal clear'.42 Gender roles that draw on implanted plots make sense in their particular social and historical contexts, but this does not necessarily mean that they should not be challenged. The feminine that appears in the 1990s (or indeed in any other historical period of time) Korean cultural productions must therefore be considered as essentially fictional constructions, if you like, which in turn are informed by a number of often conflicting ideologies. And it is from this premise that I will now turn to discussing how women writers, themselves as producers of cultural meanings and discourses, have responded to and positioned themselves in relation to phallocentric discourses of femininity in twentieth century Korea. NOTES 1

Theresa Hyun, Writing Women in Korea: Translation and Feminism in the Colonial Period (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004), p. 32.

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Representations of Femininity See for example Ch~ng Kiimja, et al., Han'guk munhag e nat'anan chOnt'ongjok yosongsang (~~ ~~oJI 4-El-\! ~~~~ opJ"J) [Traditional Images of Women in Korean Literature] (Seoul: Sookmyung Women's University, 1985); Yi Namd~k, 'Han'guk munhag e nat'anan chont'ongjog'in yosong sang' [The Traditional Images of Women in Korean Literature], in Yiisonghak [Women's Studies], ed. Chong Se-hwa (Seoul: Ewha Woman's University, 1987), pp. 230-60; Ch'oe Pomsuk, Han'guk yoryu munhaksa (~U!ll fr"Vfi:)[~~) [The History of Korean Women's Literature] (Seoul: Hansaem, 1987); Ho Mija, Han'guk yoryu munhangnon, kojon p'yon (~U!llfr"Vfi:)C~~, i!i:A•) [An Analysis of Traditional Korean Women's Literature] (Seoul: Songsin Women's University, 1991); H~ Mija, Han'guk yosong munhak yon'gu(~~~.AJ~~ ~-T) [A Study of Korean Women's Literature] (Seoul: T'aehaksa, 1996); and the Introduction to Richard Rutt and Kim Chong-un, Virtuous Women (Seoul: The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 1974). jennifer Hansen, 'There are Two Sexes, Not One', in French Feminist Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Maryland and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 201-205 (p. 202). Irigaray, Key Writings, p. 18. Luce lrigaray, Je, tu, no us: Toward a Culture ofDifference, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20. Irigaray, Key Writings, p. 26. The Book of Changes (I Ching) is said to have been written by the mythical Chinese Emperor Fu Hsi (traditional dates 2800 BC-2737 BC), although contemporary scholars now tend to agree that it was compiled sometime around 400 BC-200 BC. From Book of Changes, 'Appended Remarks', pt. 1, ch. 1, quoted in Wing-tsit Chan, trans. and ed., A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963), p. 248). Ch'ien is thus perceived as representing knowledge, whereas k'un is perceived as instrumental in acting on the knowledge. It should be pointed out that this development is not unique to Korea. Luce Irigaray traces the foundations of Western philosophy and metaphysics to a similar elemental economy as the one discussed here (I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 23-4). Ji-young Shin, Writing Women's Art Histories: The Construction of National Identity in South Korea and the Tradition of Masculinity in Abstract Painting (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 2004), p. 100. Wing-tsit Chan notes that yin was perceived as 'negative, passive, weak and destructive, and yang[. . as] positive, active, strong and constructive' (p. 244).

Iconic Femininities 12

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Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation ofKorea (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 231-2. It is worth noting that while it would be absurd to talk about any kind of patriarchal conspiracy here, it is telling that the introduction of such pronounced hierarchical gender binaries did follow a period when Yuan (Mongol) princesses had wielded considerable power in the preceding Koryo dynasty (918-1392) court. It seems hardly a coincidence that during the first year of the Choson dynasty it was women's conduct and public outings that were curtailed in the name of morality (see: Yung-Chung Kim, ed. and trans., Women of Koreai a History from Ancient Times to 1945 (Seoul: Ewha Woman's [sic] University Press, 1976), pp. 70-87. The crossing out of their names from the family books was a symbolic indication of this literal 'deletion' of the daughter from her natal family. This disruption in female genealogy usually had difficult consequences for individual women who found themselves torn from their origins and implanted into a new family unit in which they initially occupied the lowest position (YungChung Kim, p. 89). However, since the only way they could exist as legitimate members of society was to be identified through a male member of their family (i.e. someone's wife or mother), marriage was considered not only as unavoidable, but desirable as well. A newly-wed woman would spend at least the early years of her marriage under considerable pressure. In general, new brides were thought unable to think for themselves and were treated accordingly (Hyungsook Yoon, 'Gender and Personhood and the Domestic Cycle in Korean Society (I)', Korea Journal 30:3 (1990), 4-15 (pp. 6-7)). See a more detailed discussion on this in Chong Sunjin, Han'guk munhak kwa yosongjuiii pip'yong (~~ ~"&32} ~ "'cl "f'-Qj Hllf1) [Korean Literature and Feminist Criticism] (Seoul: Research Centre for Korean Studies, 1992), pp. 230--8. In fact, for these women the upper class status presented an additional burden as yangban men were expected to transcend physical labour and to devote themselves to becoming a superior man in achieving harmony with nature in transcending the mundane issues of immediate physical existence. This burden continued to the modern period as well, and Korean literature of the colonial period features a number of examples of images of faithful wives who support their writer-intellectual husbands without a complaint despite the strains on their own physical wellbeing. Lee Seung-Hwan, 'The Social Meaning of Body in Confucian Tradition: Between Moral and Political Power', Korea Journal 44:2 (2004), 5-29 (p. 11).

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Representations of Femininity For an extremely useful psychoanalytical discussion on this, see Bracha L. Ettinger's Matrixial Metramorphosis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Irigaray, This Sex, p. 69. Taeyon Kim, 'Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women's Bodies in Korea's Consumer Society', Body & Society9:2 (2003), 97-113 (p. 100). See Michael J. Pettid, Overcoming Sexual Repression: Humour and Sexuality in Chason Period Literature, a paper presented at the 2001 Korean Studies Association of Australasia Conference (Monash University, Melbourne), http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/korean/ ksaa/conference/paper [accessed on 20 January 2009]. Jack Zipes, 'Cross-cultural Connections and the Contamination of the Classical Fairy Tale', in The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001), pp. 845-68 (pp. 848-9). Luce Irigaray has a great deal to say about this issue. She asserts that myths and other such wonder-tales can function as tropes and philosophical statements to justify the ontological conditions of women's subordination ('The Bodily Encounter with the Mother', trans. David Macey, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), pp. 34--46, (p. 36)). Yi Namdok, pp. 255-8. Typical examples of such stories include the tale of Mrs Pak (Pakssi chon) and The Tale of Ch'unhyang (Ch'unhyang chon) in which women initially suffer, but succeed in finding happiness through prevailing in their virtuous qualities. An example of such is the legend of the Buddhist monk P'yohun and King Kyongdok, which is a story about a kingdom that is brought to ruin as a result of feminine power. At the beginning of the tale the reader is informed that the king had a penis that was eight ch'on long, and so the reader is assured that there is nothing wrong with his masculinity. Despite this, his wives are unable to reproduce a son for him. Exasperated, the king sends monk P'yohun to petition to the ruler of Heaven to grant him a son, only to be informed that such a request would be dangerous because the boy would grow up to be a 'feminine man'. In his desire to have a son, the king ignores this warning and a son is born. The king then dies when his son is only eight-years-old, and with the Queen Consort as a regent, the country falls into chaos. To make things worse, as the monk had warned the king, the son turns out as effeminate, and because of his lack of masculine qualities, he is unable to reign wisely, the kingdom comes to ruin and even the holy monks depart (see James H. Grayson, Myths and Legends from Korea (Richmond: Curzon, 2001) pp. 188-9). This story illustrates the recurring theme of how femininity was symbolically connected with impotence and

Iconic Femininities

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how femininity in a position of power is perceived as a recipe for disaster, be it then political or spiritual, and imagines femininity in terms of interiority and confinement. Seungsook Moon, 'Begetting the Nation: The Androcentric Discourse of National History and Tradition in South Korea', in Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism, eds. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 33-66 (p. 41). These 'culture hero' imageries are common in the existing Korean mythologies, and similar stories would include (for example) the tale of Hwan'ung who founded Ko-Chostln, the tale of King Sura who also descended from heaven and founded the kingdom of Karak, and the Myth of King Hyokkose, the founder of the Silla Kingdom, who also had celestial origins (Kim Yol-kyu, 'Myths, Crises and Heroes', Koreana 1:2 (1987), 12-18; Kim Yul-kyu, 'Some Aspects of Korean Mythology', in Folk Culture in Korea, Korean Culture Series 4, ed. Chun Shin-yang (Seoul: The Si-sa-yong-o-sa Publishers, 1982), pp. 12-25. A number of other similar examples are also listed in Grayson's Myths and Legends from Korea). In some versions of the story the period of time is given as hundred days. For an excellent critical appraisal of the historiography of the Tan'gun myth, see Hyung 11 Pai, Constructing 'Korean' Origins: A

Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-formation Theories, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 187 (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Asia Centre and Harvard UP, 2000), pp. 57-76. An extended commentary on the Myth of Tan' gun can also be found in Grayson's Myths and Legends from Korea, pp. 30-58. Grayson notes that in another version of the myth (the thirteenth century Chewang un'gi version) the female is not identified, nor does she have to undergo tests. Instead, she is merely transformed into a human in order to reproduce male offspring. This second version would seem to enforce the idea that the female protagonist in this myth functioned merely as a reproductive womb that ensured the creation of the male nation (p. 45). James H. Grayson, 'Female Mountain Spirits in Korea: A Neglected Tradition', Asian Folklore Studies, Nagoya, LV-1 (1996), 119-34 (p. 121). The worship of Sansin is usually carried out for two reasons: either to obtain protection for a journey, or to beget a male heir in order to continue one's male lineage. Hyung 11 Pai, p. 60. Ibid. Seungsook Moon asserts that the reinterpretation of the origins of the Korean nation during the military regime of Park Chung Hee

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Representations of Femininity reflected the way it was utilized to 'articulate the interests of male ruling elites' (p. 46). See Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask Prospect Heights IL: Waveland Press, 1998 [originally published 1963, New York: Harper & Row Publishers]), p. 138. In discussing modem mythologies, Eliade argues that 'mythical behaviour' can still be observed in the modem world (p. 183). A well-known Korean folktale about a woodcutter and a nymph is an example of such. See for example 'Ado and the Advent of Buddhism in Silla', and 'The Advent of Buddhism in Kaya' (Grayson, Myth and Legends from Korea, pp. 191-5). Chun Young-Paik, 'Mother's Anger and Mother's Desire: the Work of Re-Hyun Park', in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, ed. Griselda Pollock (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 233-53 (p. 192) It is telling how closely this reflects Simone de Beauvoir's observation in The Second Sex that within patriarchy humanity has become 'male, and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being'. (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1953; reprinted in London: Vintage, 1997), p. 16. Taeyon Kim, p. 107. The motivations to engage with aesthetic surgery in Korea should be considered a straightforward issue that concerns simply a desire to appear 'Western'. Instead, as Ruth Holliday and I have argued elsewhere, it is a complex issue where considerations of national identity and 'race' intersect with gender, class and sexuality (Ruth Holliday and joanna Elfving-Hwang, 'Changing Faces: Rethinking Aesthetic Surgery in South Korea', a paper presented at the Gendering East/West conference at the University of York on 9 July 2009). Sang Ran Lee, 'Feminine Muteness and Blindness as a Counter Discourse in Korean Literature', Asian Women (1995), 129-61 (pp. 130-1; 145). Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, p. xiv. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 102.

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Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity

femininity thus emerges as a historically and socially situated I fcultural construct, which is open to multiple contestations, it is useful to consider how women writers, both as women and producers of new cultural meanings, have responded to patriarchal representations of femininity. Although women writers have been active throughout modern Korean history, the fact that they have sometimes been writing about (and as) women has not meant that they have automatically succeeded in creating effective counterdiscourses to existing ideas about femininity. In some cases they have arguably not even aspired to do so. In fact, the way femininity is represented in twentieth century Korean women's fiction is very descriptive of how difficult it is to imagine alternatives to existing phallocentric ideas about femininity. This difficulty stems in part from the position that Korean women writers, as opposed to male writers, have occupied within the field of cultural production. The fact that the writers are women has typically prompted critics to search for some specifically feminine qualities in their texts, whatever those might have been defined as at a particular time in history. Among critics both inside and outside Korea, there has thus been a tendency to segregate women's literary works from those of men on the assumption that the specificity of women's writing arises from some innate biological reason that somehow predisposes women to write in 'feminine' ways. In the context of Western symbolic imaginary, feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter, Luce Irigaray, julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, have explored and evaluated how women are affected because of the way they are positioned in relation to language that itself is essentially phallocentric. Their ideas build, to an extent, on jacques Lacan's idea that human subjectivity can be

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conceptualized in terms of the symbolic (the unconscious, deep structure of language and meaning), the imaginary (the realm of fantasies and images), and the real (that which lies outside all signification).1 But because patriarchal symbolic order only recognizes the existence of one dimension of human subjectivity, its language too is underpinned by a morphology of patriarchy. 2 Consequently, women are always disadvantaged in one way or another in relation to language. Helene Cixous, an author herself, has argued that this is both an opportunity and drawback for literary women. On one hand, women seem more versatile because of their ability to tap into creative powers that seem transgressive because women already are in some ways writing language that is essentially phallic (or phallogocentric, as she terms it). On the other hand, the downside of this might be that this kind of writing may also be so different that it will not be understood by the general reading public, not to mention publishers who of course control what gets published in the first place. 3 In the field of cultural production this dictates who possesses the power to decide on what constitutes 'good' literature. Take the Korean literary establishment for example. Since Korean male writers and literary critics have typically been, until very recently, at the forefront of defining the parameters of what constitutes 'good' literature in terms of literary expression and subject topic, women writers have been disadvantaged on two fronts. Firstly, they have had to write in the language of patriarchy, and one that inherently might even be considered as a tool of their very oppression. Lastly, because of the embedded phallocentricism in culture that presents gender relations as a fixed structure, women's own texts about women and femininity have also been evaluated within a discourse that assumes that humanity is conceptualized as male. It is no wonder then that throughout the twentieth century Korean literary history women writings have been received with no little ambivalence: there has been a tendency to either praise women's works for the extent to which they describe 'human experience' (itself understood as male) or more recently, for women's ability to write about that strange, yet fascinating quality called 'femininity' that still seems to somehow escape that which is considered normative human experience. In fact, the following discussion on how Korean women writers in the twentieth century sought to engage with discourses of femininity shows how difficult it was for women writers to create counter-discourses to existing representations of femininity, given their own position in relation to both the male-centred language and literary establishment. For women writers, the task at hand

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 35 was a complex process of negotiating between fixed gendered discourses which in turn intersected with nationalistic discourses. As a result, rather than attempting to overturn existing patriarchal representations of femininity, women's own counter-discourses to these tend to merely gesture towards criticizing perceived gender inequalities in society. EARLY MODERN WOMEN WRITERS In the turn of the twentieth century, the Chason dynasty was wavering, and the introduction of foreign ideas contributed significantly to the transformation of Korea from a feudal to a modern society.4 The Japanese imperial powers, which were steadily gaining increasing influence over the administration of the crumbling dynasty, implemented Western-style changes in the Korean legal system in the lead up to colonizing Korea in 1910. At the same time, many Koreans who had studied abroad (and mainly in japan) were concerned that the existing political and social structures in Korea were in dire need of reform so that the nation could be brought up to speed with development in the rest of the world. The breakdown of traditional feudal political and social structures were propelled by the actions of reform-minded Koreans within, as well as from the Japanese colonizers' external influence. During this transitional period from the 1880s to the 1910s, it was often the status of women in the 'old' society that carne to signify the oppressive nature of the antecedent social structure. Yet while the rhetoric promoted women's rights and education, it also paradoxically worked towards maintaining existing gender discourses. In the face of Japanese colonial encroachment, it was thought that the survival of essentially Korean cultural values rested, at least in part, 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. 5 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. 6 Partly because of this, the discourse of gender equality was soon absorbed into the discourse of national liberation, which effectively silenced the former through the process of this integration. Despite the rhetoric of gender equality and women's rights, the aims of the modernization movement were still at odds with challenging the traditional

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ideas of hierarchical gender relations and the existing ideas about 'virtuous femininity'. Modern Korean literature, too, developed in the early part of the twentieth century, and amidst tumultuous times of Japanese colonial encroachment and rising nationalist sentiment, literature formed part of a cultural movement that sought to understand and define what a Korean national identity meant in a colonized country. While not all writers were engaged in this nationalistic endeavour, it was within this context that images of long-suffering mothers and violated virgins were often used to make sense of what was happening to the nation. 'Femininity' in literary imagination was thus early on harnessed as a metaphor to symbolize a sense of national helplessness against stronger political entities or even the perceived naivety or innocence of a nation violated by colonial incursion. In truth, the concept of 'Koreanness' itself was by and large new, since the modern Korean nationalistic consciousness only began to develop in a modern sense after it came under the influence of the Japanese colonialism. Defining 'Koreanness' under colonial censorship and cultural influence was therefore an enormously complex task. It was no wonder then that writers concerned with the nationalist cause often turned to what they saw as the 'authentic' conclaves of Korean culture, which were not 'defiled' by colonial or other foreign influences: the countryside and the body of a long-suffering wife or mother. Both the physical soil and the body of the maternal nationalistic woman came to symbolize cultural continuity and the nation's ability to withstand extreme suffering and oppression without breaking under its strain. The immutable and unchanging natural world provided a comfortable backdrop to descriptions of modern urban dystopias and political uncertainty. Women, on the other hand, featured in literary fiction as metaphors of enduring national suffering. In particular, an image of the weak female victim suffering at the hands of the more powerful male oppressor fitted particularly well the larger cui tural rhetoric of national struggle for survival against colonial powers? There was, therefore, an emerging thematic connection between these two literary tropes, which both functioned as passive and immutable backdrops to allow for the discourse of 'Koreanness' to develop. While this new and gendered rhetoric to describe 'Koreanness' was being created, a number of women writers were not only forging a place for themselves in the emerging literary canon, but were also actively seeking to subvert archetypal and constraining feminine ideals in their literary works from which these nationalistic discourses drew on. Against all odds, three remarkable

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 37 early women writers- Kim Myongsun (1896-c.1951), Kim Wonju (1896-1971; also known by her pen name Kim Ilsop) and Na Hyesok (1896-c.1949) -all boldly advocated women's emancipation in their works, and set out to criticize the existing patriarchal social system that oppressed women and limited their options in life. 8 Their works openly addressed issues they felt strongly about, such as women's right to choose an occupation and whom they wanted to marry or live with. They also discussed such concepts as the 'new morality' (ffiili:~) and 'new virtue' (ffi j~Jifi), which were radical ideas about pushing the boundaries of what was then considered morally acceptable sexual conduct. For example, these so-called 'new women' (sin yosong) believed that extramarital sex was not immoral as long as the partners had genuine feelings for each other, because they saw sexual subjectivity as an integral part of realizing their singular feminine subjectivities. While chastity and heterosexual relationships to one man in a marital relationship highlighted patriarchal ownership of women's bodies, the discourse of 'new morality' posed a possibility of women's autonomy, or even independence, over their own bodies. Accordingly, the sin yosong argued that recognizing women's right to experience sexual desire and satisfaction was the only way to discover feminine subjectivity, and saw the emancipation of women's bodies and sexualities as the only way to discover subjectivity, and by extension, genuine romantic love. Their demands were thus of a fundamental nature because they were attempting to seize the right to define the feminine for themselves. It is telling that while the sin yosong writers in the 1920s considered women's sexuality as being of a central importance to women's emancipation, it was this idea of sexual liberation in particular that their critics (both male and female) found difficult to deal with. Even though a significant number of other women were also active in colonial Korean society, and women's issues had been discussed in journals and magazines as early as in the first decade of the twentieth century, many shunned the ideas that the sin yosong writers advocated. Instead, the majority of women's movements aligned themselves closely to the nationalist movements on the understanding that reorganization of the society on more gender equal terms would eventually happen, but only after the nationalist objectives of gaining independence from Japan were achieved. 9 For the majority of women, sin yosong were but renegades to the greater cause of national liberation. For most Korean intellectuals, the virtuous 'new woman' in the context of 1920s and 1930s Korea was to be a nationalistic wife, who could safeguard the Korean cultural heritage and ensure the survival of essentially 'Korean' values

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when they were seen as under threat from the 'Japanization' programmes of the colonial government. 10 It was in many ways inevitable then that the sin yosong writers' voices were soon subsumed under the nationalistic anti-colonial discourses, which branded any suggestion of women's sexual subJectivities as a detrimental influence on Korean womanhood as a whole. 11 While the women writers' attempts to suggest more heterogeneous forms of feminine sexualities can be seen as an attempt to transcend traditional ideas about passive feminine sexuality, it was all too revolutionary for their contemporaries. Despite their ambitious aims, all of these early modern women writers eventually fell victim to social ostracism that effectively destroyed their promising literary and artistic careers, as it was in the case of Na Hyes6k. Kim My6ngsun attracted criticism from traditionally-minded male critics, who argued that the only reason she wrote with such a 'daring' tone was because she was the daughter of a concubine and hence her moral standing would always be in doubt. Their argument was that she had a 'genetic imperative' to become rebellious and lacking in traditional feminine virtues, and this argument was used to a great effect to discredit Kim's intellectual achievements. Towards the end of her career she was quickly forgotten, and after unsuccessfully trying her luck as a reporter and a film actress, she died without friends or family in a Japanese mental asylum. The literary careers of the two other authors were equally short: faced with social ostracism and disowned by her family, the immensely talented artist and writer Na Hyes6k was denied access to her four children and died destitute. Kim W6nju came out relatively unscathed, as she renounced her earlier life as a writer and sought solace in a Buddhist monastery. The fate of these women was reason enough for many other potential women writers to be discouraged from coming forward until the 1930s.l2 While some male writers, such as Chu Yowp (1902-1972) and Y6m Sangs6p (1897-1963), were sympathetic to the idea that romantic love should be a precondition to any successful marriage, it was the effort to promulgate women's sexual freedom outside marriage in particular that was met with a frosty reception from the emerging (predominantly male) literary establishment. 13 In fact, if in women's writing of the 1920s female characters made choices about their lives and physical encounters with others, the feminine in men's literary texts took an entirely different direction which often intersected with wider political and nationalistic discourses. There was often a strong thematic element in these stories which emphasized the virtues of female chastity. Contrary to this, sexual freedom outside heterosexual and monogamous

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 39 relationships was portrayed as immoral deviations that were bound to end in disaster. Kim Tong-in (1900-1951), who achieved critical acclaim by his 'daring' works that portrayed depravity in society and what could perhaps be best described as 'feminine suffering', was openly hostile to the idea of sexual liberation of women. In one of his best known early works, 'Potatoes' (Kamja, 1925/28), he describes a young woman's fall into prostitution. The body of the 'defiled' young woman becomes here a metaphor of the perceived moral degradation of colonial Korean society. More moderate writers, such as Yi Kwangsu (1892-1950), perceived free love as important, but at the same time saw 'women's chastity as the element that should be controlled for the development of the nation'. 14 While women's sexuality did feature as a topic in men's literary discourses as well, there was always an element of mistrust when discussing women's sexed bodies. Yi Hyosok's (1907-1942) 'When to Buckwheat Blooms' (Memil kkot p'il muryop, 1936) is a good example of a work in which women are presented as sexed beings, but in a very primordial and animalistic way. In some ways, there is a keen sense that once released, women's sexual prowess has a real potential to cause serious damage to the orderly society. On the contrary, Chu Yosop's 'Mama and the Border' (Sarang sonnim gwa omoni, 1936), presents a very human and sympathetic portrayal of a young widowed woman who struggles to repress her emotional and sexual desires in order to fulfil her maternal duties. However, it is telling that her moral resolve to hold on to what she believes to be right is never criticized. On the contrary, in many ways her self-sacrificial suffering inspires respect. I suspect that one of the main reasons for this insistence on representing sexually repressed female characters lay with the fact that representations of active female sexuality would have simply posed a threat to representations of normative masculinity. And since this idea of all-powerful masculinity was already under threat from the colonial discourses within which the Korean male was represented as the 'other' of the japanese male, images of passive and weak women offered both a literary trope to signify the subaltern male, and a comforting reminder that the feminine, come what may, was still imagined as a hierarchical opposite of the masculine. Therefore, just because female characters feature in men's fiction of this period, they typically appear simply as thematic instances or tropes which perform a specific narrative function. More often than not this function is to reinforce existing patriarchal ideologies, even when the characters are presented in a sympathetic light. Paradoxically then, while many male authors highlighted

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women's sufferings (and occasionally women's perceived ignorance of the world outside their familial setting) in their works, they also often dismissed women's own voices by criticizing their literary production. The reactionary discourse that formed in the 1920s thus discredited women writers' counter-discourse to traditional ideas about femininity through the cultural establishment's assertion that women could not be called professional writers because of their 'lack of effort' since they had not supposedly published a large enough quantity of fiction to merit such a title. 15 The writers were also effectively segregated from the early literary canon through the simple act of naming: they were called yoryu chakka (literally: 'writers of the female species'), a derogatory title used to distinguish them from those who were perceived as 'proper' (male) authors (chakka). Therefore, despite the existence of a counter-discourse to traditional discourses of femininity, the nascent nationalist discourse of 'Koreanness' under colonial rule during the 1920s witnessed the assertion of the 'virtuous woman' discourse as a way to maintain national integrity. As iconic representations of femininity were resurrected to signify cultural, historical and even social continuity in a country under colonialism, women writers' own voices were thus effectively silenced through a patriarchal discourse that emphasized female chastity. It is thus hardly surprising that throughout the rest of the colonial period, even women who wrote about 'feminine' suffering under colonialism were simply perceived as taking part in the wider discourse against colonial oppression, rather than attempting to subvert the patriarchal practices that often caused such suffering. 16 This is particularly evident with women writers of the 1930s and 1940s who often describe female protagonists who are being oppressed by either the men in their families, or women who are struggling to survive within the economic system of colonial capitalism without the financial support of a father or a husband. One such writer was Kang Kyong-ae (1907-43) whose works reflect a deep understanding of the lives of women at the lowest stratum of society. Her best known work is arguably 'The Human Problem' (In'gan munje, 1932), which is a story about a woman who suffers as a result of both colonial and patriarchal oppression. Although works such as Kang's were generally read and taken as criticism against the colonial government whose policies caused such extreme poverty, Kang was also covertly criticizing the structures of patriarchal society that condemned women to poverty unless they enjoyed the support of a male member of their families. 17 Kang's 'Underground Village' (Chiha ch'on, 1937) is another such

Korean Women's Literature and Representations ofFemininity 41

work that describes a widowed mother in abject poverty who has no choice but to endure her wretched fate. In the 'Underground Village', the mother suffers and endures her suffering as an epitome of Korean self-sacrificing mother, seemingly conforming to the existing ideals about selfless femininity. However, Kang at the same time highlights the sheer unnecessary nature of this suffering, and points an accusing finger at the economic and social structures that condone and even laud such needless misery. Ch'oe Chonghui (1912-90) is another writer of this period who covertly criticizes patriarchal structures and their effects on women and those who depend on them. In 'Haunted House' (Hyungga, 1937), for example, she describes the experiences of a terminally ill single mother who struggles to provide for her extended family. The emphasis here is on her inherently good character, despite her socially dubious standing as a single mother with a child born out of wedlock. Similarly to Kang's story discussed above, this story could be read in part as a critique of colonial capitalism and its detrimental effects on individuals. Yet, it also highlights how difficult it was for single women to even survive in a society that was so firmly built around patriarchal kin structures and social practices. Another point worth a mention within this context is the colonial government's drive in the 1930s to ensure that no politically or socially subversive ideas could gain foothold in the colony, as the empire prepared for a further geographical expansion. Since women had been active in nationalistic organizations such as the Aeguk puinhoe (Patriotic Women's Society) and Kunuhoe (Helping Friends Society) that became increasingly subject to Japanese colonial forces' suspicion and were eventually disbanded as antiestablishment, the authorities saw a need to keep the troublesome female nationalist activists in check through reasserting traditional repressive social practices and values. Neo-Confucian gender discourses and practices were presented as a 'return to traditional Korean ways' and were integrated in young girls' school education. They emphasized the ideal of domestic femininity, and also introduced the Oapanese) idea of 'wise mother, good wife' (hyonmo yangch'o ~.£OJ=~, or ryosai kenbo.ll!~'S:S), and these ideas soon gained wide support because they appealed to a traditional malecentred value system. 18 Since this emerging Korean identity was increasingly imagined as a community of men whom the women support, it also meant that any alternative femininities outside the idea of passive female bodies came to be considered as an act of subversion. For women writers, this became an increasingly difficult barrier to overcome in terms of reimagining active forms of femininity.

42

Representations of Femininity THE DISCOURSE OF FEMININITY IN POST-WAR LITERATURE

The liberation from the Japanese occupation in 1945 promised a new start for the Korean nation, but the subsequent outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 put an end to all such hopes. The war left the nation divided and devastated. Not only was the national infrastructure destroyed, but the peninsula was also left politically fractured as the borders closed amidst growing tensions between the two Koreas. The trauma that people faced was not only the loss of relatives who perished in the war, but the division of what had been perceived as a historically unified country. Even more dramatic was the traumatic loss of those relatives and friends who were divided by opposing ideologies, whether divided by the actual physical border or not. Unsurprisingly, the apres guerre consciousness is clearly present in (south) Korean literature of this period, as writers sought to make sense of the enormous consequences of the war. While some authors wrote anticommunist novels about the war and its divisive nature, others concentrated on describing the psychological trauma that the survivors of the war now had to live with as refugees, widows and orphans. Femininity, again, features in many in these stories, and it is notable how often they contain vivid descriptions of extreme violence against women's bodies. An example of such is Hwang Sunwon's 'Trees on the Slope' (Namu di1l pit'ar e soda, 1960) in which the focus is on the three main male protagonists' traumatic war experiences, and on how they each cope with the immediate trauma of the war. What is telling in this novel is how all female characters that feature in it are subjected to physical violence: they are raped or murdered in most horrific ways. The metaphorical link between women's bodies and the physical soil is yet again highlighted here. Similarly to the way in which the land with its previously tranquil rivers and mountains is turned into a site of violence torn apart in constant bombings, women's bodies are equally presented as objects of mindless mutilation. Whereas a death of a soldier is portrayed as a tragic and occasionally a heroic one, women's bodies simply suffer collateral damage because the men are no longer able or willing to protect these passive bodies. Their chastity now in tatters, they are defiled in a way similar to how the land seems defiled by the spilling of the blood of relatives and friends fighting each other. Even in trauma literature, the nature/culture dichotomies resurface, and are reinforced as men are presented as victims of psychological torture and women as victims of rape. The trauma of war gives context to women's literary production

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 43 during this period as well. Although women were again an active part of South Korean literary scene after the Korean War, their approach to describing women's lives in their works was interpreted as being decidedly 'humanist' as opposed to 'feminist'. This meant that although many literary works did depict women's experiences either during the war or immediately after it, women's suffering or even oppression were not perceived as issues radically different or separate from the homogenized trauma that the nation had suffered. But as Denise Riley observes in the context of the early twentieth century British suffragette movement, sex-blind humanism 'may work for men, but not for women' because humanism that is considered 'neutral' is very rarely just that. 19 Similarly, in the 1950s (south) Korean literature women's suffering was in some ways presented as justified because it represented the suffering of a patriotic woman sacrificing herself for the masculine nation. Against this background, it was perhaps no wonder that the women writers who were most visible in the aftermath of the Korean War; such as Pak Kyongni, Ch'oe Chonghui, Han Musuk and Kang Sinjae, often described women in traditional gender roles in their works as there was an almost palpable need to search for comforting signs of 'tradition'. Rey Chow has observed that in highly nationalistic societies there is a tendency for this to happen. She asserts that in the moment of national crisis people become in a sense degendered: 'Whenever there is apolitical crisis [... ] women stop being women; when the crisis is over and the culture rebuilds itself, they resume their more traditional roles as wives and mothers as part of the concerted efforts to restore order.'2D Similarly in Korea, as gender binaries within the discourse of national identity in a divided country assumed an ever greater importance, women's literature of the 1950s and 1960s never had a chance to develop into a discourse that could have challenged the male-centred discourses that informed the existing ideas about femininity. NATION AS A COMMUNITY OF MEN

This kind of masculinized image of the nation was further reinforced from 1961 when General Park Chung Hee (Pak Chonghui) took leadership of the Republic of Korea in a military coup d'etat, with a specific aim to build a strong nation able to withstand any potential communist encroachment. Subsequently, his military regime instigated reorganization of the society into a well-oiled working force aimed at making Korea an economic power to reckon with, and as a result the country underwent a rapid economic development often hailed as a shining example of a developing nation's

44


way of achieving economic success. 21 However, these economic triumphs came at a price, as the regime silenced any dissident voices that did not agree with the leadership's ultra-nationalistic right wing policies. The government set in place a series of educational programmes that were aimed at ensuring Korea's survival as a political entity against what was perceived as the North's ever-present threat of military invasion. As the military regime emphasized educating citizens into ardent nationalists, subjects such as 'Anti Communist Morality' and 'National Ethics' were included in the national curriculum.22 The emerging rhetoric of 'authentic Koreanness' was informed by both anti-Communist ideology and a desire to distinguish that 'Koreanness' from the competing cultural influences. Thus this national identity that was promoted by the Park government relied on conceptualizing national identity also in oppositionary terms: the foreigner (be it North Korean, Japanese or American) was always conceptualized as the 'other' and inherently different from the 'authentic' Korean subject.23 Historians, archaeologists and cultural critics took part in creating the discourse of Korean national spirit (minjokhon) and the myth of a homogenous race (tan'il). 24 This process of creating national identities in Korea was an enormously complex field of study that involved, among other things, issues such as race, language, customs, historiography, religion and so forth. While these cannot be exhaustively discussed here, it is significant to note that yet again 'woman' as a sign within this discourse was imagined as a depository for the newly unearthed traditions and culture. 25 As a result, women's nationalism was ostensibly shown to be informed by what were perceived as 'traditional' feminine values, albeit adapted to fit the needs of the emerging industrial capitalist economy. The 'traditional feminine qualities' of submissiveness and docility were emphasized in the official discourse on femininity. This made particularly women of lower social status an easy target for capitalist exploitation, and their efforts had a considerable input to the growth of the domestic economy. 26 Patriarchal ideology thus came to play an integral part in the rhetoric of 'authentic Koreanness' which justified women's unpaid domestic work or low-paid factory work through appealing to historical 'truths' about 'authentic' Korean femininity imagined in terms of interiority and physicallabourP Against this sentiment that increasingly imagined femininity in terms of interiority, women writers had the precarious task of producing literary fiction for public consumption, while negotiating within the existing discourses of femininity and issues considered to be of wider social importance. The 1960-70s critical literary scene

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 45 was also focused on defining the parameters for 'good' literature, and one of the issues that related to this was whether creative writers should be included in the group titled as 'intellectuals'. An intellectual, according to this definition, was someone who possesses a clear moral and ethical orientation to merit such distinction. 28 According to this logic, writers who wrote purely to produce aesthetically pleasing literature (as opposed to augmenting a morally and ethically aware society) could not be thought of as intellectuals, and should therefore be comparable to writers of pulp fiction. This kind of thinking informed much of the field of literary production, and probably partly as a consequence literature of this period tended to often have a didactic focus in that it sought to disseminate moral ideals to which readers were encouraged to adhere. During these years of military dictatorship, literature was often also perceived as a voice for the disenchanted population because of the way in which writers sought to portray societal ills caused by the government policies which focused on economic growth without much regard to the needs of those who appeared to suffer as a result of them. 29 Since writing about these issues was perceived as anti-establishment, and could have grave consequences for the writers concerned, writers were generally respected for their desire to portray those who suffered but were powerless to do anything about it. That said, women's rights were not generally deemed to be one such issue, and it was largely for this reason that literary narratives that dealt with women's struggles and personal desires in a male-dominated society were largely considered sentimental pulp fiction, and were generally ignored by the critical literary establishment. 30 Women writers were thus discouraged from writing feminist literature, not the least because it ran the risk of alienating the literary front that was on one hand engaged in trying to define the boundaries of 'morality' and 'humanity' in a rapidly changing society; and on the other in highlighting the lack of basic human rights in society. As the focus on participatory literary politics continued in the 1980s, women writers also actively partook in the minjung movement (a cultural movement aimed at expressing solidarity with the 'oppressed masses'), and the consciousness this fostered about class and human rights. 31 The number of literary women was steadily growing, and the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an influx of a whole new generation of talented women writers who were well educated and highly perceptive of present social issues. However, while Korean women's rights movements began to focus on issues that concerned women in particular, the majority of women writers still wanted to avoid being labelled as 'feminist' and saw themselves as part of a much wider democratization movement. 32 In their works,

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gender was often aligned with class, and women's inequality and other gender-related issues arising in their stories were presented as universal to the whole of Korean society. It is then often difficult to say what in their writing is unmistakably 'feminist', and simply because the writers were not always consciously making statements about women's status in society. Yet this aligning of women's oppression with the wider democratic movement undoubtedly helped this group of women writers to establish themselves as an integral part of the nation's literary canon. They won praise both for their talent as creative writers, as well as for the perceived cultural significance of their fiction. One of the most acclaimed authors of the 1980s was 0 Chonghui, who frequently had female characters in her stories, but was rarely considered a feminist writer because her stories were generally read as narratives that described social or political alienation of powerless individuals in modern society. Pak Wanso is another example of a woman writer who eventually became one of the most widely read modern Korean authors, and arguably in part because she was careful to avoid directly engaging in gender politics even when her stories almost invariably feature female characters. Her focus has often been on describing human depravity and the loss of traditional values such as moral integrity and human compassion, and on criticizing the modern society for its focus on material wealth over any other meaningful values. Pak's gender alone did not then necessarily dictate that she was on a mission to rewrite the existing representation of femininity, and indeed in many of her stories female characters tend to be very stereotypical. 33 Similarly, while some other women writers 34 certainly had female protagonists in their stories, they could have hardly been labelled as feminist, albeit some of them became increasingly explicit in criticizing patriarchy in the 1980s. Although their characters were shown to struggle with loneliness, psychological confusion caused by the collapse of traditional familial structures and values, and the sense of alienation that people experienced in the modern world, the feminine that emerges in their narratives is still by and large in line with existing patriarchal gender discourses. On the other hand, when writers like Yang Guija, Kang Sokkyong, Kim Chi-won and Kim Minsuk (to name a few) did more or less explicitly choose to criticize patriarchal power structures in their narratives, the general social criticism visible in their works meant that the explicitly feminist voice of their stories was quite often lost to the reading public. In other words, their works were interpreted according to the existing nationalistic and patriarchal discourses of femininity that effectively frustrated the

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 47 nascent potential of counter-discourse that existed within them. 35 Morality was still conceptualized in terms of male nationalism and female chastity, and the saintly mother was desexualized in public discourses of femininity. 36 It is difficult to say then how the critical success of these women writers could be seen as a triumph of gender equality. Rather, their success is perhaps descriptive of the extent to which they had learnt to write in such a way that they maximized their positive reception with the reading public at this given time in history. But whatever the reason, by the end of the 1980s they had amassed enough symbolic power to be recognized as writers equal to their male counterparts. They succeeded in claiming the oft-evasive title of chakka (writer) for themselves, as opposed to yosong chakka (woman writer) or indeed the somewhat derogatory title of yoryu chakka. Having thus secured a place with the other 'consecrated' producers of culture, they paved the way for new women writers who no longer had to struggle against the gender-biased critical establishment to get recognized, despite being women. Most importantly, by the 1990s women writers now had a voice and medium through which to contest traditional representations of the feminine that had proved so difficult to cast off in the past. WOMEN WRITERS OF THE 1990S The 1990s was a decade in Korea when a lot happened to challenge the necessity of conforming to traditional gender roles. The 1980s had ended with a moral high for the democratic movement. In 1987 Roh Dae Woo (No Tae-u) was chosen as the first democratically elected president in direct elections, even if his presidency subsequently failed to deliver any radical reforms of the repressive political structure. Nevertheless, his presidency prepared the ground for Kim Young Sam (Kim Yongsam) to become the first democratically elected civilian president in 1992. An enormous popular movement for democracy that had marked the 1980s was thus followed by a real sense of exhilaration when Kim was elected, and the new decade seemed to hold an exciting promise of political change. 37 The 1992 presidential election also heralded the end of censorship and state-enforced labour and social control, and effectively witnessed the end of the cultural nationalism of the 1980s. There was a change in the general atmosphere among writers as the sense of emergency that had characterized the minjung-inspired literary politics receded. Writers, whether men or women, no longer felt obliged to write about issues of great political or social importance,

48


such as democracy or human rights, albeit many continued to do so. Instead, the 1990s witnessed the rise of a new kind of writer who was less concerned with writing social commentary and distanced themselves from political discourses of working class struggle and narratives of dislocation that dealt with the national division. With the general rise in affluence, education and political freedom as well as increasing openness to foreign cultural influences through the internet and technology based media, there was a sense that the need for direct literary politics somewhat receded. While some continued to reflect on the often traumatic events of the 1980s, such as the Kwangju uprising, others turned to describing how people now lived and existed in a society where values that were previously thought central to harmonious human existence now seemed to give way to other concerns. Most markedly, there was a clear shift from writing about individuals' responsibilities in society to describing how individuals dealt with the often contrasting discourses that were informed by tradition, consumerism and urban modernity. It was as if people had somehow lost a greater sense of purpose, and the writers' literary response to this cultural vacuum was often centred on this perceived artificiality and inauthenticity of contemporary life. Caught in this kind of cultural void, many women writers began exploring what kind of subjectivities and identities women could have in such a society. The subject-topics of these writers differed from earlier women's writing on at least two levels. Firstly, most of these new writers claimed no particular political allegiance (such as socialist or nationalist stance), although some of their work can of course said to be political because of their marked focus on writing about the female subject. Lastly, their literary activities can also be seen as a reflection of the vacuity of modern existence that the erasure of democratic-nationalistic identity discourses had seemingly left behind. While there was a distinct move towards postmodern narratives that defied the existence of any singular truth about the nature of humankind, writers were increasingly avoiding statements about what is or is not morally acceptable for an individual in contemporary society. Yet for women this was not a straightforward task as a discourse on traditional familial values reared its head again, with a renewed emphasis on motherhood and maternal self-sacrifice, as well as promoting passive, yet 'sexy' femininity. This seemed at odds with postmodern ideas about humanity and new moral values, and there was a need to make sense of what position women could occupy in a post-minjung society that emphasized educating women only to continue to disadvantage them after graduation, both in the work place and at home.

Korean Women's Literature and Representations ofFemininity 49

Women writers who began publishing in the 1990s were typically university educated and highly socially and politically aware. After all, many of them had actively been involved in the student demonstrations for democracy in the 1980s. This group included writers such as Chon Kyongnin, Kim Insuk, Kong Chiyong, Shin Kyongsuk, Yi Hyegyong, o Suyon, Un Huigyong, Cho Kyongnan, Ha Songnan and so forth. Although they carne to be referred to as 'new generation women writers' (sinsedae yosong chakka), categorizing such a diverse group is problematic, to say the least. In fact, many resented being categorized as 'new generation' writers as they were not necessarily younger than the authors who began to publish in the 1980s. What they had in common, however, was their marked focus on the female subject, albeit this was not always intentional as not all of them considered themselves as feminist writers as such. Instead, as these women writers found themselves part of a literary movement that was searching for new values, or indeed, sought to describe a total loss of traditional values, it was only natural that the writers chose to describe women's experiences and views on the same basis. What they did was to describe the effects of patriarchy on women on an individual, as opposed to collective, level. This did not mean, however, that women writers began to write romantic novels or pulp fiction. On the contrary, one could easily say that in their writing personal became political as individual women's concerns were, for the first time, elevated to legitimate issues of debate. While styles and topics typically varied from writer to writer, many of the narratives are openly concerned with women and women's experiences in contemporary society. The authors whose works are discussed in this book are also to an extent representative of this diversity of the 1990s literary expression that concerned women and the representation of the feminine. UNHUIGYONG Although Un Huigyong was already in her forties when she began publishing in the 1990s, she is generally considered to be a 'new generation' author mainly because her stories tend to focus on women's lives and the way in_, which social practices stifle women's individual subjectivities. Un Huigyong became one of the most discussed authors of the latter part of the 1990s because of her unapologetic approach to examining modern relationships between men and women. She was born in 1959, and graduated from Sookrnyung Women's University with a degree in Korean Literature and made her first attempt to write literary fiction whilst

so

Representations ofFemininity

studying for a Masters degree at Yonsei University in Seoul. After university, she worked as a high school teacher and publishing consultant, and was eventually employed at a publishing house and women's magazine. She began writing full-time in 1994, taking a sabbatical year during which she wrote five short stories and a novel. 38 Her first critical success carne with her short story 'Duet' (Ijungju, 1995) which won recognition in the Donga Ilbo literary competition. Her commercial breakthrough carne in the following year with the winning of the first Munhak Dongnae literary prize with a controversial novel titled 'The Bird's Gift' (Sae i1i sonmul). In 1997, she won the tenth Dongs~ Literary prize with a collection of short stories titled 'Talking to the Other' (T'ain ege malgOlgi), in 1998 the 22nd Yi Sang Literary Prize with a short story titled 'My Wife's Boxes (Nae anae i1i sangja), and in 2000 she won the 26th Korean Novels Literary Prize (Han'guk sosOl munhaksang). She has continued to be one the most prolific authors of the latter part of 1990s and 2000s. Critics often like to describe her as a 'problematic' author who writes about love and marriage, but in a way that seeks to subvert generally accepted ideas of the nature of love. For her love is not the sentimental or naive self-sacrificial kind of love that is often celebrated in traditional stories or some contemporary melodramas. Instead, she described love as something that requires a constant effort in order for it to survive. She often discusses love within the boundaries of marriage, and mocks the ideals of romantic love and fairytale endings so often depicted in 1990s Korean television dramas. She also frequently portrays marriages within which communication between men and women has broken down, and consequently relationships are wrought with misunderstanding and mental anguish. Her subject-topics also include motherhood, but she appears to deliberately avoid depicting traditional selfsacrificial maternal images that she herself finds oppressive. 39 Un herself claims that her aim is to make readers uncomfortable with accepted notions about the validity of existing cultural values and practices.40 Arguably it has been her descriptions about people's private lives behind the facade of ideal families that have made her particularly popular among the reading public. Nevertheless, Un herself asserts that although many critics have described her as an author who is on a quest to discover 'feminine identity', her aim has always been to write about humanity, and not exclusively about women. She complains that 'when men write about their problems it is perceived as writing that deals with issues relating to human existence. On the contrary, when women write, they are criticized for trying to discover their "feminine

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity

51

selves" [through writing].' 41 It is telling that while she takes a non-committal stance with regard to gender politics, her focus has decidedly been on how women in particular respond to the contradictions of contemporary life. CHON KYONGNIN Unlike Un, Chon Kyongnin is a self-proclaimed feminist writer, whose works are occasionally reminiscent of Angela Carter in their unapologetic attempts to subvert accepted ideals of femininity through creating fantastical or non-dogmatic alternatives. Chon Kyongnin was born in 1962, and graduated from Kyongnam University with a degree in German Language and Literature. She became a very popular writer in a short period of time after her first short story, 'The Moon over the Wilderness' (Sa mag iii tal), won the Dong-a Ilbo Spring Literary Award in 1995. In the following year she won the 29th Han'guk Ilbo Literary Prize with a short story titled 'The Woman who Tends Goats' (Yomso ri1l monifn yoja), followed by the Second Munhak Dongnae Literary Prize with a novel titled 'A Man Who Is Nowhere' (Amu kos eta omniin namja) in 1997. In 1999, she won the Third 21st Century Literary Award with The 'Merry-goround Circus Woman' (Merigouraundif sogosif yoin), consolidating her position within the emerging group of new literary celebrities. Chon is an explicitly feminist writer whose works openly explore how patriarchal society's oppression affects women's lives. Her childhood experiences of living in 'traditional' family surroundings in a small regional town, where sons were privileged over daughters, are likely to have affected the choice of subject topics in her works. Having been a housewife before she began writing, she has noted that writing for her became a somewhat cathartic experience.42 She often resorts to the fantastic literary mode in order to interrogate the existing cultural meanings attached to femininity, and seeks to subvert the homogenized idea of modern women whose identities are perceived as unproblematic and uniform in existing discourses about femininity. Accordingly, Chon's characters are typically struggling with their self-identities, which are fragmented or fluctuating because they cannot fit into the feminine roles or models that society expects of them. She also writes about the damage inflicted on women's consciousnesses through false representations of essentialized feminine roles, and how women are encouraged to live lives that are not really their own. Some of her protagonists are women who are simply content to live lives mirroring someone else's ideas of how they should live their lives. Others refuse to accept the ideals of virtuous femininity

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and its promise of a docile, spiritless existence and choose to rebel instead. 43 In this sense, Chon's work represents the most aggressive counter-discourse among the writers in this book, as she is actively engaged in finding alternatives to existing discourses of femininity in the context of 1990s Korean society. HASONGNAN Although Ha Songnan (b. 1967) is not by any means associated with feminist writing as such, many of her works deal with the absurdity of contemporary life from a woman's point of view in which traditional values seem laughably outdated and simply function to stifle any sense of real subjectivity. She made her debut with a short story 'Grass' (P'u[), which was published in the daily Soul sinmun in 1996. In 1999, she won the Choson Ilbo Dong-in Literary award with a short story titled 'Flowers of Mould' (Komp'ang'i kkOt), followed by the Han'guk Ilbo Literary Award in 2000 for her short story 'Joy to the World' (Kippuda kuju osyonne), and has since established herself within the contemporary literary scene. Many of Ha's stories depict urban life and the way people living in cities have become part of the machinery of the modern day city. 44 Her concern is not so much with describing the effects of political and social upheavals in society, but rather she depicts protagonists who struggle to come to terms with the meaninglessness of their everyday lives. Ha's stories generally deal with abject things in life and the 'other' that haunts people but is kept well out of sight, and because of this some readers find her works uncomfortable. In her works the uncontrollable, almost primeval aspects of human existence- murderous thoughts, sexual desire, abject waste of human existence- resurface and upset the lives of her protagonists. Although many readers find Ha's style challenging, some critics have also praised her 'refreshing' usage of the Korean language. Her narrative style is usually detached, and intriguingly often elevates inanimate objects to the status of characters, making them as important as the protagonists themselves. Her typically extradiegetic narrative style avoids passing any moral judgements on characters, and it is left to the reader to make up their own mind about the moral virtues or failings of her protagonists. Although her stories do include female protagonists, Ha is rarely referred to as a 'feminist' writer, and critics see her generally as someone who describes the modern day 'human condition' rather than women's issues in particular. 45 In some ways this is quite significant, as she has in actual fact succeeded in making the politics

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 53 of mundane everyday life a legitimate subject for literary discourse, especially since many of her stories are set within the microcosm of the family. And for the purposes of this book, her decidedly nonfeminist stance also offers a fertile ground for analysing unconscious representations of the feminine in 1990s women's literature in Korea. NARRATING THE FEMININE SUBJECT

Gender-political intentions aside, the choice to focus on the female subject on these writers' part has been enormously significant, because it represents an important shift from the 1980s literary politics where it was ultimately men's experiences that were taken as representative of describing the nation's path to democratization. On the contrary, women's experiences and views in these discourses always remained somehow peripheral, and were perceived to represent interesting, but almost anecdotal evidence of what was happening to those who represented the silent 'other' of the society. The decided focus on the female subject in the 1990s women's writing, however, signalled a shift from discussing injustices arising from political oppression and the differences between the wealthy and the poor, to describing how gender affects individuals' experiences and possibilities in life. Women's writing thus became a site to explore and analyse patriarchal perceptions and ideologies that continued to inform ideas about women and femininity. In essence, it opened up a debate about the validity of existing ideologies that dismissed women's dreams and opinions limits their subjectivity to being facilitators of men's self-realization. Accordingly, characters that typically feature in these stories are unhappy housewives living in claustrophobic domestic existence, women who engage in extramarital affairs or just simply female characters who do not fit into any traditional categories and suffer ostracism as a result. These narratives struck a chord with a wide readership who sympathized with these new kinds of literary anti-heroines. As a growing number of highly educated women married and left work to raise children at home, they soon became disillusioned with traditional family values and practices which seemed increasingly outdated. Women in their late twenties or early thirties in particular received mixed messages of what married life as a housewife was like. In fact, the romanticizing discourse of domestic femininity in television dramas obscured the very real social resentment that individual women experienced within the domestic. On the contrary, the reality of domestic existence described in women's

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fiction is a world apart from the fantasy world of television family soaps. These narratives thus exposed the gap between women's hopes and experiences as university students, and what happened when existing structures in society could not support their subsequent efforts for self-realization. Female protagonists in these narratives are materially satisfied but essentially lonely and frustrated. Their marriages appear to lack any real affection, and both men and women in them seem to inhabit a space where their respective dreams and desires never quite seem to meet. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, many narratives describe women who shed the traditional image of a long-suffering wife and instead head off for pastures new in search of new life (albeit very rarely with much happier consequences). While the majority of stories is marked by a sense of powerlessness and inability to find alternative feminine roles, the 1990s women's literature nevertheless represents an antidote to the neo-conservative attitudes towards gender and women. CRITICAL RECEPTION OF THE 1990S WOMEN'S FICTION It is no great surprise that feminist literature, or literature written openly about and for women, received a mixed reaction from critics. After all, the rhetoric of women's unease with the domestic and even refusal to reproduce in normative heterosexual relationships stabbed at the very heart of the imagined 'Koreanness', because it stubbornly refused to reproduce the idea of a nation as a community of heroic men and their suffering mothers. In fact, it is striking how the situation resembled the one the sin yosong faced in the 1920s, in that in the 1990s there was a similar attempt to distinguish female 'new generation' writers' work from the canon of Korean national literature through branding it 'feminist'. This act of naming was potentially damaging to the literary credentials of these writers, since feminist literature within the Korean field of cultural production was always considered to lie outside 'Korean' literature in that it was firstly and foremost seen to be about that which concerns itself with women and women's experience, and only secondarily the Korean society (imagined as a community of men). The implicit suggestion within this act of naming was that men's literature remains the standard against which this 'feminist' literature was judged. Thankfully, there was to be no repeat of the 1920s, and the writers turned out to be a phenomenal critical and commercial success. There were a number of critics who embraced the 'new

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 55 generation' writers and their bold approach to describing women's lives and sexualities. Kwon Song-u, for example, claims that this group of writers had become such a central part of the Korean literary scene by the mid-1990s that they established themselves as 'the most prized possession' of modern national literature. 46 This statement is descriptive of how these writers became recognized as an important part of the literary establishment of late twentiethcentury Korea, which suggested they had amassed enough symbolic power as cultural producers to now have a voice and a platform from which to contest existing ideas about femininity. It is also telling that, despite some efforts by the literary establishment to disqualify contemporary literary discourses as irrelevant by criticizing them for shallowness and political disengagement, the sinsaede writers of the 1990s found a receptive and enthusiastic audience, particularly in female readers. This factor has been a particularly important point in deciding the success of the sinsaede writers, as towards the end of the 1990s the majority of people who bought literary works were women. It is arguably not too far-fetched to assume that this is explained by the statistics that show Korea as having one of the highest numbers of women with university degrees, but who nevertheless chose to become full-time housewivesY These highly educated housewives formed a savvy and profitable market for publishers, as demonstrated in the way the 'new generation' women writers' books frequently topped the list of bestsellers. As the Korean publishing industry experienced massive growth in the 1990s and bestsellers that sold one million copies or more were no longer rarities, their commercial success enabled many writers to become wealthy enough to write full-time- a privilege not enjoyed by many before the 1990s.48 A successful woman writer was no longer an exception, and by the 1990s becoming a writer was an appealing career choice for many. After all, it offered a potentially well-paid career opportunity and a public voice, not to mention the critical recognition that went with it. It is telling, however, that when women began to write about the domestic, this was often taken as evidence of their refusal to take part in the discourses concerning wider society, and of their desire to 'wallow' in issues that concern exclusively women. Some critics continued to question the relevance of women's literature in relation to more 'important' issues in society, although one suspects that this can also be seen as symptomatic of some very real anxiety about the growing popularity of these women writers. As these budding new writers won numerous literary prizes and accolades, there was a great deal of worry about the 'feminization' (yosonghwa)

56


of Korean literature. 49 For the majority of literary critics, after all, the ideal writer had until then generally been one who con-

cerns himself with issues deemed of national importance, such as national division, social inequalities, class division, democracy or the lack of it, and so forth. Hence when the sinsaede writers turned out to be much more interested in finding new ways to describe women's lives without feeling obliged to provide social commentary or draw moral lessons from the lives of their protagonists, many critics openly worried about the nation's collective moral state. In fact, this focus on individual desire caused a minor crisis in the critical field, as evaluating literary works on the basis of their 'moral soundness' became difficult when so many of the works seemed to fly in the face of any existing moral values. Some saw the portrayals of loveless marriages and family relationships without any particular sense of affection as evidence of a society lacking any real human values. 50 Others criticized women writers for 'being obsessed with themselves', and instead of writing about issues in modern society that called for social criticism (such as the lack of compassion and proliferation of greed), women writers were seen merely interested in obtaining cathartic relief in their private identity crises through focusing on what one critic refers to as 'women's inner psychology'. 5 1 It is telling that it was in particular because of this perceived irrelevance to wider society and the focus on specifically female identity and sexuality that many- prominently malecritics saw the popularity of sinsaede literature as a threat to 'serious' literature. 52 It was occasionally referred to as 'literature of desire' (yongmang i1i munhak) because it included topics that had previously been considered as taboo, such as female sexuality and sexual desire, and which now frequently featured in these writers' works. Although female sexuality had featured in 1920swomen'sliterature, it now resurfaced as a common theme during the 1990s. 53 While criticized for being 'obsessed with sex', women writers in actual fact attempted to move towards an expression of sexual subjectivity on an individual level, as opposed to describing collective experiences of a monolithic group of passive bodies. However, this was often taken as an example of the depravity of modern consumerist society that had become devoid of all moral values, rather than an attempt to subvert the existing sexual mores. The critical reception of 'new generation' women writers' works was thus soon divided into two groups: those who argued that their works lacked 'critical consciousness' because the writers were perceived to offer nothing more than semi-autobiographical musings on their inner feelingsi and those who praised their works as

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 57 faithful expressions of contemporary realities. It is intriguing to note within this context that while the writers enjoyed their newfound status as producers of new cultural meanings, their critical reception from feminist literary critics, who could after all be defined as women writers' natural allies, was equally divided. Part of the reason may be because the emergence of these writers coincided with a period of time when the field of Korean feminist literary criticism was also in a state of flux. As the political binary arguments between Left-Right politics faded with the democratization of the society in the 1990s, many critics were also bereft of a clearly defined ideology that could inform and lend critical grounding to their analyses of literary texts. Just as their male counterparts, feminist critics perceived that the literary field itself had also somehow lost direction. As a result, some critics felt that what was needed was a creation of 'women's culture' which would represent an accurate cultural expression of what it means to be a woman in the changing society. 54 For some, the way to define such a culture was to attempt to define paradigms for 'good feminist literature', which would in turn allow for a clear set of rules by which women's literature could be appreciated as an expression of their gender. For example, Chong Yongja defines 'good feminist literature' as literature that must pursue the agenda of creating conditions in which women can live 'worthwhile lives'. 55 There was thus a tendency to insist on the social responsibility of both the critic and the author, and on maintaining that writing- whether it is in the form of criticism or narrative art- must be seen first and foremost as a political act. 5 6 In addition to being politically motivated, there was a strong argument that women's literature would have to be in essence socially constructive or responsible, as its main task would then be to awaken women's awareness of their equal rights with men. In some ways there was a desire to influence contemporary women writers to fit the criteria for politically correct or desirable writing, and in doing so create a sense of direction for the feminist movement as a whole. Many feminist critics also remained uneasy about the topic of female sexuality, which remained an under-discussed area of feminist studies in Korea in the 1990s. 57 There was a concern that even though the new generation of writers had become bolder in their approach to the rhetoric of sexuality, they still all too easily equated sexual liberation with the achievement of gender equality. Song Chihyong, for example, argued that sexual liberation would eventually be a counter-productive reaction to the patriarchal structure's constraints, because sexually explicit narratives would serve as a 'sublimation of men's dreams', and as such women

58


would become the victims of their own liberation. She asserted that, as the society's political, economic and social systems did not support gender equality, to think that gender equality could be accomplished through sexual liberation is nothing but 'fantasytalk'. 58 Similarly, Kim Mihyon argued that rather than liberating women, explicit writings about sexually liberated women will only serve to repress women. In fact, she perceived 'new generation' women writers' literature as offhand and blithe in its pursuit of pleasure, and therefore selfish and antisocial as it 'encourages antipathy between the opposite sexes'. 5 9 Kim also argued that such works alienated male readers through their perceived militant feminism, and potentially even female readers who would be unable to see the relevance of such ideas in their own everyday lives. ro The critics certainly have a point here, and as I will discuss in Chapter Five, simply talking about female sexuality does not necessarily amount to a textual subversion of existing representations of femininity. That said, 1990s women's literature in Korea represented tentative but simultaneously powerful efforts to create new discourses of femininity. In resisting traditional and existing categorizations of the feminine, they in effect attempted to problematize the very concept of female identity or the symbolic representation of women. For that reason, their writing could no longer be taken as a simple reflection of women's 'real' experiences in society, even if they have been occasionally read as such. The following chapters will engage with these discourses of dissent within thematic spaces that have been typically assigned to the feminine. However, what is significant about these discourses is that the feminine discussed in them emerges as a sign of difference (rather than a point of reference) through contesting the complementary thinking that has positioned the feminine as the inverted opposite of the masculine within contemporary Korean cultural imagination. NOTES 1

2

Lacan discusses these in Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience', in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 1-7; and in Jacques Lacan, Speech and language in psychoanalysis, trans. with notes and commentary by Anthony Wilden (Baltimore and London The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Luce Irigaray, 'The Bodily Encounter with the Mother', p. 39.

Korean Women's Literature and Representations of Femininity 59 3 4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

Helene Cixous, 'Castration or Decapitation', trans. and ed. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7:1 (1981): 41-55. See further discussion on this in Carter J. Eckert, et al., Korea Old and New, a History (Seoul: llchokak Publishers, 1990), pp. 222-53. Yung-Chung Kim argues that women's movements in this early modem period cannot be discussed in terms of 'individual liberation from stereotyped feminine roles' because the aims of these movements were more complex than that. She asserts that 'the term "women's liberation" in modem (Korean) usage, which lacks political nationalistic consciousness, does not characterize the depth and breadth of Korean women's social and political participation in the history of their country at his time'. (See Kim Yung-Chung, p. 266.) Suhji-young, 'Collision of Modem Desires: Nationalism and Female Sexuality in Colonial Korea', The Review of Korean Studies 5:2 (2002), 111-32 (pp. 115-16); and Kenneth M. Wells, 'The Price of Legitimacy: Women and the Kunuhoe Movement, 1927-1931', in Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds. Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Asia Center & Harvard UP, 1999), pp. 191-220 (pp. 201-205). There was a tendency to present the nation as a suffering female in the 'transitional' period of Korean literary history. Writers such as Kim Kyoje, Yi Haejo, Yi lnjik, Yi Sanghyop and Pak Iyang wrote about female protagonists who suffered at the hands of their inlaws, parents, husbands and even marriage brokers. However, unlike the traditional stories, these narratives concentrated on social and political injustices such as class divisions and poverty (Ann Sunghi Lee, 'Escape from the Inner Room', Korean Culture 12:2 (1991), 14-21). So Chongja, Han'guk kiindae yiisong sosol yon'gu (~~ctll <XI AJ ±1i ~ -T) [A Study of Modem Korean Women's Literature] (Seoul: Kukhak charyuwon, 1999), p. 20. Wells, p. 192. Yi Kwangsu's Mujong (Heartless), published in 1917, is a good example of such a novel. Suhji-young, pp. 112-27. Yung-Chung Kim, pp. 278-9. For further discussion of these writers see: Carolyn P. So, 'Seeing the Silent Pen: Kim Myongsun (1896-c. 195 1), a Pioneering Woman Writer,' Korean Culture 15:2 (1994), 36-7; Chong Sunjin, pp. 263-S; and Song Myoghui, Munhak kwa song iii ideollogi (~~»1- A.j .9l 0]1:-i]%.£71) [The Ideology of Literature and Gender] (Seoul: Saemi, 1994), p. 15. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 118. So Chongja notes that the term chakp'um omniin mun'in saenghwal

60

Representations of Femininity was used to describe this (pp. 19-20). See also Ch'oe Chongsuk,

Yosong munhag iii munbOp kwa pip'yong (:] !!f ~) [The Last House by the Sea; a collection of short stories] (Seoul: Saeng'gak iii namu, 1998), pp. 37-76 (p. 59). Seungsook Moon notes that 'the role as family provider as an element of hegemonic masculinity is the material basis of men's authority as fathers and husbands. Similarly, men's earning power is a commonly accepted indicator of their manliness' ('The Production and Subversion of Masculinity', p. 86). Similarly, Park Boo Jin notes that 'with the emphasis on capitalism [. .] the patriarch who cannot guarantee a sufficient income becomes [an] object of criticism, is seen as incompetent, and occasionally gets asked for divorce' ('Patriarchy in Korean Society: Substance and Appearance of Power', Korea Joumal41:4 (2001), 48-74 (pp. 67-8). Park Boo Jin asserts that in the context of contemporary Korean society, 'the patriarch, responsible for the livelihood [of the family], secures his authority according to the position [of] his profession and earned income, and the wife has gained the right to demand satisfactory accomplishment of the patriarch's economic duties' (p. 67). Chon, 'Pam iii nasonhyong kyedan', p. 48. Ibid., p. 74. Dn Huigyong, 'Yolsoe' (~ ~) [Keys], in T'ain ege malgolgi (E}'tl 01]71] ~~7]) [Speaking to the Other] (Seoul: Munhak Dongnae, 1996), pp. 185-220 (p. 194). It should be noted that the mother may have decided to leave Yongsin with relatives because of a fear that the new stepfather might mistreat the child. However, this is never made clear in the story, and can only be inferred from the cultural context. Cho, 'Living with Conflicting Subjectivities', p. 175. Yi Eunhee Kim points out that 'the emergence of the nuclear family and of romantic marriages [. .] does not necessarily mean that a cultural sanction is placed on the independence and autonomy of the individual and the nuclear family, as is the case in the West. [. .] Even when married sons do not live with their parents,

132

37 38

39 40

41

42 43 44

45

46

47

48

49 50 51

52


they, together with their wives and children, are still considered members of one [. .] "patrilineal extended family", while married daughters and children are not' ('Mothers and Sons in Modern Korea', p. 9). Dn, 'Yolsoe', Pe· 192-3 (ellipses in the original). At this point, Un's story converses with that of Chon discussed in the earlier section, by pointing out that economic independence does not necessarily translate to a viable civil identity. Irigaray, Key Writings, pp. 197--8. Ibid., p. 159-60. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian G. Gill (London: Athlone, 1993), p. 102. Ibid., pp. 108-109. Dn, 'Yolsoe', p. 220. See for example: An Sugwon et al., Han'guk yosong munhak pip'yongnon (Seoul: Kaemunsa, 1995), pp. 9-10. Joanna Elfving-Hwang, 'The Improper Desire for Knowledge: Degendering Curiosity in Contemporary Korean Women's Literature', in Korea: The Past and the Present, eds. Susan Pares and James Hoare (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008), pp. 446-54 (p. 448). Margaret Whitford, Luce Iriga ray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 185. Margaret Whitford, 'Irigaray, Utopia and the Death Drive', in Engaging with Irigaray, eds. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), pp. 379-400 (p. 388). Chon Kyongnin, 'Saenun onjena kugos e itta' (41::: 'i!~]L} .:::z.*oJl ~) ct) [The Birds Are Always in That PlaceL in Yomso riil moniin yoja (~S:~ .2.:::: oj:A}) [The Woman Who Tends Goats] (Seoul: Munhak Dongnae, 1996), pp. 215-42 (p. 217). Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 228. Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air, pp. 44-5. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, pp. 100-105. It should be noted that Irigaray's idea of this utopian past is not based on archaeological evidence, but rather she draws a conclusion that such a time must have existed before the emergence of patriarchal social systems. I doubt that Irigaray has actually attempted to present an actual historical fact here. Instead, she focuses on the development of narrative structures in myths that seem to favour father-son relationships over mother-daughter relationships. Luisa Muraro notes that in Irigaray's later work, she begins to concentrate on the positives of female genealogy, discussing it in terms of the Demeter-Kore couple, 'which represents the mother-daughter

The Maternal Feminine and Female Genealogies

53 54 55 56

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relation characterized by natural harmony and spiritual fruitfulness' (Luisa Muraro 'Female Genealogies,' trans. Patricia Cicogna, in Engaging with Irigaray, eds. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), pp. 317-34 (p. 331)). Irigaray's analyses of the myths are thus to be read as explorations beyond set ideas about the feminine within existing patriarchal symbolic orders, rather than attempts to rewrite history before patriarchy. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, p. 106. Chon, 'Saenun onjena kugos e itta', p. 230. Ibid., p. 241. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, p. 14.

5

Female Sexuality

hen Korean women writers of the 1990s began describing W women's sexual experiences in their narratives, it was as if there was an expectation that the simple act of talking about this previously taboo topic would in itself prove subversive of traditional ideas of femininity. After all, given the pervasive focus on female chastity, the very issue of talking about women's sexualities, in other than a reproductive sense, had always been approached with some considerable unease. In this respect, to imply that female sexuality could be conceptualized and represented as active en par with male sexuality was a scandalous move to many readers and critics. For the women writers, however, shifting the thematic locus beyond women's domestic oppression to the female body was less about wanting to shock their readership, and more about contesting the issue of who 'owns' and controls women's bodies. In practice, however, it turned out to be not as straightforward as that. While even the very decision to write about women's sexualities was undoubtedly a bold move on the writers' part, there was again a problem with how to conceptualize alternative models to the existing ideas which still relied on essentially Neo-Confucian discourses about human sexuality in Korea within which the phallus was seen as the sole signifier of a sexed subject. In other words, since women's lack of the phallus in the discourse of human sexuality is perceived to rob them of any significant agency in society (given their supposed irrationality and passivity) women within it are represented as passive receptors whose natural desire is to marry and engage in heterosexual relationships with men. In contrast to this understanding of women's bodies as non-desiring receptacles and nurturing wombs, male sexuality is perceived as by nature impulsive, even to the extent of always potentially losing control. Accordingly, masculinity is associated with sexual prowess

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and discharge in particular, whereas femininity is associated with chastity and complete lack of sexual desire. Because of the lack of sexual desire, women are also seen as defenceless against male sexual energies, and in need of constant supervision to protect them, legitimizing a demand for absolute female chastity. The yin-yang binaries, which could have been interpreted to explain the governing principles of the nature of two separate and equivalent gender identities, were appropriated in the Korean NeoConfucian philosophy in a somewhat distorted way that promoted masculinity as the normative expression of human sexuality. This, in effect, foreclosed the possibility of accepting sexual identities of any other kind. While the Great Ultimate itself does not indicate an existence of a hierarchical relationship between yin and yang, the practical application of the principles of yin as the 'earth' and yang as the 'heaven' (ruling over the earth) led to an understanding of the feminine more as a complement to the masculine, rather than its autonomous 'other'. The feminine and the female sex within this discourse appear to be necessary in order to signify that which the masculine sex is not. Not only this, the existence of the female sex is always associated with functions that are required in order to preserve the masculine subject in terms of reproduction and nurture. This, in turn, reduces female sexuality to the one essential quality that it appears to embody: the maternal. Yet, and as discussed earlier, while women's bodies are recognized to have this important reproductive function, the active life-engendering aspect of the female body is rendered impotent through a process of imagining female bodies in terms of passivity and chastity within the Korean symbolic order. The female body is considered both instrumental in its essential function of providing a service as a womb for the nurturance of the life-energy imparted by the masculine. However, all the active elements it also embodies are played down in order to highlight the perceived superior symbolic value of the masculine. It is also intriguing that even though female sexuality is in actual fact independent of reproduction in that it can experience sexual enjoyment without the necessity to engage in an act that is essentially reproductive (whereas ejaculation is always connected to reproduction), it is women's sexualities that continue to be conceptualized in terms of reproduction in Korea and other patriarchal societies as well. As Spivak notes, women in patriarchal symbolic orders of representation have undergone 'symbolic clitoridectomy' in terms of representation in that while the penis signifies a sexed male subject, it is the womb and not the clitoris that is presented as the signifier of the sexed female subject. 1

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I also suspect that the demand for a highly regulated female sexual behaviour in the context of Korean culture stems, at least in part, from the clearly worrying logic that the same elemental philosophy that seems to divide human sexuality into two distinct sexes, is also subject to some considerable fluctuation. After all, since the yin and yang are perceived to have the potential to interact within the human body, they might, if not kept in check, produce bisexual bodies. This uncomfortable likelihood that bisexual behaviour was simply lurking under the surface of proper decorum was undoubtedly one of the reasons why the Cho.sOn society organized around patriarchy required a discourse that emphasized male bodies as 'active' and female bodies as 'passive' in order to keep these presumably rampant energies in check.2 And having survived the test of time, this dualistic view of human sexuality has now come to be regarded as simply commonsensical, even in the context of contemporary Korean society. Any notion of active sexed subjectivity and female jouissance are thus placed hierarchically below the masculine and the maternal function within this conceptualization of human sexuality. In this sense, as the material value of the feminine is embodied in the maternal, feminine sexuality is also reduced to a mere function instead of representing a form of subjectivity in its own right. The cosmic feminine 'other' in this discourse is thus reduced to an identity that can only be defined in relation to its celestial yang, and any other form of expression of female sexuality is subsequently considered an unacceptable deviation from this supposedly 'normative' sexual passivity. Both men's and women's sexualities thus focus on the phallus, with the yang always the dominant despite its constant interaction with, and even dependence, on the yin. Such passive conceptualization of female sexuality is of course not unique to Korea, and corresponds surprisingly closely to what Irigaray observes about what she refers to as 'the discourse of truth' that underlies the logic informing Freudian psychoanalytic theory. 3 This male-centred theory of women's sexuality mirrors very closely the understanding of female sexuality in the Korean cultural context- the difference being that this discourse of feminine sexuality is legitimized not through presumably scientific discourse but through the philosophical discourse of perceived universal truths. The focus of the Neo-Confucian discourse is also more on emphasizing the need to repress female sexual desire in order to ensure social order, and for that reason the focus is not as much on the individual woman as it is on her position within the kinship unit that she is part of. This said, both the Freudian and Neo-Confucian discourses are conducive to demonstrating how the

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patriarchal logic of exclusion works when it comes to the question of female sexuality. The logic in both these discourses is descriptive of the patriarchal myth that seeks to present female sexuality within patriarchal symbolic as existing not in its own right, but as simply a negative reflection of male sexuality. Male sexuality is thus imagined as the normative form of all human sexuality. What is at work here then is the logic of exclusion which allows for the valorization of male sexuality through a denial of the intrinsic value of active, or clitoral, female sexuality. In this aspect, while based on no scientific evidence, Neo-Confucian and Freudian understandings of female sexuality thus mirror each other in their valorization of the penis as the only sexual organ of any significant value, and function as legitimizing discourses about the need to regulate and control women's bodies. Korean popular cultural representations of human sexuality in the 1990s also reflected this kind of valorization of male sexuality, and portrayed images in which men often appear as those who desire to 'conquer' the female body, whereas women desire to be 'conquered'. This reflects how the continuing symbolic representation of women's bodies and sexualities remained in many ways almost unchanged and focused on presenting male sexual subjectivity as the norm. 4 The ideology that informed cultural representations perpetuated a dualist view of sexuality which centred on male sexual desire and its focus on climax and discharge, while the sexual female body continued to be represented as a passive receptacle of that male desire. As a result, female sexuality was still predisposed to be misunderstood and devalued on the basis of its perceived inferiority to male sexuality within heterosexual relationships. This is turn perpetuated myths about women's sexualities and also informed many commonly held misconceptions about women's bodies and sexual identities. 5 In terms of sexual practices, this discourse was also aligned with discourses that related to social class and status. Michel Foucault's observations about 'bourgeois sexuality' and 'class sexualities' are particularly helpful in explaining the discourses at work here. Foucault points out how in the context of late eighteenth and the nineteenth century Europe, social differentiation could 'be affirmed, not by the "sexual" quality of the body, but by the intensity of its repression'. 6 This in my view reflects very closely the relation between women's class and sexual identities in 1990s Korea as well, which was still by and large informed by the discourse of compulsory female chastity (regardless of whether actual lived realities reflected this view or not). In other words, the female body was still perceived as a sacred enclosure reserved

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exclusively for procreation with only one partner. As a result, it was seen as natural for men to frequently engage in extramarital affairs to satisfy their sexual needs with as many partners as they wished. On the contrary, the continuing perception of women's bodies as nurturing receptacles meant that if a woman was to engage in such casual encounters with multiple partners there was no similar kudos attached to it? Arguably, the negative perception of active female sexuality was also in part informed by nationalistic cultural discourses that presented chastity as an expression of desirable 'Korean' feminine quality. As I have already discussed in a previous chapter, male-imaged literary discourses in particular have throughout the twentieth century located representations of women's bodies within anti-colonial or anti-communist discourses as metaphors for national integrity. It is intriguing to observe that while literary discourses that relate to national purity have focused on the male subject, it is the sexual (and occasionally abused) female body that emerges as a site to criticize men's failure to protect the nation. Before the 1990s, these metaphorical female-body-as-Korea discourses meant that male writers, who chose to represent or discuss their own perceptions of female sexuality in their works, dominated the very literary discourses on female sexuality. In contrast to this, and also arguably in part because of the stigma attached to the sin yosong discourses of the 1920s, women writers tended to avoid the topic until it resurfaced in the 1990s. In essence then, for the most part of the twentieth century, literary representations of female sexuality were male-imaged, or aligned with phallocentric and nationalistic discourses of the same. It comes as no surprise then that references to active female sexuality tended to be somewhat lewd, since active female sexuality often presented a signifier of the nation's degrading moral stance, or evidence of having 'sold out' to the foreign powers. 8 This is particularly evident in the numerous literary works about the lives of sex workers living around US military camp towns, known as kijich'on (military camp town) literature. 9 These works highlight women's physical and emotional abuse as sex workers, but more often than not also present the bodies of prostituted female bodies as evidence of the (symbolically) castrated Korean male's failure to protect the chastity of the bodies that are being metaphorically sacrificed to satisfy the foreign, imperialist desire. 10 In this sense, these socalled kijich'on narratives also speak against active female sexuality through highlighting the need for Korean men to 'protect' the vulnerable (Korean) female body, which should ideally be chaste and not available for the consumption by foreign men.

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While in literary discourses female sexuality was thus appropriated in this way, it did feature as a topic in its own right in other cultural media. In fact, in the 1990s women's sexuality became a topic that featured in women's magazines, but there was a peculiar consumerist twist to it. In an alleged liberation of female sexuality, women's bodies in these women's magazines became objects of a consumerist gaze, as the slim, flawless female body came to signify desirability and success. Cho Haejoang observes that in the 1990s women were encouraged, through advertising and media, to choose to become sexy 'in the name of individuality and selfexpression'.U The 'right' body image was presented as being of increasing importance for any self-respecting woman as the bodily expression of one's subjectivity was also increasingly perceived as way of gaining symbolic capital. In practice, dieting, beauty treatments and engaging in aesthetic surgery became a way of simply ensuring the best potential for success- whether it be in finding employment, a suitably well-off marriage partner, or even just happiness in terms of accepting one's own body image. When shopping in one of the markets in the vicinity of Ewha Womans [sic] University, I found it intriguing (and frustrating) that many clothes were only made in one size, and it was up to the woman to diet in order to fit into the available size. This also reflected the growing sense in the 1990s that beauty was equated with a slim body, and for those who felt less confident about their feminine charms, losing weight was seen a ticket to renewed self-confidence- not to mention just fitting into available clothing. 12 In the 2000s, this tendency to emphasize external appearance has arguably become of an utmost importance to many women in Korea, and the growing popularity to various forms of aesthetic surgery ranging from rhinoplasty to calf-muscle trimming reflects this. The fact that radical surgery has become an accepted form of improving one's appearance speaks volumes of the way some women (and an increasing number of men) consider aesthetic surgery as an empowering experience in attempting to attain that elusive 'sexy' appearance. But this focus on women's bodies was not only creating sales in the form of facial creams and dieting pills. In the marriage economy, the new image of a sexy, well-educated woman became an ideal for men who sought a partner. For women, television dramas and advertising enforced the idea that a beautiful sexy woman could find a loving husband with whom she could enjoy blissful married lifeP Kendall observed how this tendency first appeared in 1980s Korea, and noted that women who used a matchmaker's services to marry were often expected to be relatively tall and pretty, well educated, refined and well-mannered:

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If Korean brides are now more than pawns in the matrimonial schemes of their elders, they are less than equal players in a marital enterprise constructed on the premise that women attract and men choose. Young women measure themselves, and matchmakers measure their candidates, against a projected image of feminine attractiveness fostered by the media. 14

Unlike in the past when women's bodies were kept hidden and their sexualities were conspicuously repressed, in the 1990s women's bodies thus became not only the object of the gaze of others, but of their own as well. Yet there is a very important distinction to be made here in relation to visibility and changing sexual mores. The fact that women's bodies were now visible did not mean that the way in which women's sexualities were discussed and represented had undergone as radical change as it might have seemed. The focus was distinctly on being sexy rather than projecting a sexual subjectivity of a kind. Women's bodies were presented as objects of consumption for both men and women themselves, as objects of gaze and of appreciation, but within the existing framework of symbolic representation. For example, despite the more 'sexy' feminine image, women's sexualities were still not being publicly discussed outside the institution of marriage. Fundamentally speaking, the appearance of the 'sexy housewife' ideal did absolutely nothing to challenge the idea that women's bodies were still perceived as objects for men to possess, and the old ideals of submissive femininity still survived whether or not this message was packaged differently. 15 So-Hee Lee observes the same in the context of 1990s Korean popular culture in which 'female sexuality, especially a wife's sexuality, appears to be an object to be acquired, possessed, dominated and conquered'. 16 In fact, rather than sexually liberating women, the new image of a sexy (but not promiscuous) professional housewife put new demands on women in terms of physical appearance, but made no difference in the symbolic representation of women's sexualitiesY This passivity is reflected in how within marriage the woman's sexual desires were generally accepted to come after that of her husband, and sexual intercourse was still largely considered as the wife's duty, rather than a source of sexual pleasure. While popular television dramas and films released in the 1990s increasingly portrayed sexually active women who engaged in extramarital affairs, there was still a distinct sense that female sexual pleasure was always secondary to the need to gratify male sexual pleasure. Even though women's sexuality was referenced in the idea of a 'sexy' woman (a woman who dresses or behaves seductively in

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order to attract a man), sex within marriage, or heterosexual love in a long-term relationship or male-led illicit relationship, it was more difficult to find works that dealt with women seeking to gain control over their own bodies without any reference to masculine sexuality. In fact, female sexual pleasure was often represented as not arising from women's ability to enjoy their erogenous wnes, but from the pleasure of being able to satisfy men's sexual needs. The masculine was then always privileged over the feminine in this economy, and there was a real difficulty in shedding persistently negative and repressed views of female sexuality. In addition to this, there was still a continuing emphasis on compulsory motherhood within the traditional setting of marriage as a desirable social destiny for all women, which was seen to be contradictory to sexual desire. 18 In fact, women were perceived as so subsumed to their maternal function that, as Elaine H. Kim observes, they were considered almost asexual.1 9 Given that women's bodies had such increasingly visible presence in 1990s advertising and media, it is no wonder that many women writers sought to explore female sexuality in their works. While the popular culture emphasized the 'sexy' female body, women's literary works often attempted to present alternative representations of female sexuality, and to articulate something of what the existing cultural representations seemed to leave unsaid about the sexual female body. They contest the treatment of women's bodies as commodities, and seek to explore how women experience their own bodies and sexualities. However, for writers, the process of creating alternative discourses about female sexuality was also problematic because it went against the existing discourse of sexual morality which sought to categorize women either into 'ethical' asexual women (wives and mothers in marital relationships) and 'unethical' highly sexual beings (sex service workers), both of which seemed to exclude one or the other. 20 Indeed, this emerges as one of the main difficulties that women writers faced when writing about female sexuality, because it was not easy to articulate something that in some ways could not yet be represented in the existing symbolic order. This was also probably the reason behind the critical negative reaction against many such works, and some writers were quite frequently accused of 'voyeurism' and of 'obsession with petty feminine problems'. 21 However, on a closer analysis, what is significant about these literary representations is the way in which the descriptions of female sexual experiences are generally marked by a very real sense of alienation, claustrophobia and devaluation or even violation of women's sexuate bodies. What is conspicuously absent from these

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Representations ofFemininity

descriptions is a sense of joy, of jouissance and sexual fulfilment. References to sex are mundane, and the sexual act itself is simply a means to an end to escape loneliness or to engage in relationships, and the act itself is perceived as a simple physical or even primitive event. Occasionally, descriptions of these are as unromantic as they can get, and although women are presented as desiring sexual relationships, they almost invariably fall back into traditional sexual stereotypes where the woman becomes a container for the release of tension for the man. The main difficulty then seems to lie in imagining an active form of female sexuality that would not appear immoral.22 That is also why representations of women's sexualities and sexuate bodies emerge as a site of contesting male-imaged notions of the same, but not so much through articulating what female sexuality 'is', but rather through representing that which it is not like; namely, passive and a commodity. PASSIVE COMMODITIES

Korean women's literary representations of passive female bodies are positioned within a discourse that seeks to contest who 'owns' women's bodies, and whether women themselves can ever 'own' their bodies within the parameters of patriarchy, given that women's bodies are perceived as symbolic commodities to be exchanged between men in various conjugal relationships. I use the term 'commodity' here to refer to the symbolic positioning of women within the equation of gender relations, within which they are positioned in relation to men not only in terms of 'ownership' but also in terms of how female sexuality is disposed towards the male body. Ha S~ngnan's 'Nightmare' (Angmong, 1999) is particularly descriptive of how the conceptualization of female sexuality as a valuable commodity within the marriage market also affects the way physical violence against women's bodies is perceived in society. In particular, Ha questions the legitimacy of, and logic behind, accepting rape as an unfortunate side effect of the predatory male sex-drive without a reference to women's right to control what happens to that body. Ha's criticism in this narrative is levelled against conceptualizing virginity as a commodity within the marriage market, and sexual violence against women's bodies as an external event significant only in terms of whether it results in the woman's increased or decreased value within this economy. Ha's narrative follows the (mis)fortunes of a young and sexually inexperienced daughter of a fruit farmer who becomes a victim of sexual violence in the supposed security of her own room. The story opens with a scene in her room on the morning after she has

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been raped. Physically and psychologically traumatized, she seeks the help of her parents in trying to come to terms with the violation of her body, only to discover that they flatly deny anything has happened, despite the fact that she finds evidence of them attempting to cover up the physical signs of the rape. Lacking her parents' support, what follows is the protagonist's struggle to gain control of what happens to her body. Unwilling to forget her ordeal, the protagonist sets out to find the assailant and finds that he, in fact, works as a hired-hand, picking fruit in her father's pear grove. As she confronts him, he feigns innocence, claiming - like her parents - that she has merely had a nightmare, and even gives her a pair of scissors with instructions to fight back should the rapist reappear. Unable to find proof of what has happened or be listened to, the protagonist finally attempts to annihilate her assailant on his next nocturnal visit. However, as the attempt is unsuccessful, the narrator implies that the girl has begun an inevitable slide towards insanity. Central to 'Nightmare' is the way in which it exposes the cornmodification of female bodies within patriarchal society, which in turn causes society to ignore any psychological damage that such objectification might cause to individual women so long as their value as commodities is not affected. Female sexuality in this equation, rather than being a psychosexual construct, is thus merely understood as a manifestation of a purely physical quality pertaining to femininity. lrigaray refers to this almost disassociated way of thinking about women's physical bodies as a 'horn(rn)osexual economy', to describe a way of conceptualizing the value of human sexuality centred on 'the exclusive valorization of men's needs/ desires, of exchanges among rnen'. 23 In other words, this system of thought recognizes male sexuality as the normative expression of all human sexuality, and fails to account for or recognize women's sexual subjectivities that are different from those of men, yet of an equivalent value. In fact, women's sexuality in the context of the Korean horn(rn)osexual economy described in Ha's narrative appears as yet another commodity comparable to other perceived functions of the feminine such as motherhood and domestic duties. Ha's narrative is illustrative of this commodified perception of female sexuality. The young female protagonist in the story emerges as a 'product' that is being groomed for the marriage market. Her parents sponsor her through music lessons so that she gains the skills needed to become a piano teacher, which in itself is seen as a nice 'feminine' occupation that might impress potential suitors. They worry about boyfriends and keep a close

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eye on her phone calls in order to guard her chastity, and fantasize about the not-so-distant future when she will spend leisurely hours playing her piano in a city apartment instead of having to engage in manual labour like her parents. Equally, her virginity is perceived as simply an advantage within the marriage market, and so the sexual violation and involuntary loss of virginity is treated as an unfortunate accident, rather than an attack on her actual person. The parents' reluctance to take action against the man who raped their daughter is therefore not rooted in indifference towards their daughter, but in the sincere belief that covering up her ordeal is for her own benefit to increase her value in 'marriage market'. 24 The idea of her being a commodity haunts the story not only textually but symbolically as well. The story is set against the background of the protagonist's father's pear grove, and frequent references are made to his main marketing product, the pears. The maturation of pears in the trees provides a symbolic backdrop to mirror her innocent, maturing sexuality which is being stripped of its virginal purity through sexual violence. Like his daughter, each fruit is treated with care in order to ensure its full commercial value in the market: [The foreman explained:] 'Now look carefully. Handle them so that you won't bruise the fruit. If it gets bruised you won't get paid.' One of the workers in the trees joked: 'Handle them carefully, as if you were touching a young girl's bottom.' The workers laughed. But no matter how carefully you handled them, the pears were easily damaged. [. .] The locals would turn up to buy bruised or bug-eaten pears. They would sell them one-a-penny by the bus terminal or in the corner of the village market. [. .] These pears tasted sweet, but their colour was not attractive enough. Pears like that couldn't be sold as first-class produce.25 The narrative reinforces this symbolic suggestion of the importance of preserving the impression of being virginal and untouched. The chiasmus between the pears and a young girl's bottom illustrates graphically the effects of the genital violence of rape, and the way in which it has caused the girl to become 'damaged goods'. Moreover, the parents' reaction to the physical violation of their daughter's body further enforces the impression that she, like the pears, is on the 'market'; they go to great lengths to hide the loss of her virginity in an effort to limit the damage she has suffered as a commodity in the marriage market. Through this denial of the

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protagonist's experience, the narrative thus questions the cultural dichotomy she, as a woman, is faced with: to accept male violence or to fight against it at the cost of being 'devalued' in the market. Youngtae Shin notes that the legacy of traditional culture with its emphasis on female chastity (coupled with the Hegelian democratic notions of individual's 'free will') translates into a very unforgiving understanding of sexual violence against women. There is a persistent belief that if a woman's body is violated it is often thought that she had somehow caused the incident herself through negligence or provocation.26 Similarly, in 'Nightmare', the male sex drive is seen as a force that cannot be stopped, and therefore the solution to the problem of male violence is seen in the attempt to convince the protagonist to forget about the violation of her body, to ignore it and to regard it as a bad dream. While this story may have a consciousness-raising function about what may be going on behind closed doors, the narrative also reveals something much more profound about the positioning of female bodies within Korean symbolic order as objects to be protected or consumed, rather than belonging to the person who inhabits that body. What the deep narrative structure of Ha's story reveals is a troubling dismissal of civil identity that would allow for the protagonist to have control of her corporeality within the hom(m)osexual economy. This actively promotes the sacrifice of women's individual well-being in order to protect their value in the economy organized for the benefit of men. Within this context, while the narrative shocks with a description of the protagonist's parents' perceived insensitivity towards their daughter's plight, it also hints that part of the parents' reluctance to act might be due to the patriarch's failure to protect his daughter's innocence in the deceptive safety of her own room. This further enforces the idea of the daughter's body as a commodity to be protected, and the violation of that body causes the father anxiety over his masculine capacity to protect that body. Because of this, the effects of the actual act of male violence against her body are perceived as less harmful than the effects of punishing the perpetrator and making the female protagonist's ordeal public. The mother's inaction is also descriptive of how women too have internalized their position as passive bodies at men's disposal. Ultimately, the story shows how women as commodities are left with only two options to deal with their situation: either to accept it as 'bad luck' or to fight against it with physical violence on an individual levei.27 In 'Nightmare', the protagonist chooses to confront her aggressor, simply to be dismissed by him. The assailant taunts her by joking that if she keeps stalking him he might take it as a sign of her desire for his body, in an attempt to abdicate any

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responsibility for possible future violence. It is telling here that the perpetrator transfers part of the blame for the rape onto the victim: by virtue of being an object available for the male gaze, she should not imagine her position to be any different. As an object of consumption, it is her fate to be consumed: He stepped close to her and grabbed hold of her shoulders, his fingers examining her flesh. He moved them as if playing the piano and tickling her slightly. 'You've been dreaming. They say that young girls have dreams like that, don't they? Shall we call it a practice run of a kind?' He walked to the corner and rummaged through a plastic container. Pulling out a pair of scissors, he opened the girl's clenched fist and put the scissors in it. 'If you dream a dream like that again, slash the face of that bastard with these scissors. If it's not a dream like you say, his face will have a huge scar [as evidence of the attack which proves it took place].' Carrying a metal bucket he stepped out of the house, suddenly turning around. 'I will tell no one about your dream. And can I give you a warning? Don't come hanging around the lodgings or the pear trees again. The workers are simple people, you see. They'll think you like them. It's not difficult to climb up to the second floor [where your room is]. Your nightmare might even turn into reality if you're not careful.' 28

The choice of scissors as a weapon here is a telling one, as they clearly seem to suggest a possibility of male castration which serves only to reinforce the man's view of her as a docile body unable to defend herself. The protagonist, however, refuses the position of an object by resorting to the same form of action as her assailant: violence. When her father fails to act on her behalf, she takes action that seems to blur the limits of right and wrong: when confronted by the assailant again she seriously, possibly fatally, injures him with a pair of scissors. The textual representation of the event invites the reader to condone the girl's choice of action. The act of violence is in fact represented as a cathartic moment at which the protagonist momentarily gains control of what happens to her body, and also of the male body that she has in turn violated. Nonetheless, her attempt to stab and annihilate the rapist is not successful as he manages to escape. As a result of her failure to use a masculine form of force to protect herself, and because of the lack of support from her own social network, she eventually slips into madness. The escape into madness can be seen as her way of escaping the unbearable reality of her powerlessness, and to represent an unconscious rebellion against the system that seeks to treat her as a commodity and refuses to listen to her complaints. The prevailing

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nebulous mood of the story invites the reader to doubt whether the girl's experiences took place at all, and allows the reader to experience a similar kind of self-doubt that victims of rape often undergo. The final paragraph of the story describes how her cry for help is simply silenced by her loving but inadvertently insensitive mother who pleads for her to stop 'dreaming': She screamed. Her father's hand covered her mouth, but could not stifle her scream. Reality for her was a never-ending nightmare from which she could not wake up. The surroundings [in the pear grove] were slowly growing brighter with the rising sun. It wouldn't be long until it was time for the workers to wake up. The father exchanged a meaningful look with the mother who was standing behind her daughter. The mother pointed at an empty hollow on the ground and said to her with a worried voice: 'Look at this child. This is nothing but a dream, a dream. So please why don't you try waking up now.' 29 Even though the protagonist in 'Nightmare' does not succeed in gaining complete control over her body, the narrative itself succeeds in exposing the social acceptance of male violence that is made possible through the commodification of women which in turn results in their non-subjectivity within the symbolic order. The narrative is also descriptive of the fragile position that women as commodities occupy in the hom(m)osexual economy, and how women are effectively prevented from making meaningful decisions on what happens to their bodies, or on how violence against their bodies should be dealt with. The story thus emerges as a counter-discourse against any argument that women's position as commodities is advantageous to them. Moreover, through describing a protagonist who is actively seeking to fight against her position as a commodity, 'Nightmare' offers a powerful narrative contestation of the perceived naturalness of the female body as a docile receptor of sexual male violence. Yet, as the protagonist of this story can only overcome her position as a commodity through retreating into madness, the narrative also highlights the fact that such commodified bodies are essentially bodies that have no civil identity, and that they will remain vulnerable as long as they continue to be regarded as such. PASSIVE BODIES Another aspect of how female bodies are represented within the Korean symbolic order is the perceived 'naturalness' of passive

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female sexuality. In the 1990s, women's literary narratives also explored this, and how women seem to accept and interiorize not only the abuse, but the devaluation of their sexual subjectivities. For example, in Un Huigyong's 'Keys' (Yo'"1soe), which I discussed in an earlier chapter, the author highlights the difficulty of overcoming patriarchal ideology that not only informs women's relationships with each other, but also continues to emphasize motherhood and passive forms of sexuality. This suggests that despite the economic advances that women have made, economic wealth and independence do not automatically mean that women can suddenly change the way they view their sexuate bodies as separate and independent from male sexuality. In 'Keys' the underlying cause that perpetuates gender inequality is found in the absence of a role model who could have provided the main protagonist (Yongsin) with a positive image of femininity and female sexuality in particular. As the protagonist perceives her mother's sexuality to be the reason behind her forced separation from her mother, she too seems unable to come to terms with her own sexuality and to form lasting relationships with other people. Sexually, she appears not only passive, but frigid, and both she and her husband are shown to believe that her perceived frigidity is to blame for their awkward and sexually unsatisfying relationship. Paradoxically, although the husband is shown to be aware that Yongsin's traumatic childhood experiences have certainly something to do with her perceived frigidity, he fails to recognize that it is his focus on his own sexual demands and needs that perpetuate Yongsin's inability to come to terms with her body. In a passage in which Yongsin recalls their life together, she remembers how their sexual interactions had always taken place on his terms, even when he claimed otherwise: In the mornings he enjoyed embracing her. Often, by the time the little child next door had started his violin practice, he would have undone the buttons of her nightdress. She would stare at his fingers, which were performing their own little dance on her body. Still, but her body always remained cold [to his touch]. [...] She would have needed someone who could have understood her to enable her to enjoy physical closeness. But even when her husband desired her body, he did not have the patience to awaken her desire. And as time went on, they did not even expect to find any harmony in the bedroom. 30 The point highlighted here is then the continuing misrepresentation of female sexuality as a proxy to satisfy the needs of male

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sexual desire that continues unchanged. While Yongsin's mother is portrayed as having been forced to abandon her daughter in order to submit her body wholly to her new husband as a possession to own, Yongsin's body is equally presented as a site for gratifying the needs of the male body. This is also what makes 'Keys' so effective as a counter-discourse, because it opens up such a one-sided view of all human sexuality for the reader to criticize. Through highlighting the husband's insensitivity and lack of understanding, the narrative questions the logic that allows for only male jouissance at the expense of suppressing the female jouissance, which after all constitutes one core element of feminine subjectivity. The emphasis on the way female sexuality is represented as a site for male sexual pleasure reveals the root cause of women's inability to accept their bodies and sexualities, which lies in this exclusive focus on men's needs as well as on conceptualizing the totality of all human sexual pleasure in relation to the male jouissance. Consequently, there appears to be no valid symbolic representation of female sexuality beyond the maternal. In other words, the maternal function, imagined as a passive site of incubating the male seed, is presented as the totality of women's sexuality against which any active form of female sexuality is presented as a deviation. OBJECTS OF DESIRE

While there is no shortage of 1990s fictional narratives that described women engaged in extra-marital relationships, what is remarkable about them is how the female protagonists are almost invariably shown to struggle in order to achieve any real sense of sexual subjectivity that would not be constructed in relation to their male lover. This relates very closely to the idea of passive bodies discussed above. While women are shown to initiate sexual encounters, the sexual act itself or even the very relationship with a male partner is shown to take place on his terms. Un Huigyong's 'Her Third Man' (Kit nyo iii saebOn jje namja, 1998) is one such narrative. It portrays a woman in an extramarital relationship, who despite conducting an affair that is 'outside' accepted social conventions continues to facilitate her lover's sexual fulfilment at the expense of her own emotional and sexual realization. The main protagonist is, again, presented as an independent working woman, but who willingly allows herself to be 'owned' by the man she imagines herself in love with. The story is thematically located outside the domestic setting, and centres on a protagonist whose long-time boyfriend marries another woman but keeps

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her on as his mistress. Despite her financially established position working in an office in Seoul, the protagonist of the story is reduced to a position of a modern-day concubine by holding on to some delusion of love for a man who suddenly marries another woman. While she is located outside the institution of marriage, the protagonist still emerges as being firmly positioned within the patriarchal economy, not as an autonomous agent, but as an object of pleasure for the man who has claimed her body as his 'property'. The narrative introduces the disillusioned protagonist from the moment when, on a perfectly normal day, she suddenly comes to a point where she realizes that she can no longer bear her present existence as someone's 'other woman': It's not as if I did not love him. Who knows, maybe I will never be able to love anyone else. But I hate my life as it is. I want to change it completely. But what can I change? My name? Age? Sex? The school I graduated from? The titles of all the books I've ever read? The men I've slept with? The jobs I've done, my dressing style, my dislike for mushrooms and curry, it's all so mundane. I'm sick of it all. Just think about it- I'll have to live like this until I die, hating myself. Disgusting. So I've decided that I'll marry someone else, someone I've never met. Actually, let's think about this. Whom shall I marry? I could drive a few hours on a quiet country road, stop at a service station, and pull the man who happens to sit at the table next to mine, eating his bowl of cabbage soup. That'll do. He will have nothing to do with my previous life. I'll enter an unknown world and will live as a new person. Happiness? Who knows? I just want to try to live as someone else. Even if it's less fun than now, it'll be better. 31 As a result of this realization, she decides to embark upon a quest for some meaning and purpose for her seemingly meaningless life. She leaves Seoul and drives to a secluded Buddhist temple in the countryside, to reflect on her life and relationship. Through frequent analepses to the protagonist's life which are posited against the calmness of the surrounding temple, the reader slowly learns of the kind of relationship that the protagonist has had with her lover. She is shown as caught up in a no-win relationship, and the absurdity of her modern-day concubinage arrangement is made clear through her recollections of their encounters over the years not only to the reader, but to the protagonist herself. The lover is portrayed as an archetype of a man who takes all the advantages of the situation he is in, keeping her as his mistress on the pretext of

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love. Their relationship, their meetings and especially their sexual encounters are dictated by his wishes: After he married they had never spent a whole night together. She accepted it as a matter of fact. Once in a while he wanted to try positions that were new to her. 'Try putting your legs like this. There, move your back.' That was when she would realize that he had already tried that position with another woman. In this way she had to endure the deep sorrow and self-despicable reality of having a sex partner whom she shared with another. There were times when he would stroke her lower back, and then hesitate when realizing how different it felt to that of the other woman. One day he said, 'You don't really make noise, do you?' 'Is that so?' She replied nonchalantly, yet again realizing that she had learned something else about the way his wife behaved in bed. 32 The woman's acceptance of her position as a docile object of consumption regardless of her own emotional or physical fulfilment reveals her inability to think beyond the position of an object of male sexual desire. The narrative thus exposes the modern myth of 'liberated female sexuality' which is often presented as an action taken on sexual desire. This sexual desire, however, is ultimately revealed as nothing but a passive state of being desired and positionality against active male desire. The body that is presented as active, in that it takes action to satisfy a desire, remains fundamentally passive because the desirability of that body depends on it being an object of consumption of male desire. Consequently, and with reference to the idea of 'intersubjective gaze', this kind of construction of female sexuality, in my view, can never emerge on equal terms with the male sexuality because the man is never the object of gaze in this process of sexual subject-in-formation. What further reinforces the protagonist's position as a passive body is the notion of modern romantic love. Through her fixation on the idea of love and the man being her 'chosen one', she has condemned herself to the delusion that what she now has with her lover represents all there ever will be. Love itself, for her, has therefore become a trap that requires her to suppress her own female subjectivity in order for her to exist as an object for her lover. This love is, however, revealed as a fictional construct, a figment of imagination that the protagonist holds onto. In actual fact, her lover shows no real affection towards her, as their relationship is always marked by his tiredness for 'having to' keep two women happy and by her trying to accommodate this tiredness. Rather

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than representing a meeting of two minds, love for the protagonist is imagined in terms of emotional and physical servitude as the protagonist is unable to imagine her position as equal to that of her lover. Within the imaginary of the symbolic order she thus occupies the position of an object while she is never in a position to 'own' a man's body. In some ways then, the whole concept of 'love' in contemporary settings is revealed as a fictional construct which positions men as consumers and women as bodies (and minds) that are consumed. The modern cultural construction of 'love' thus produces passive bodies that emerge as only active in seeking to be desired and consumed. In 'Her Third Man' the protagonist's position affords her no real corporeal pleasure of her own, a position she is aware of, but unable to overcome. She is shown to confuse love and duty, and having lost her virginity to her lover she feels it is her duty to devote herself to the one who in a sense 'conquered' her body. The issue then lies in her inability to imagine a non-complementary relationship with a male partner, within which she would not occupy the position of 'lack'. Irigaray observes that because of this inverted conceptualization of human psychosexuality, many women still 'do not believe that woman can be anything other than the complement to man, his inverse, his scraps, his need, his other'. 33 Similarly, while the protagonist in this story does not inhabit a socially acceptable feminine role connected to the maternal or the domestic, her symbolic positioning in her relationship with her lover remains equally constrained by the perceived unassailability of the phallic position that the male protagonist occupies. In this sense, having sex outside marriage in an apparently no-ties relationship does not represent a position within which the protagonist could be seen as having subjectivity in relation to her own body. In fact, deluded by her sense of loyalty to eros, she is 'buried alive', and cut off from her own becoming-subject through her position as what Margaret Whitford refers to as 'being-for-men'. 34 It is telling, however, that in the story it is on the corporeal level that the female protagonist finally becomes aware of her own body as a site of the oppression of her subjectivity. After having changed her physical location, her external appearance and even her spiritual outlook through immersing herself in Buddhist ritual, she finally also 'deconsecrates' her body by sleeping with a local carpenter whose interest in her is purely sexual. The encounter is wholly without affection, and on her part even without lust, but by sleeping with the man she objectifies his body on a symbolic level and releases herself from the 'illusion of love' for her lover which had required a pure body for his use only.

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The ending of the story is open, as there is no narrative closure regarding how the relationship turns out. Nor is there clear resolution to her predicament as an object in the sense of her being clearly liberated and shown to have achieved subjectivity. Instead, there is only a realization of her oppression and a hint of impending explosion beneath the surface that might perhaps lead her to attempt to objectivize her lover in the same way he had objectivized her. This is also descriptive of the difficulty that women writers faced in relation to imagining active female sexualities, which at best can be represented as an awareness of women's objectification or perhaps an attempt to mimic masculine sexual behaviour. In the context of this story, there is therefore no transcendental platform separate from masculinity on which the female protagonist could begin the process of her becoming-subject. ACTIVE SEXUALITIES

Unlike the previous story, Un's 'A Butterfly in the Dust' (Monji sog i1i nabi, 1996) appears to reject the image of passive and objectified female sexuality in an attempt to redefine it as 'active'. The main focus of the story is on the efforts of one woman to obtain subjectivity in patriarchal society, and who views sex as the starting-point from which liberation and civil identity on all other social levels will follow. The female protagonist, Sonhtli, for reasons that are unknown to the reader, has adopted a sexual behaviour similar to the men she works with, changing partners frequently and initiating sexual relationships. The story thus unfolds as an interesting description of social responses and attitudes towards what is perceived as active female sexuality. The story is narrated by a male reporter, who works for a women's magazine mainly produced by men for women. The choice of setting for the story suggests a certain degree of irony, as the men working in a publishing company, supposedly targeting a female audience, are revealed as almost completely unaware of what women around them think and dream of. Sonhtli, on the other hand, is a moderately successful freelance journalist whose path crosses with that of the narrator in the context of their work. As her efforts to obtain independent subjectivity seem to take place mainly on the corporeal level, she has a somewhat dubious reputation, and is known as a 'slut' because of her liberal attitude to sex. 35 Moreover, the choice of a male narrator is telling, as through his uncomprehending but sympathetic gaze the reader is given a glimpse of the way patriarchal society views women who deviate from the set norms of feminine sexual behaviour.

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What is conspicuously absent in the story, however, are any references to actual enjoyment of female sexuality. Instead, sexual acts emerge as acts of resistance rather than expressions of individual desire, and it is this inability to experience any real form of jouissance that emerges as another symptom of the persistent inability to re-imagine female sexuality. For the female protagonist, sex is not an idealistic fusion or a 'meeting of two minds', but a purely physical experience which serves only to satisfy her desire for pleasure which nonetheless always escapes meaningful description. She com pares sex to instant coffee - in the same way as coffee evokes in her pleasant memories of smell, sound and taste, sexual encounters are similarly pleasurable memories with no deeper meaning or consequence. Criticizing the emphasis placed on sex by society and its restricting effect, Sonhui notes: If we are honest anyone can achieve freedom, starting from sex. And in my opinion desire, if such a thing exists, originates from the fundamental truth that can be found in sex [itself]. It's hardly my fault if the freedom that you yearn for goes against the established rules by which [we conduct our] lives. That is the fault of the world that has created the framework within which we live. 36

Through her dismissal of sex as a purely corporeal experience, Sonhui seeks to subvert the assumption that for 'good' women (that is, those who are not prostitutes) sexual experiences will have to take place within the parameters of meaningful relationships, governed by male-dictated rules of propriety. She refutes the view commonly held among her male peers that women's (but not necessarily men's) sexual desire should be connected to emotional desire. Instead, her behaviour mirrors that of her male colleagues who conduct extramarital affairs without emotional attachmentY Accordingly, Sonhui treats her partners as bodies for pleasure, and whether she is fond of them as people is irrelevant. On this level, her choice to mimic lecherous male sexual behaviour is an attempt to subvert existing models of female sexuality and behaviour on an individual level. Within this context, some of Irigaray's comments on contemporary ~estern women's sexual behaviour strike some resonance to what Un is describing here. Irigaray observes that as many women in the West have achieved and gained a great deal in recent years in terms of material possession, it is not uncommon for some of them to seek to identify with the so-called male identity. However, she argues that this does not solve the fundamental problem that women in patriarchal societies face: that of not being recognized

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as women, as their success has almost invariably depended on the degree to which they have been able to mimic ideal male subfectivity.38 Besides, mimicking the male model of sexual behaviour is rarely viewed positively in women. This, as Irigaray point out, is symptomatic of how modern patriarchal systems do not allow for the existence of a sexual culture which would respect the existence of two equally productive and creative genders, both of whom could express their sexualities in ways appropriate to each one. 39 As a result, the choices available for women to express their sexualities are severely limited, to say the least. In the context of this story, different characters' responses to Sonhui's exploits represent various different ways of responding to the presence of active female sexuality, all which ultimately stern from the deep-seated fear of any expression of female sexuality that differs from the one approved by patriarchal society. The narrator himself is described as a young professional, eager to understand what drives Sonhui to her multiple relationships, but simultaneously unable to see beyond the existing sexual mores. His manager, in his blunt condemnation of Sonhui and ridiculing of her way of expressing her sexuality, represents how more socially established and powerful men view women's extramarital sexual exploits with benevolent contempt. Women like Sonhui are not perceived as people who have reached their sexual subjectivity, but as fundamentally flawed in their moral character and an exception to the perceived norm of passive female sexuality. While she is then open to the male voyeuristic gaze, her can dour and directness also disturbs and frightens the men around her. This is descriptive of some deep-seated fears about female sexuality in its active form that patriarchal representations of femininity otherwise seek to repress. In 'A Butterfly in the Dust', Un demonstrates how in the Korean cultural context, female sexuality, by virtue of its passivity, is also seen as a potentially fearsome vacuum of male sexual energies. 40 Irigaray notes that this fear of female sexuality, the unknown abyss and the lack (or death) that it represents, arises from the male need to see woman as the castrated one, protecting the masculine ego from its own castration and death. 41 Reflecting this, in this story Sonhui's sexual prowess is also 'castrated' through the ridicule of both men and women around her. The male characters' way of discounting Sonhui both professionally and as a woman can be seen as a reflexive reaction to the threat to male self-representation. Their inability to perceive an alternative to meek femininity means that Sonhui remains branded as a whore, a prostitute. By branding her a loose woman, the male characters in the story ensure that

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Sonhui no longer poses a threat to their own subjectivity, which requires a meek, objectivized femininity to maintain their phallic self-representation. Instead, she is now relegated to a position of one of the nameless vaginas that serve man and afford no further mention. Moreover, the inclusion of the character of another female character in this story (Miss Pang) is interesting, as she is portrayed as being as ready as the male characters to judge Sonhui for her liberal sexual behaviour. Tellingly, her criticism of Sonhui is partially due to her infatuation with the narrator, and by virtue of asserting her identity as an object for male gaze she hopes to win his affections. This in itself is descriptive of how the balance of power is re-enforced by the competition between women within the sexual economy governed by men. Throughout the story the author does not comment directly on the values and opinions of her characters, but merely shows the duplicity of sexual morals to her readers through her male narrator. In fact, the author's own opinion of whether Sonhui's efforts to achieve subjectivity independent from men is morally right or wrong is never made clear through the use of a supposedly neutral male narrator. Rather than passing judgement, or inciting women to indecency as some have criticized Un for, the narrative illustrates something of how the existing social structures and women's positioning within the symbolic continues to objectivize women even when they attempt to attain sexual subjectivity. The male narrator too, who at least to a certain extent sympathizes with Sonhui's predicament, fails to see how any alternative mode of feminine behaviour would be acceptable. In fact, Sonhui continues to make him uncomfortable because she does not conform to the norms which society expects of her. Towards the end of the story Sonhui spends a night with the narrator in a motel, but as the narrator, in a sudden urge to know, asks about another man she had presumably slept with, Sonhui understands this as his attempt to 'possess' her and humiliates him by offering him money for his nocturnal services: Why was she giving money to me, I wondered. 'Let's call this prostitution,' she said. 'What do you mean?' 'If you are not happy with taking this money, then let's call this rape or something.' Her voice carried no emotion whatsoever. 42 This conversation is descriptive of how the narrator, despite his attempts to understand what motivates Sonhui's behaviour, is

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unable to transcend the symbolic that informs the logic of his thinking. For him, the sexual act equals a simple transaction, as in his mind Sonhui is to some degree his property because of their shared sexual experience through which he has 'conquered' her body. In response, Sonhui gives him money for his 'services', refuting his efforts of ownership over her body. This can be seen as an attempt to achieve moral freedom similar to that enjoyed by men in her society, even if she may already recognize these efforts as hopelessly futile. Thus, as in all previous narratives discussed in this chapter, the limits of the protagonist's emancipation are made visible in the story. She does not come across in any way emancipated to any of the other characters, nor is she presented as such to the reader. Instead, she becomes an object of pity in her struggle against society. The narrator likens her to a butterfly he sees half hidden under the dust in the streets of Seoul, flying aimlessly through the air but making its existence evident through its struggle: At first I thought it was dust. But had it been just dust it should have floated in the direction of the gusts of wind created by the cars. Instead, this thing was, with pathetic tenacity, making its way against the air torrents. I saw it was a single butterfly struggling through the darkening city sky, which by its painstaking flight was making its existence known. For some reason I felt a lump in my throat.43 The dust-covered butterfly in this story symbolizes the way in which women struggle against the odds in trying to realize their feminine sexual identities, even if such feminine becoming-asubject seems impossible in the present circumstances. The story thus works as a reverse criticism of the dual morality placed on male and female sexualities. The male characters are allowed multiple partners, are not shy to talk about their sexual exploits, they initiate sexual encounters and dominate these sexual relationships. Moreover, paid sex is meaningless for them, merely the satisfaction of an urgent need through a simple transaction of money and sexual services provided by nameless women. However, when a woman attempts the same she is faced by a barrage of criticism and is discounted as a loose woman by both men and women. Thenarrative thus calls into question why there is such a difficulty to even imagine female sexuality independent of reproduction or one that merely corresponds to men's sexual needs. Since the author too struggles to offer meaningful alternatives to the male-imaged representations of female sexuality, the reason for this might be that

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there simply is no way to represent such alternatives within the existing Korean symbolic order. Yet, the author's problematizing of the received notions of supposedly passive female sexuality works as a point of potential rupture to its very representation, even if such representations are yet to come. REIMAGINING FEMALE SEXUALITIES?

All these narratives discussed here thus point to some kind of recognition by Chon, Ha and Un that the topic of female sexuality is of a central importance in reimagining femininity within the Korean symbolic order. However, they all struggle with defining what female sexed subjectivity outside notions of passivity and object of desire could be. Indeed, in some ways the stories simply reveal and reaffirm various ways in which society sanctions men-aspredators to take advantage of women by virtue of their perceived ownership of women's bodies and right to discursively define their sexualities. To this end, the narratives describe women's bodies and sexual behaviour either in order to question the logic behind accepting rape as an unfortunate side-effect of the predatory male sex-drive, or to portray women who have affairs with married men and mimic what is considered equivalent to men's rapacious sexual behaviour. Moreover, where the woman is portrayed as initiating sexual encounters, she is relegated to a position of a loose woman and subjected to double standards that allow multiple partners for men and demand chastity of women. The inability of the female characters to transcend this position in the above stories signifies not only the absence of positive representations of female sexuality, but also the difficulty of beginning to think what form this positive representation could take within the existing constraints of patriarchal symbolic order. Simply identifying with the masculine sexuality falls equally short of achieving feminine sexual subjectivity, and through these narratives it most definitely emerges as a flawed form of women's sexual liberation. Irigaray notes as well that while such identification allows women 'a sexuality which seems more free and "sporty", part masculine, part feminine', it merely contributes to a creation of a society of unisex citizens which is no nearer to recognizing sexual difference.44 This observation is helpful, because it clearly explains how identification with the masculine does not represent liberation of women from the position of an object, because 'whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other - they are irreducible one to the other'. 45 In other words, since within the Korean masculine imaginary woman is still

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perceived as the sex that lacks the phallus, she is caught up in a state of feminine non-becoming because she has simply become a man and thus her sexuality is still a product of the symbolic order to the same extent that it was before. (This is also why Irigaray criticizes women who succumb to an exclusively phallocentric sexual economy by speaking and acting 'like phallocrats' since such women simply serve to reinforce the primacy of masculine power and their position as the 'uncontested master[s] of the means of production of pleasure'.46) Rather than representing women who imitate men's sexual behaviour, there is therefore a need to represent women in sexual relationships that are not hierarchical. However, in women's literary fiction of the 1990s, there was still very little by the way of exploring what kind of different sexualities women could have beyond a male-centred model of sexuality. Casting off one's sexed identity by replacing it with that of the other did nothing to challenge the existing symbolic representation This is also why the female protagonist of 'A Butterfly in the Dust', for example, never achieves a distinctly feminine subjectivity as she simply desires to possess the power of the phallus by imitating what she perceives as men's predatory sexual behaviour, even when the phallus remains a distorting signifier for her own sexuality. Rather than rewriting passive female sexuality, these stories reveal the sheer difficulty, if not impossibility, of imagining active and positive forms of female sexuality within the current Korean symbolic order. Therefore, mapping out female desires in a male-centred society is not as simple as it may seem. Desirability is confused with the expression of sexuality, and because that desirability always centres on satisfying the needs of the masculine desire, it can never truly function as anything more than an expression of inverted male sexuality. Another issue that these narratives highlight is how female sexuality seems to be confused with being sexy within this context, and how this relates to conceptualizing female sexuality as a commodity rather than a core of individual subjectivity. References to sex are mundane, as if sexuality in its entirety is performed in a heterosexual relationship that focuses of the satisfaction of the male partner. In fact, the physical sexual acts never appear as a source of pleasure for the female protagonists. Rather, it is the limited power that they exercise over their own bodies, or the body of the other which affords them some form of satisfaction. What is more, any descriptions of same-sex sexual desire are also conspicuously absent in these stories, as sexual desire is always located within a heterosexual setting. Thus the supposedly 'active' bodies turn out ultimately

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to be passive, and sex is portrayed simply as a way of escaping loneliness and a way to connect, at least on a corporeal level, with another human being. NOTES 1

2 3

4

Spivak, In the Other Worlds, pp. 149-53. Derek Bodde, 'Sex in Chinese Civilization', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 129:2 (1985), 161-72 (p. 163). This would seem to suggest that the mechanism of patriarchal oppression, despite its geographical variations, still functions in surprisingly similar ways in different cultures of the world. Yet this is not to suggest, however, that the way in which patriarchy manifests itself in different parts of the world is the same. Freud argued that both little boys' and little girls' libidos are essentially masculine, and as a result the early stages of girls' sexual development centre on the clitoris, as a 'little truncated penis' and object of pleasure. However, eventually the girl comes to realize that her clitoris is somehow inferior to the penis, and as a result she experiences a profound shock as she realizes the perceived deformity and insufficiency of her sexual organ (Irigaray, Speculum, pp. 34-7). Moreover, for a girl to attain feminine sexuality she is then expected to repress her active sexuality in order to obtain her supposedly 'natural' sexual characteristics defined by passivity which require her to suppress her 'masculine' libido. The girl in her passage from childhood to adulthood and sexual maturity is therefore, according to Freud, required to accept the burden of cultural and sexual schizophrenia. She is also supposedly haunted by 'penis envy', and in her inability to accept her own sexual organ the girl will turn away from her mother who shares and embodies her lack, and to her father in her desire for a penis. It is only by nurturing her husband or by giving birth to a son that the woman can possess a penis (subjectivity) by proxy. (Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library Vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 376, 380-2; and Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id, Vol. XIX, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), pp. 144-5, 252-3); see also lrigaray, This Sex, pp. 40-2. Boy-preference was still quite common in 1990s Korean society, and the termination of female foetuses was not unheard of. Traditionally, the valorization of the penis itself as a sign of family fortune and an object of admiration was sometimes expressed in the practice of touching an infant's penis by the paternal grandmother in particular, who would do this to simply show her

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5

6

7

8

9

10

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

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appreciation of the organ which would ensure the continuation of the family line. Elaine H. Kim, for example, found one such myth in her interviews conducted with Korean men in the late 1980s. Some of her interviewees were convinced that feminine sexuality was somehow 'disgusting' and 'shameful', and that even the gender differentiation of men's and women's roles was based on a presumed biological imperative. In other words, the inside/outside dichotomy was being informed by the fact that men's genitals are on the 'outside' whereas those of women are on the 'inside' (pp. 72-3; 137). Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998; first published under the title The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction by Allen Lane, 1979), pp. 127-9. See a useful discussion on this in Young-hee Shim, 'Feminism and the Discourse of Sexuality in Korea: Continuities and Changes', Human Studies 24 (2001), 133-48 (pp. 136-7; 142). See Kim Chonghoe and Ch'oe Hyesil, p. 9. The term kijich'on refers to the US military camp towns or surrounding areas, and it generally implies narratives about the lives of the prostitutes in these areas. So-Hee Lee, 'A Comparison of Fox Girl and The Bridle: Gender/ Nation, Colonialism/Postcolonialism', Studies in Modern Fiction 15:1 (2008): 149-91. Cho Haejoang, 'Living with Conflicting Subjectivities', p. 182. Song Yongsin, 'Sobi wa kwango sog ui sinch'e imiji wa erot'isijum' (±.1:1]9} =\9:Jl 4j-Q.] 11:4 o]o];;l:l9} oJ].s;.EjA]~) [Body Image and Eroticism in Consumer Advertising], in Munhag iiro poniin song (~ ~ .Q..s;. &:::: ).J) [Sex Through Literature], eds. Kim Chonghoe and Ch'oe Hyesil (Seoul: Kimyongsa, 2001), pp. 203-32 (pp. 220-4). Laurel Kendall, Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality and Modernity (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 109. Ibid., pp. 110-14. Reflecting this, the idea that married women and their sexualities were still perceived as their husband's possession was prevalent to such an extent that wife-rape was still not considered a crime under the Korean Family Law in the 1990s. This law has since been revised. So-Hee Lee, 'Female Sexuality in Korean Popular Culture', in Under Construction, ed. Laurel Kendall (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002), pp. 141-64 (p. 146). This is also why it has been so difficult to imagine or represent lesbian bodies because there is no space within the existing Korean

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18 19

2

°

21

22

23 24

25

26

27


symbolic where it could be represented. Instead, the lesbian body lies always 'outside' the existing patriarchal representations of the feminine as an 'anomaly'. Cho Haejoang, 'Living with Conflicting Subjectivities', p. 189. Elaine H. Kim found in her interviews in the late 1980s that especially middle-class men perceived their wives as nurturers to 'comfort them', and sought sexual satisfaction from elsewhere, p. 84. Chunghee Sarah Cho notes that sex workers are presented as 'ethically fallen women' when the punters who visit them are never described as 'ethically fallen men', ('A Reflection on the "Comfort Women" Issues', ICAS Spring Symposium (May 1, 2000) http:// www.icasinc.org/2000/2000s/2000scss.html [accessed 23 February 2008]). See for example: Kim Mihyon, 'Ipu, chanch'i nun kkunnatta chendo hog un ummo,' (0 1.!!., ~~1;: ~~q.- ~ t:~ ~::: g 2.) [Eve, the Party Is Over - Gender of Conspiracy], Munhak Dongnae 6:1 (1999) [accessed 17 November 2000]. Even outside 'serious fiction' there is an apparent difficulty to shed the idea of the passive female body. For example, in sexually explicit comics aimed at female audiences the active bodies engaged in sexual acts are always male. Examples of these are fan fie, in which a popular male teen idol is imagined and portrayed in an explicit gay relationship and yaoi, which contains gay love stories between two men written by women for women (Cho ]oo-hyun, 'Intersectionality Revealed: Sexual Politics in Post-IMF Korea,' Korea Journal 45:3 (2005): 86-116). Irigaray, This Sex, p. 170-1. Young-hee Shim asserts that only a fraction of rape cases are reported in Korea because of the persistent ideology that emphasizes female chastity (p. 139). Ha Songnan, 'Angmong' (9f%) [Nightmare], in Yopchip yoja (~~ .:ij:A}) [The Woman Next Door] (Seoul: Ch'angch'ak kwa pip'yong, 1999), pp. 64--88 (pp. 84-5). Youngtae Shin, 'Self-determination and Violence against Women in South Korea', Asian Women 11 (2000), 27-48. It should be noted that this view of sexual violence against women's bodies is not unique to Korea. Even some Western feminists have perceived rape as a 'function of male biology'. (See for example: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 16.) A decade ago sexual violence against women's bodies was not regarded as a serious social problem but merely 'bad luck' for the women involved, or in some ways just a feminine 'duty' to be

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28 29 3o

31

32 33

34 35

36

37

38 39 40

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endured. Even if (mainly through the vigorous lobbying by women's rights movements) sexual violence is now regarded as a serious crime, general attitudes towards rape take longer to change (Youngbee Shim, 'Feminism and the Discourse of Sexuality in Korea', p. 144-5). Ha, 'Angmong', p. 81. Ibid., p. 88. Dn, 'Yolsoe', p. 196. Dn HUigyong, 'Kunyo ui sebOnjje namja' (.::Llij ~ Alllft~ 'J-:A}) [Her Third Man], in 1998 nyondo I Sang munhaksang susang chakp'umjip, che 22hoe (19981.;!5:. opJ ~~AJ 'TAJ 3}%~, ~D 22~) [Collection of the Winning Works of Yi Sang Literary Price of 1998, Vol. 22] (Seoul: Munhak sasangsa, 1998), pp. 63-125 (p. 66). Ibid., p. 101. Irigaray, I Love to You, p. 63. Whitford, Luce Irigaray, p. 149. The original Korean word used here is kolle, which literally translates as 'floor mop'. This derogatory term is used to describe a woman who sleeps around with so many men that she is perceived to gather as much dirt as a floor mop would when used for cleaning. Dn Huigyong, 1Monji sog ui nabi' (~:A] 4r~ L}l:l]) [A Butterfly in the Dust], in T'ain ege malgolgi (E}~ oJllll ~~7]) [Speaking to the Other] (Seoul: Munhak Dongnae, 1996), pp. 252-77 ( p. 271). Youna Kim notes that in Korea men are perceived as 'logical', whereas women are generally seen as 'emotional'. The existing dual sexual morals are justified on this basis, as men are perceived as more able to 1Cope with' and enjoy non-attached sexual relationships, whereas such behaviour is seen as impossible for women because of the assumption that they will inevitably become emotionally involved with their sexual partners (p. 41). lrigaray, Thinking the Difference, p. 79; Je, Tu, Nous, pp. 84-6. Irigaray, Je,Tu, Nous, p. 80. Traditionally it was believed that if a man was preparing for a battle or some other testing event that would require his full strength, he should abstain from sexual relations with a woman as he might easily be stripped of his strength by being engulfed by the femine sexual 1Void'. Chong, 1Yosong ui hyonsil gwa munhak', p. 133. This belief was based on the idea that being exposed to too much of women's yin energy, which was always receptive to and craving for the yang energy, could result in depleting the male yang energies in men (Bodde, p. 161). There is a resonance here with the way in which the Medusa-like active female sexuality haunts the masculine unconscious in the Western imaginary (Helene Cixous, 1The Laugh of the Medusa', Signs 1:4 (1976), 875-99 (repr. in Kelly Oliver, ed.,

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41

42 43 44

45 46


French Feminism Reader, (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 257-75 (p. 259)). Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 91. Dn, 'Monji sog ui nabi', p. 276. Ibid.,p.261. Irigaray, Elemental Passions, pp. 2-3; 28-9. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 13. Irigaray, This Sex, p. 199.

6

Contesting the Symbolic: The Feminine in the Fantastic

Korean women writers' efforts to highlight the perDespite ceived difficulties or emotional suffering of their female protagonists depicted in their narratives, there appears to be a real difficulty in moving beyond understanding femininity in terms other than interiority, passivity and the maternal. It seems to me that the reason for this lies by and large with the fact that the mimetic or realist genre operates within the parameters of the known symbolic order in which representations of femininity are still informed by historic events and archetypal imageries. For this reason, there is a distinct difficulty in imagining alternatives to the existing representations of femininity. Dismantling these, and replacing them with new ones that would not simply recreate the existing patriarchal symbolic order in reverse, has thus proved to be a complex task, and one that is not by any means unique to the Korean cultural context. 1 This is because what is really needed is no less than a paradigm shift that does away with much of what has previously been considered as common knowledge about femininity and women. Since fiction written in the realistic or mimetic mode can be a particularly uncompromising platform for reimagining femininity, it appears that the possibility of doing so lies only within the silences of patriarchal culture about the feminine. For example, it is telling that in the narratives discussed in previous chapters it is only within the thematics of previously unrepresented motherdaughter relations that some degree of subversion of the existing symbolic representation can be found. This would suggest to me that the thematic spaces that are currently unsymbolized can provide the most fertile starting point for envisaging alternative, yet positive, representations of the feminine.

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The challenge remains, however, with how to reimage the feminine within a culture that only recognizes the masculine subject. Working within the parameters of the existing symbolic order of representation, the writers may well recognize and articulate symptoms of discontent that arise from the denial of the existence of more than one kind of subjectivity. However, the problem arises when attempting to represent feminine difference of an equivalent value to the masculine because there seems no way of doing so within the existing symbolic order. This is also why Irigaray, for example, places such great importance on finding a way to symbolize the feminine in ways that would not necessitate a reference to the masculine, because she believes that such a process would allow the feminine to be recognized in its own right. Since phallocentric symbolic order only recognizes the existence of one form of normative subjectivity, acknowledging other forms of equally valid subjectivities would lead to a culture that allows for all other kinds of difference. However, this kind of paradigm shift is highly problematic, and not the least because our imaginations and linguistic conventions even are formed, as Griselda Pollock notes, 'in a culture whose languages do not imagine a specificity for that which is not the One'. 2 In terms of rewriting Korean representations of femininity, this presents a very real difficulty, because in order to imagine an alternative kind of symbolic order, one would initially have to locate the feminine outside the existing symbolic order. Irigaray too, while theorizing about a possibility of creating a 'symbolic in the feminine' has been criticized for seemingly oversimplifying a complicated issue. The main problem with reimagining the symbolic is that if the feminine is located outside a patriarchal symbolic order because it currently has no subjectivity within it, there would simply be no point of reference at all that would make the new representations in any way meaningfuP For example, Margaret Whitford, while generally very positive towards Irigaray's theoretical corpus, points out that: Since woman is not recognized by the cultural imaginary, theory, no matter how far-reaching and innovative, goes on perpetuating the founding obliteration. The absence of creative intercourse in the imaginary leads, eventually, to an impasse on thought; thought is condemned to go on repeating over and over again the same gesture of silencing and repression. 4 This is therefore where any attempt to find new ways to symbolize the unsymbolized feminine runs into difficulties in the Korean


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cultural context as well. If the feminine has no place within the existing symbolic order outside being a reference point for the masculine, there is no way of knowing which other qualities could possibly signify the feminine. The issue at hand is, therefore, about how to reconcile the differences between the creation of a symbolic that recognizes the existence of multiple subjectivities (of which none is considered normative) with the way we make sense of the world around us. 5 In terms of literary imagination, such a break does not seem possible within the realist genre, because the surroundings in which the stories are set do not support such representations. On this note, Catherine Belsey has observed that classic realism tends to constitute 'an ideological practice in addressing itself to readers as subjects, interpellating them in order that they freely accept their subjectivity and their subjection'. 6 In other words, the realist genre relies on an assumption that it is presenting a reflection of reality that the reader recognizes. However, the downside is that if there is no language in which to imagine alternative subjectivities, any representations created within the realist genre are in some way always limited because they necessarily refer to the symbolic that informs the 'real' that is being represented. This, to an extent at least, explains why so many Korean women writers of the 1990s have seemed unable to create much more than a consciousnessraising effect about patriarchal oppression since alterity (or sexual difference) in these narratives always appears in some ways negative: madness, hysteria, angry un-motherly mothers, or even narcolepsy and apathy. As such, these simply work as gestures towards the difference which cannot yet be represented in the phallocentric symbolic order. Engaging with the fantastic genre, on the other hand, can allow writers to leave their socially and historically defined positions, and to reach out for alternative ones by the means of expanding the boundaries of perceived 'reality? The fantastic as a literary mode is based on what the reader considers 'real' or 'reality' through mimesis, which is then combined with narrative elements that seem, to an extent, unreal or even impossible. Rosemary jackson notes that this mixture of that which the reader can consider 'real' and that which seems a distortion of it, disorientates 'the reader's categorization of the "real'". 8 Whereas realism 'confirms the dominant ideas of what constitutes this outside reality', the fantastic breaks such essentialist views of self, identity and the 'real', breaking 'the boundaries separating self from other, leaving structures dissolved, or ruptured, through a radical open-endedness of being'. 9 The subversiveness of the fantastic genre is thus founded

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in its ability to destabilize the reader's perceptions of rationality and the 'real'. Similarly, Nicholas Ruddick notes that: For most critics [. .] the fantastic is (or ought to be) subversive, seeking to undermine the status quo, to interrogate whatever is privileged by the name of 'reality' by the cultural powers that be, to reveal the repressed absences in what we are encouraged to think of as the 'real', to expose it as ideology that is presented as eternal truth. 10 Textual subversions within the fantastic genre are thus possible because of the way the genre 'bends' perceived reality in creating textual dynamics. When transported outside the borders of 'reality' and to the realm of the fantastic, writers are free to explore alternative truths which often question the dominant discourses in society, and to attempt to create counter-discourses to them. Even if the stories appear escapist and far removed from every day realities, they can still be subversive because of the social-situatedness of the genre. 11 In the words of jackson: Like any other text, a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context. Though it might struggle against the limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it.l2 In the context of discussing contemporary Anglo-American literature, Lucie Armitt comments that it is hardly surprising that women writers should then turn to the fantastic mode, given 'its ability to challenge received notions of contemporary reality'. 13 Whereas classical realism presents a point of view, by often merely sanctioning and endorsing prevailing ideologies in society, many feminist writers in the West have embraced the fantastic genre in order to create spaces outside the known symbolic to imagine alternative representations of the feminine. 14 Rather than emerging as a form of escapism, these narratives in the fantastic thus represent explorations for an opening for what Judith Butler refers to as 'a possibility of a reverse displacement' that can interrogate existing representations of the perceived 'real'. 15 Moreover, the fantastic genre can offer an apparatus for a 'flooding' of cultural signifiers in its over-emphasized effort to signify marginal elements that are normally left un-signified within an existing symbolic order. 16 Thus moving characters outside the perceived known reality allows for a creation of a symbolic order that has a reference point within the known and recognized 'reality', but which can be manipulated


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and altered to provide a platform for creating symbolic orders that recognize the existence of more than one form of subjectivity. Among Korean women writers of the 1990s, Chon Kyongnin in particular engaged with the fantastic in an attempt to transcend the idea of fixed and culturally defined femininity. Although she was not by any means the only one engaging with the fantastic genre, 17 her narratives are interesting in this context because of the way she succeeds in interrogating existing cultural meanings of femininity in particular through writing in the fantastic. It is also telling that Chon is the only one of the three authors included in this book who has not objected to being called a feminist, and her agenda of challenging the symbolic order through crossing over from the mimetic realist expression to that of the fantastic is yet another indication of her commitment to challenging phallocentric thinking in her literary works. While representations of domestic femininity, compulsory heterosexuality and motherhood easily lend themselves as thematic points of self-reference for the masculine, Chon's feminine resists such binary positioning through reaching for more transcendental representations of the feminine. In many of her narratives she expels her female subjects outside the known 'reality' where the assumed rules of the 'real' are bent or warped. This almost evanescent feminine in Chon's texts often assumes its own independent, yet often indefinable subjectivity, with characteristics that are typically very different from the existing culturally accepted notions of the feminine. 18 In some ways, the feminine in these narratives becomes somewhat transcendental and fluid because it cannot be controlled or contained within the narrative boundaries of essentially phallocentric perceptions of reality. The thematics of exteriority thus feature in these narratives, particularly in terms of mirror images, excess and death. MIRROR REALITIES

Chon Kyongnin's narratives are in some ways typical of the 1990s prevalent postmodern literary trend in that she is often concerned with fractured identities and the sense of uncertainty that seems to haunt contemporary society in which many ideas and norms that were previously thought natural and commonsensical seem no longer to apply. However, Chon's take on this is distinctly gendered in that the identities under doubt relate to her protagonists' identities as women. 'When the Mirror Looks into a Mirror' (Kouri kour i1l poltte, 1998) is one such story where she utilizes a mirror metaphor to evoke a sense of instability and existential doubt about the very

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nature of that 'real'. Mirror metaphors in literary narratives are of course often used to signify dual identities, and, similarly in this narrative, Chon creates a disturbing narrative effect by placing her unnamed protagonist inside a mirror. Inside the mirror, she becomes a reflection of socially constructed ideas about the feminine that she metaphorically 'reflects' back to those who look 'into' her. The story thus focuses on false identities and the protagonist, with no definable identity to speak of, emerges simply as a surface to reflect society's projections of desirable feminine qualities. The storyline is divided into five sections, some of which are narrated homodiegetically and some intradiegetically, as if the female protagonist occasionally wished to dissociate herself from the story she is narrating and is merely observing another person's actions as through a window, or indeed, a mirror. This manipulation of narrative distance both allows her to abdicate any responsibility for what she does or does not do, as well as to reflect on what happens in her life. The first section is narrated in a space which is not described or named, creating a sense of the protagonist 'floating' in an almost formless and timeless space. In this space she converses with a masculine character 'L', who - assured of his own sense of subjectivity - points out to the protagonist that 'she is not herself, but a reflection of someone else'.l 9 The second section is an analepsis back to her formative years when she first encounters the effects of the objectivization of women's bodies, and in the third very short section, the homodiegetic narrator describes her married life in a monotonous and disinterested manner. The fourth section describes her affair with a man who is simply referred to as 'C'. This section is narrated extradiegetically and in the present tense without the passion that the reader might expect of such a subject topic. The final section returns to a space that inhabits a moment of eternal present, where distant prehistoric events are merged with the present moment as the narrator 'falls' into a fantastical space in which she returns to a point of her 'original' self, a space where she appears formless and in a state of subject-in-formation. The organizing motif in the story is the mirror which is shown to signify a sense of false existence, or doubleness and alternative images of self. During the course of the story, the protagonist comes to realize that the identity she possesses is nothing more than a series of reflections of other people's projections of themselves, and that she in fact exists as a reflection of someone else's identity. In the story, the protagonist recalls discovering the existence of mirrors for the first time when she was thirteen. In the mirror she sees a reflection of the first signs of her maturing sexuality, and it


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is at this point that she for the first time experiences doubt about the authenticity of the reflection she sees in the mirror. As the story proceeds, she comes to a conclusion that her very existence must depend on holding onto that reflection, whether it be fallacious or not: The problem I faced was not really that complicated, but at the same time I found the thought of it terrifying. Between the world and myself, between life and myself, stood the mirror. The world existed only as a reflection of a kind. It did not simply exist and not because its existence was an indisputable truth. No, the reflection of my subjectivity in the mirror was the only available foundation on which I could construct an image of myself. Whether that image was of my right or left side, front or back, reality or illusion- none of that made any difference to me. 20 It is at this point that the narrative converses with existing cultural constructions of femininity through questioning the very logic of these accepted notions. There is a strong suggestion here that while the protagonist does not recognize her image in the mirror, she chooses to identify with it to protect herself. For example, while she recognizes the first signs of her maturing sexuality she chooses not to accept the image of a sexual woman. Instead, she recalls how her cousin's marriage ends in rejection and suicide on the basis of her having lost her virginity prior to marriage, and thus associates female sexual prowess with fear of failure. Consequently, she comes to correlate her own body, or the reflection of her feminine sexuality that she observes in a mirror, with her own potential downfall. It is at this point where the narrative shifts to fantastical, as the protagonist, in her deceased cousin's red dress, literally enters into the mirror, noting: 'From that time onwards I was always tiptoeing. '21 The mirror, lacking now an object to reflect is thenceforth always suspect and prone to shattering the reflection that it returns. The mirror functions as an instrument to provide a reflection of a socially constructed idea of femininity, and invites the protagonist to accept it as an authentic reflection of her 'real' self. Swallowed up in a mirror existence, she finds herself detached from her own life in which nothing appears real to her. Even childbirth is likened to an animalistic experience, as the protagonist describes it as 'pushing out a baby like a cow would a calf' Frozen into a seemingly meaningless and timeless state of existence, she spends her days sleeping, as if desiring a return to a womb-like primary existence:

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My life was stagnant, as if I were somehow imprisoned. The mirror was forcing me. It was compelling me to wake up from my sleep, to look into the mirror, to shake off the slumber and live. But I have no dreams. With all of my strength I press myself down against my bed, closing my eyes as I try to dig myself into a hole. 22 Tellingly, in the above passage the mirror's 'compelling force' is not strong enough to shake the protagonist out of her dreamy existence, as it offers no real alternative to the unreality of her dreams. The (artificial) feminine identity forced on the protagonist results in her inability to break out of her 'mirror existence', and she appears to be simply observing life 'on the wall' as her corporeal existence is replaced by her mirror image, which becomes an independent, separate entity. The motif of a 'mirror looking into a mirror' thus suggests a sense of double falsity where the image in the mirror simply represents an image of the socially and culturally constructed feminine that she projects, while any representation of an authentic 'self' remain hidden and unknown both to the reader and the protagonist herself. The style of telling in the narrative, which consists of an intricate play between various narrative voices and tenses, further enforces the protagonist's fragmentary and elliptic identity that is constantly in doubt. The protagonist's nonchalant attitude towards having an extramarital affair with 'C' in a society that values female marital chastity highlights her inability to experience a sense of 'real', even corporeally. This suggests that she cannot experience herself as a sexual subject until she experiences herself not as an object of male desire, but as a desiring subject in her own right. Chon thus implies here that simple sexual liberation leads nowhere if it is not coupled with a clear sense of subjectivity. In fact, the protagonist is shown to have realized this; her affair is just a desperate effort to experience a sense of reality through objectivizing herself. Referring to herself as 'A', as if observing herself from a distance, she notes: 'A' is annoyed that she cannot have subjectivity that would allow her [to take action and] to simply merge with shadows in the darkness. She can only be a reflection; she feels she has no self. As such, her body is not real, and it only reminds her of the fact that it, too, will eventually perish. 23 It is telling, however, that although the sexual encounter with 'C' does not reward the protagonist with a sense of subjectivity, the experience has some consequences. As the protagonist in this section of the story simultaneously occupies a space within herself


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while transcending herself, she is able to observe herself 'from the outside'. Having become an object of her own gaze, as much as she is an object of the male gaze fixed on her, she is also able to realize her precarious position: as her 'original' self disappears, her very existence becomes questionable. The protagonist cannot be said to reflect herself, but appears as simply a reflection of who happens to look 'into' her. As a 'mirror' of a kind, she relies on other subjects to reflect themselves on her 'surface', and as such she has no subjectivity to speak of. Considering Chon's Buddhist background, it is likely that she borrows this idea from the Zen (or son) Buddhism in which the mirror is seen as a metaphor of nonattachment: the mirror cannot be said to be the object it reflects, because it cannot keep the reflection of the object if it moves from in front of it. The implication in this context is that without the subjectivity of the (masculine) other reflected on the surface of the feminine 'mirror', the feminine cannot even possess a position as an object as there is nothing left to reflect. In other words, rather than reflecting an image of some kind of authentic femininity, without the image of the masculine subject reflected on the 'surface', the feminine on its own cannot even possess a position of an object as there is nothing left to reflect. This is also shown as the main reason for the protagonist's fragmented perception of self. What is more, the image of a mirror looking into a mirror becomes a powerful metaphor of the fundamental non representation of the feminine in Korean symbolic order of representation. The very use of mirror metaphors also connects the narrative to the perceived reality known to the reader, and it is at this point that the narrative doubles up as an intertextual metaphor, inviting the reader to ask themselves whether they in fact experience a similar sense of detachment in their own lives. Through emphasizing the fundamental unreality of her protagonist's perceptions of the 'real', Chon thus challenges her readers to question the very authenticity of their own perceptions of the 'real' In this sense, the protagonist's journey to self-discovery of some form of authentic feminine identity provokes a response from the reader, through questioning to what extent their very own experiences parallel those of Chon's hapless protagonist. It is also telling that this feminine lack of subjectivity described in this story is constantly juxtaposed against male voices and their perceived subjectivities. There are two male characters who appear in the story, one ('L') telling the protagonist that she has no subjectivity, and the other ('C') wanting to 'own' her body and so to gain subjectivity through possessing her as an object. The story thus reads occasionally as a dialogue between the masculine, assured in

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his subjectivity, and the feminine who cannot fix her identity on anything solid, apart from being the object of the male gaze. The positioning of the firm, fixed portrayal of the masculine characters against the fluid, unfixed feminine is descriptive of the hierarchy that the masculine and the feminine occupy within the symbolic order in which the protagonist appears simply as a reflection rather than an authentic being. This is descriptive of how the patriarchal cultural constructions of a positive masculine continue to require an inverted, negative mirror-image of the masculine, and how the masculine then is in the position of authority to speak what the feminine is and is not. The protagonist's dialogue with a masculine other, referred to as 'L', further clarifies her position. 'L' is an enigmatic character, who only appears as a disembodied voice, and is never described to the reader. 'L' is never presented as a negative character, and the narrator is shown to admire his self-assured existence: 'You never shook hands with a person, or grovelled before them to survive .'24 This [in this world]. You never sold yourself short like that. is also why 'L' also possesses the moral superiority to point out to the protagonist that she, unlike him, is merely masquerading as someone else: You are not you. Are you perhaps mimicking someone? Or have you without ever realizing it been absorbed into someone else's ego and become their property? That song you sing is not yours. That desire and that dissatisfaction you feel are not yours, and that rage you experience is not yours either. The life you live is not yours. [. .] Your life is simply a collection of vague memories of other people's desires. 25 However, as the solid subjectivity of the masculine 'L' in the narrative draws on the assuring gaze that he fixes upon the subjectless female protagonist, his perceived subjectivity is brought similarly in doubt, as it is revealed to be nothing but a simulacrum of a fallacious sense of subjectivity built on the death of the feminine subject. Therefore, as the story progresses, rather than describing the mirror as a passive receptacle or bearer of the image of the other, the masculine 'L' is revealed as equally without subjectivity as there is no knowing who is the original subject, because the characters all reflect each other, and none of them represents the original or 'real' subject: You and me, we are nothing but two mirrors hanging on opposite walls, facing each other. You face me and I face you. You have


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no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no face. You are nothing but one of the countless men in their white shirts, loitering in the narrow streets between buildings during their lunch break. I am nothing but a bride among the seventy or so couples, who wearing my white wedding dress had my wedding photos taken at Toksugung palace. We are not real, but illusions and fabrications of endless reflections that bounce off each other when a mirror looks into another mirror.26 The sense of doubt of the original subject thus disrupts binaries in the story, as they both appear as reflections of the other. lrigaray's notion of the 'real' is particularly helpful in this context, because it articulates what Chon is attempting to describe. Irigaray describes the current (Western) patriarchal understanding of reality as a partial view of reality, because it is based solely on the selfrealization of the masculine subject, and in which the masculine subject alone represents the 'truth' about reality. Irigaray questions this misconception of the nature of reality when she asserts: It appears then that the real exists as at least three: a real cor-

responding to the masculine subject, a real corresponding to the feminine subject, and a real corresponding to their relation. These three reals thus each correspond to a world but these three worlds are in interaction. They never appear as proper in the sense of independent of each other. And when they claim to do this, they neglect one of the three reals, which distorts the whole. 27 As an alternative to a mirror-existence, Irigaray suggests a new subject position for the feminine, one in which the feminine would be allowed a position outside, and not in relation to the masculine. To this end she suggests that 'each subject must come to a standstill before the other, respect the irreducible alterity of the other. The help that each provides to the other's growth must be appropriate to each other's initial real and becoming, as far as each is faithful to such a real.'28 The protagonist of 'Mirror' reaches a similar conclusion towards the end of the story through her realization that since her current existence is based on something that is essentially artificial, the only way out of it is through the destruction of the mirror-image: 'I do not know the way out of the mirror. How could I get out? I desire for my own death, for someone to come and smash me into pieces. '29 In the end the protagonist escapes the mirror by breaking it, and falling into an empty space, as she recounts her discoveries to the masculine 'L':

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L, the world has no surface. It has no skin to touch. There is no falseness or truth in it. There is only the power of the mirror, the mischief of the mirror, the trick it was allowed to play on me. For a long time I existed as two mirrors facing each other on the opposite walls. I was suspended high up in mid-air, and I tried to believe that this world could have a surface. I was reflected on the surface of it, I was living and walking on its surface. But the mirrors shattered, and the pieces cut me as I lay on them. The game was over. Without wings I fall out of the birdcage. Letting out a scream and fall straight into the world ... 30 The world into which the protagonist falls is a fantastical and mythical space within which she experiences a sense of orbiting. She recalls a myth or a story of a whale, a cow and a hippo, according to which they all appeared from the same mirror, and that they shared the same body, implying a possibility of return to an original sel£. 31 Breaking the mirror and falling outside of it symbolizes the protagonist's escape from the socially imposed identities that hamper her becoming-subject, and becomes a way of regaining the subjectivity that she lost and a point of a new beginning. Without a clear sense of definable identity, the protagonist is left in semidark, in a space in which she has no form but is no longer an object of a gaze. Instead, she has become a subject-in-formation: 'Like the moon once did, I begin orbiting, undivided. Like the moon that I was eventually formed by orbiting a dark and solitary planet. orbit mysel£.' 32 The protagonist's 'fall into the world' represents an escape from the one-sided view of the masculine, not bound within definable boundaries, but which is in constant movement in open spaces. As she trajects herself out of the representation she has until then seen in the mirror though breaking the reflection that constrains her, she thus opens up a space in which feminine becoming-subject becomes possible. The narrative space that the protagonist now inhabits thus ceases to be a mirror, and becomes a metaphorical womb in which the protagonist begins to assess the limits and possibilities of her existence. Floating in empty space, in constant motion and surrounded by darkness, her orbiting becomes a metaphor of her new state of constant becoming-subject in which she is no longer bound by the stifling effect of being an object of male gaze. The narrative time at this point reinforces this sense of being reborn: the plot is dislodged from its chronological procession, and events from the narrator's past merge into her narrative present, she appears to float in a space that has become timeless itself. The narrative itself thus becomes a textual 'womb' in which


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the protagonist begins to assess the limits and possibilities of her existence. The ending also resists closure as the protagonist never discovers an absolute 'truth' about herself, which would suggest that Chon, very much like Irigaray, believes that although the feminine ideals that patriarchy endorses are fallacious, the alternative femininities should be left open and undefined. Because of this, 'Mirror' represents a view of femininity and of feminine-becoming not only tantalizingly similar to what Irigaray frequently speaks of, but also an idea quite different from those held by most contemporary Korean feminist writers. In fact, Chon calls for the new conceptualization of feminine subjectivity, based on the individual's, rather than society's, needs and desires. On the other hand, I suppose it would be tempting to criticize Chon for identifying a problem but offering no alternative or indeed a solution it. I'm inclined not to because it is precisely this open-endedness that keeps the feminine subject-in-formation described here a process that aims to simply gesture towards a description of the feminine rather than provide a definition of what the feminine 'is'. And that, I think, is quite a profound issue to consider for feminist politics in Korea and beyond: if it is only through non-representation that the feminine can become evanescent (if not transcendental), how do we begin to make sense of any alternative representations of femininity in the existing symbolic order? It could be that answering this question begins with articulating that which phallocentric symbolic order defines as its excess. THE FEMININE EXCESS

Irigaray suggests that women's entry into the male discourse of signification means that the woman has to renounce 'the specificity of her own relationship to the imaginary' in order to conform to the existing male-imaged symbolic order. 33 In other words, women learn to think in the masculine to such an extent that any 'authentic' expression of the feminine can only be found in that which the masculine logic rejects as excess. While I am uneasy with the notion of the existence of some form of authentic femininity that simply awaits to be discovered, and would suggest that Irigaraydoes not exactly assume this either, conceptualizing the excess and how it is represented in literary fiction provides a useful platform from which to begin to imagine alternative femininities to the existing ones. This is because this kind of excess resists definitions and thus escapes hierarchical and binary positioning of the feminine, and it for this reason that it possesses a potential for subverting symbolic

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power structures from the outside, so to speak. The feminine excess thus gestures towards an alternative, functioning as a reminder of a kind that the possibility for an alternative kind of symbolic might exist. Yet, it is not about replacing the patriarchal logic with elements identified as feminine excess (if such identification is indeed even possible). Rather, embracing the feminine excess represents an instance of how to speak from the position of excess and so to embrace plurality and difference in order to subvert established gender categorizations. 34 The issue here is therefore not so much to try to categorize all forms of excess as expressions of the feminine but as points of resistance to the phallocentric line of thought that denies the possibility of any alternative, valid forms of subjectivity. Chon's 'The Merry-go-round Circus Woman' (Merigounraundi1 sok'osi1 yoin, 1999) is one such instance where the narrative invites the reader to consider their own attitudes and relation to normative masculinity and femininity through presenting an extraordinary motley crew of grotesque characters who all resist traditional categorizations and are located 'outside' the norm and thus defy traditional categorizations. The narrative portrays a female character who has fallen outside a definable identity within the existing symbolic order and can only be conceptualized as its excess. She is portrayed as a woman of dubious morals in tattered clothing, who relates to other people only in the physical realm, inwardly isolating herself. She is described as 'adrift, forlorn, and with] shadows in her eyes, a thin face, slanting apprehensive [. shoulders, a resigned demeanour devoid of any expectations'. 35 Unlike other more traditional two-dimensional and unproblematic female characters often portrayed in mimetic fiction, the protagonist of this story is depicted as a woman who is discarded by society and drifts from one place to another in an almost ghostly existence, unable to connect with anyone on a deeper psychological level: Rumour has it that the woman was worn out a long time ago. She obeys no rules, has no possessions, she does not say no to anything, and having even lost her will to live, she has left all behind and existed in a dusty and dreamlike state. Sometimes, as if hit by a thunderbolt, she wakes up from her death-like and isolated existence and puts on her make-up. She comes to you, covered in layers after layers of clothing and flirts with you. Very deliberately she then stands next to you and parts her legs just to experience a sombre moment. It's not that she cares about life; she goes about wearing tattered clothing and has no qualms about stripping it


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all. The pitiful and weary circus woman. She knows that after you renounce life's indignities and silences, the only thing left to desire is death. 36 From the outset, the narrator implies that the woman never had a choice about her destiny as an excess of patriarchal society. The recurring motif of a floating woman whose identity is 'fixed in a void' is a powerful metaphor for the impossibility of her finding a satisfactory identity within 'normal' family relations. What is telling, however, is that in Chon's narrative there is an element of choice attached to this: the protagonist is described as having been alienated from rest of the society because she cannot - or does not wish to- define her identity in relation to any existing role within society. In this sense, and in some ways similar to Angela Carter's Fevvers in Nights at the Circus, the fact that Chon's female character is unable to fit into socially defined categories coaxes the reader to question the naturalness of accepted feminine roles in society. It is also significant that Chon never names her protagonist, nor refers to her in relation to her children as is often customary in Korean society ('so-and-so's mother'). This emphasizes the fact that now that she has become an outcast from the social unit to which she once belonged, she cannot be referred to by any name. The narrative thus works on a more symbolic level in relation to excess of the symbolic than simply advocating one's choice to walk out on her family as a positive thing. Abiding on the fringes of society, she has abnegated her roles as a wife and mother but not as a rebel who chooses to leave her 'normal' family-life as a wife and a mother. 37 Instead, she describes leaving such a life as a process that is 'as natural as the falling of a leaf in autumn'. 38 In this sense, she must leave because she exists as excess of the symbolic order, and as such, society can no longer 'contain' her. As excess, however, she cannot become a person in her own right, but instead she has become a nameless floating object, bereft even of the will to live: She was a woman who, at one point of her life, had been sucked into a black hole and lost a sense of gravity. They say that a person's weight is equal to the force of gravity that pulls them to earth. Having said that, how many kilograms would human ties weigh in terms of their ability to pull you down? The force pulling two lovers together, a mother and a child, a husband and a wife, or sisters even... Could it be that in the case of this woman floating in mid-air, even the pull of human ties were unable to hold her on solid ground?39

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As if even the ties of gravity cannot tie her down, the story describes how the woman at times loses contact with the solid ground and finds herself floating in mid-air. By creating a character whose identity is fragmented or fluctuating, because the models of feminine identities that society offers are somehow lacking or insufficient for this character, Chon subverts the homogenized myth of modern Korean women who all supposedly desire motherhood and stable family relations. On a more symbolic level, Chon interrogates the relationship between the feminine and the masculine within the existing symbolic order through placing her female protagonist in a society of outcasts which is stripped of any familial roles, examining what happens to this feminine excess outside the conventional patriarchal society. In the story, the circus woman is eventually employed by a hunchback circus owner (Ch'oe), who takes her to his circus located off the coast on an isolated island. However, rather than making use of her extraordinary abilities to float in mid-air, the circus owner turns her into his reluctant mistress, even when a floating woman would undoubtedly make a star attraction and save his failing circus. When the woman becomes infatuated with a Chinese acrobat called Ryu, and thus rebels against Ch'oe's authority, he punishes her by caging her and then selling her to another circus in Eastern Europe. Chon thus juxtaposes the protagonist with the two male characters who appear in the story: the circus troupe owner Ch'oe and the Chinese acrobat Ryu. Tellingly, all gendered roles within the community of outcasts are blurred and unstable, as both of the male characters are bisexual. It is at this point when the story emerges as a study of how sustaining power relations necessitate a denial of alternative forms of normative subjectivity. While in the story all of Chon's characters appear as excess (the protagonist in her desolate existence, the circus manager Ch'oe in his crippled body, and Ryu in his strange foreignness- an attribute that was traditionally viewed with suspicion by many Koreans), it is the sexual difference that in this group of outcasts becomes the main denominator to signify difference. The circus manager, despite his own despondent circumstances, is shown to be able to define his own fluctuating and fragmented identity by projecting his masculine power onto the feminine excess that the female protagonist signifies. Thus, while he is himself a non-entity within the symbolic order, the woman's arrival represents the founding moment of his subjectivity. The woman, in her unprotected and clandestine existence, both disturbs and fascinates Ch'oe as an object to control. His response to the woman's skills, especially as a circus owner supposedly on a


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constant lookout for some weird and wonderful talent, betrays his own inability to see beyond established gender roles, as for him the woman's inability to conform to normative gender roles causes him to despise and pity her supposedly dubious character. The circus owner thus emerges as a metaphor for modern society which cannot allow for sexual difference, but perceives it as a disability instead. Even within the company of the outcasts and the grotesque, despite her extraordinary skill and her physical 'normality', the circus woman is still repressed on the basis of her inability or unwillingness to fit into accepted feminine roles. This is emblematic of how the symbolic order functions in relation to femininity by turning the woman into what Irigaray describes as 'an "object" of knowledge or an "object" of love' instead, which effectively denies the circus woman any meaningful form of subjectivity. 40 It is telling that, while she occupies a position where she resists categorization, the founding moment of the circus woman's potential for becoming-subject is realized only when she revolts against her position as an object when she eventually spurs into action to rebel against Ch'oe. Fuelled by her affection for the effeminate Chinese acrobat Ryu, she grows in confidence, and with a new sense of purpose, she becomes able to form a relationship with him. In response to Ch'oe's efforts to break up the relationship, she uses her sexuality for the first time to assert herself, defiantly engaging in sexual intercourse with Ryu in front of Ch'oe: With a faint scream, she climbed onto Ryu's body. Ch'oe's eyes were brimming with tears. Even though she didn't spare him even a glance, he kept staring at her. He felt as if an icy hand was squeezing his insides, and felt himself fading away to a place beyond death itself. In less than four seasons he had lost so much to the wornan. 41 The element of bisexuality here is intriguing, particularly in the light of my previous discussions on female sexuality and its representation within the existing symbolic order. As the woman asserts her subjectivity by taking control of Ryu's body, it is within this act of taking ownership of her own sexed subjectivity that she can no longer function as a reference point to Ch'oe's projections of subjectivity which necessitate hierarchical positioning in relation to her body. As Ch'oe senses that he is losing control over her corporeality, he attempts to gain control through caging her, after which she is literally sold off to another circus in another continent. Her act, therefore, results in confinement within an animal cage, a symbolic pointer to her having transgressed the accepted realm of

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society and now being perceived as so removed from it that she will, from now on, be associated with the animal world. It is telling that in the end, the circus woman does not find subjectivity as such, but simply exists in a state of excess in which, in Geraldine Meaney's words, 'the "not me" has not yet stabilized into an Other'. 42 Regardless of this, the circus woman remains true to her position as excess, even when it results in her expulsion from all forms of human sociality. This transition from the boundaries of culture to a non-human world is portrayed as a positive turn of events, as suggested in the final sentence of the story in which the previously overcast weather takes a turn for the better.43 However, such a positive note is rather surprising, because ultimately it suggests that feminine excess will always and necessarily be excluded from the symbolic and thus can never possess a place within it. To a certain extent, the circus woman's failed attempt to gain agency thus symbolizes the impossibility of any act of authoritative speech and action for women within the existing symbolic order. The story thus reveals both the impossibility of sustaining a form of feminine subjectivity, faithful to the sexual difference that Irigaray speaks of, and the mechanics by which feminine difference is kept under control by patriarchal societies. There are, therefore, obvious limits to the circus woman's becoming-subject, since her resistance leads to confinement and a kind of a 'living death', as suggested at the end of the story by the description of her being covered in dust, locked inside a cage. Moreover, because her attempt to assert her subjectivity is carried out through what might be described as masculine means (by objectivizing Ryu's effeminate body), this story cannot be said to offer a complete restructuring of the phallic imaginary. Instead, it suggests the impossibility of embracing feminine excess which will always be expurgated from the symbolic, as long as the latter remains unchanged and resistant to difference. The title of the story becomes significant in this context, as it implies a sense of motion that leads nowhere: like society around them, the characters create a familiar social structure among themselves, and despite their potentially revolutionary position outside the society as such, they fail to recognize and act on this possibility. Thus, while the story initially seems to create a female character that eludes patriarchal categorizations, it eventually appears to be only partially subversive, because it ultimately reinforces the patriarchal order in its failure to envisage alternative spaces for the feminine. For this reason, 'The Merry-go-round Circus Woman' emerges primarily as a study of existing gender relations in Korea, rather than as a portrayal of a different social order. Yet it asks


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some very fundamental questions about the perceived naturalness of so-called feminine roles through suggesting that there exists an underlying bisexuality that threatens existing categorizations of femininity and masculinity and can only be controlled through a use of brutal force be it then corporeal or imaginary. And this, in turn, signifies the impossibility of representing any form of difference in the existing symbolic. THE POETICS OF DEATH If the feminine excess can be said to resist existing categorizations of culturally defined femininity, Chon's poetics of death describes representations of the feminine that become simply unmanageable within the existing symbolic. Through juxtaposing the way in which death and the feminine appear in a traditional myth of Princess Pari with her own take on the subject in 'Illusion and Nothingness' (Hwan gwa myOl, 1997), Chon utilizes death as a gesture towards iconic ideas, and an attempt to interrogate and problematize existing culturally encoded ideas about women and female subjectivity. Traditional, and to a certain extent modern, Korean understanding of death is informed by various religious and philosophical lines of thinking: for a Christian, death is a threshold to an eternal life with God; for a Buddhist, death is simply an end of physical existence, and one that is in any case only an illusion of existence. Indigenous folk beliefs, such as shamanism, also sought to ensure safe transfer of the spirit of the recently deceased to the netherworld, and elaborate rituals and rites were observed to ensure this. In contrast to this, Confucian scholars generally denied any form of cognitive existence after death (at least in public), but nevertheless created elaborate rituals to commemorate their ancestors. What these views have in common then is that there is a clear need to make sense of that which lies beyond physical existence, and part of this process is to reassure the living that death will not represent a complete obliteration of a person's existence or indeed memory of such existence. At the same time, death represents a complete displacement from the present realm of existence to the ultimate unknown. Death thus remains as the definitive 'other', one that threatens with the obliteration of the subject and one that cannot be controlled. Thus attitudes towards death tend to be marked by ambivalence in most societies and Korea is no exception. Since femininity in the Korean symbolic order is conceptualized as the 'other' of the masculine, it is perhaps no wonder that the

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feminine in the context of actual physical death seems to have invoked particular fear and terror. If the symbolic order presents a structure to control and define the feminine in relation to the masculine and the male kin system in particular, in death when the subject is removed outside all signification, the feminine has the potential to achieve its highest potential to seize power. There is a sense that once released from the social constraints that keep it in check while living, in death the feminine can easily become malicious and unpredictable. This fear of the unknown has inspired numerous folktales about childless women who die accidentally or commit suicide, and their ghosts were - and are often still - believed to be particularly terrifying. These restless spirits, or 'muju kohon' (~::E"J&;m), could attain power over the mortals left behind. 44 Beyond the actual physical death, femininity is thus perceived as being prone to rupture when no longer strictly controlled, and takes on an unpredictable quality which resists all definition. An unmarried dead woman thus represents the ultimate 'Other', the liminality of existence that cannot be defined in relation to social mores or phallic notions of femininity. Instead, it reflects a fear of the unknown, and that which threatens the existing social order. Yet to me, rather than describing femininity per se, the horror of feminine power within death actually reveals a very real sense of male anxiety about the perceived rationality of male control over women. It is within this context that the shamanistic myth of Princess Pari (paritegl) becomes significant because it is an attempt to articulate a sense of order in the afterlife, and to a certain extent, tame the unruly feminine that threatens the (masculine) subject with oblivion. The myth recounts a story of the seventh daughter of King Upbi, whose royal parents, distraught at the birth of a seventh daughter, abandon her at birth and throw her into the sea. The princess is saved by a deity and taken to an elderly couple who foster her. Some years later, the king and the queen are struck down by a mysterious illness, and it transpires that only the abandoned Princess Pari will be able to acquire the required medicinal water from the Heavenly Kingdom of the Western Sky to rescue her parents from the throes of death. Despite having been abandoned as a baby for being an unwanted girl, she sets out on a perilous quest to save her parents. After completing her difficult journey, during which she has to marry the Guardian Armed God and bear him seven sons, she finally acquires the medicinal water and returns home only to find her parents dead. The medicinal water, however, brings them back to life. Her grateful parents offer her a hefty reward, but the princess unselfishly returns to the Heavenly


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Kingdom and becomes a spirit guide to the souls of the recently deceased, in order to guide them on their perilous journey to the netherworld. And thus ends the story. In this Korean myth Princess Pari thus becomes an archetypal enduring heroic figure. She transcends the formerly absolute condition of death, and in a sense tames the previously fearful and unknown realm. The heroine of this story is therefore very unlike the female protagonist in the Greek myth of Orpheus in which Eurydice is simply relegated to being the object of Orpheus's desiring gaze which eventually sends her back to Hades for good. From the outset, the myth thus follows an archetypal hero-narrative: rather than being a passive observer, Princess Pari is in actual fact empowered through her dislocation from the realm of the living as she hovers between spaces occupied by the dead and the non-dead. In some sense, it can be interpreted as a narrative that portrays exploits of a strong female character.45 However, on a closer analysis, the heroic nature of Princess Pari's hazardous journey is hardly subversive of patriarchal logic, as the organizing principle that informs this myth is that of filial piety, and of existing patriarchal kinship structures. To gain power over her husband, Princess Pari marries him and bears seven sons, and is presented as an example of a virtuous woman, motivated solely by her self-sacrificial love for her parents. The feminine power that Princess Pari exercises in the netherworld is therefore a comfortably phallic one: it conforms to the symbolic order in the world of the living. The heroism of Princess Pari is found in her ability to transcend the physical constraints of this world and the next in order to fulfil her filial duties. At the same time, she never attempts to transcend the social order that defines her own femininity and subjectivity. The myth thus invites us to accept mortality with the knowledge that the existing social order continues in some form in the netherworld within the comforting figure of the spirit-guide Princess Pari. Rather than being a tale about a heroic female subject, the myth functions as a vehicle to ease male anxieties about the threat of the uncontrollable feminine that haunts the netherworld. Although Chon Kyongnin follows the same logic of dislocating the feminine from everyday physical existence, she simultaneously subverts the patriarchal logic that informs the myth of Princess Pari through problematizing and criticizing the limits of possibility that exist for feminine subjectivity within contemporary Korean patriarchy. In 'Illusion and Nothingness', the author introduces death as its central motif, and utilizes it both as a metaphor to describe the central character's sense of non-subjectivity, as well as to reveal the illusionary nature of the social order that

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she inhabits. The story focuses on the narrator-protagonist's recollections of the events leading up to the suicide of her younger sister Chin, and the subsequent presence-in-absence of the sister's ghost which affects the rest of the family in various evocative ways. Although the story appears initially as a ghost-story about a malicious female spirit, it is in actual fact more about how the narrator and the people around her deal with the presence of death in their own lives. Death is thus not discussed merely in terms of the physical demise of the narrator's sister, as this only comes to represent an existential measure of the sister's physical existence. Instead, by juxtaposing Chin's physical death with the other characters' yearning for life, the story reveals the extent to which death is already present in the lives of all of the characters who appear in this story. Because it is so extreme and polarized, the younger sister's death becomes a point around which all of the narrator's contemplations centre. As the narrator struggles to understand the reasons behind her sister's suicide, she slowly becomes aware that for Chin, death represented not an unknown limit to physical existence, but an opening to something new when she had reached the limits of her present existence. She recalls the birth of Chin and her twin sister Mi, and the bitter disappointment at the birth of two more girls to a family that already had two daughters. In a superstitious attempt to trick fate, the parents decide to give Chin a gender-ambiguous name, and she is also brought up as a boy as if to declare that a birth of another boy would be inconsequential since the family already appeared to have a 'boy'. Similarly to the princess in the myth discussed earlier, Chin is thus cast away, albeit symbolically. When growing up she is dressed up like a boy with her hair cut short, and encouraged to play with the boys in the neighbourhood. However, it is also her strange androgynous existence that makes her repulsive to rest of the family. When she eventually grows tired of playing the masculine role and lets her hair grow long to signify her wish to identify with other women, it has all gone on for too long and her family can never quite recognize her as a 'real' woman. Her unacceptable otherness is therefore not caused by Chin herself, but is brought on by the family's decision to sacrifice her gender identity for the 'good' of the family unit. In this sense, her perceived subjectivity only represents the wishes and hopes of her family, and as such she herself is not in fact represented at all. Consequently, her sense of self is fragmented at best. It is no surprise then that Chin's outlook on life is intertwined with death as for her, any subjectivity appears as founded on the death of the


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other. Accordingly, the green colours of trees, which represent life to the narrator, signify death to Chin. Observing trees lush with colour she notes: I'm afraid. The colour green makes me tremble. I can't even begin to imagine how many deaths that colour has caused as it has devoured all that life beneath it. The roots of the colour green are founded on death [of another]. And this summer, I fear, the presence of death around us is particularly exuberant. 46 In the same way as a tree draws its nutrition from the soil formed of dead matter, Chin equally feels as if her subjectivity had been drained out of her. Having never been allowed to choose the gendered identity she would have wanted to identify with, life that depends on the death of the other (such as tree roots thriving in soil that is made of dead organic matter) appear as a sign of death to her. However, Chin's non-subjectivity in this story is not meant to be taken as a warning against bringing up a girl as a boy. Instead, it becomes a metaphor for the limits of women's selfrepresentation in patriarchial society. This is because if one's sense of subjectivity is founded on an other subject's death in the symbolic, the perceived life that the former lives is based on nothing more than an illusion of lifeY In the story, this sense of the unreal that haunts the characters' experience of reality is perpetuated by the narrative style. The plot proceeds at a cyclical, almost dreamlike pace, accentuated only by frequent motifs of flowing elements such as water and wind. As the narrator's contemplations switch between the present moment, and a world of dreams and her memories, all of which are presented as equally 'real' to her, time merges into a surreal cyclical (rather than a linear) continuum. This creates a sense of open-endedness of the past and present, as if what happens to the characters is being eternally repeated and thus has no meaning in the greater scheme of things. 48 In the course of the story, this flowing mood is occasionally punctuated by images of sharp objects. Tellingly, these ruptures take place only in the protagonist's dreams, suggesting that it is only outside the 'real' experienced during her waking hours that the illusion that is her life can be broken. As the chronology of the story blends into an eternal present, only death offers a prospect of a reference point to reality in the hereand-now, even if the end of one's physical existence will eventually lead only to nothingness. It is at this juncture where Chon Kyongnin's narrative draws

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on the myth of Princess Pari and rewrites culturally encoded messages within the myth. While Princess Pari embraces the netherworld as her ultimate filial duty, for Chon's female character death is a choice because it is only in death that the feminine subject is to be freed from the limits of the existing symbolic order. In this sense, she must choose to die because she exists as excess of the symbolic order, and as such, society can no longer 'contain' her. At this point, Chon Kyongnin's view on subjectivity built on the death of the other subjectivity intersects with that of Irigaray, and how life of a (masculine) subject is founded on the death of the (feminine) other. Irigaray asserts that since the feminine subject is excluded from the realm of signification within phallic symbolic order, women exist, in terms of signification, in a state of a symbolic 'living death'. In Marine Lover, Irigaray assumes the voice of the feminine as she questions the phallic logic that informs Nietzsche, and implies that this state of continuous (living) death is perpetuated through masculine discourse of the feminine, which does not in fact allow the feminine to be represented at all. 49 Death for Irigaray is thus not simply an existential measure, but something that happens when possibilities for alternative subjectivities and representations are suppressed. 50 Similarly to how Irigaray interrogates Western philosophical thought and its ideas about femininity, in Chon's story Chin's desire for death becomes a metaphor of women's non-representation within Korean symbolic order. Thus in this story, physical death is presented as a meaningful objective for someone who is denied subjectivity. The feminine, defined in terms of docility, passivity and domesticity, signifies only death and end of fluid and open subjectivities. For Chin, death represents therefore not the final frontier, but a beginning of reality and quite paradoxically, a release from the order that allows her no viable form of existence. Rather than an end, death is portrayed as an opening and Chin's desire to die signifies a desire to achieve a release from stagnant self-image and a release from a state of fragmentation. If the reason for Chin's death is shown to lie in her inability to find a reference point for a reliable subjectivity, or even an illusion of subjectivity, the other female characters cannot escape a similar sense of non-subjectivity. The narrator also exists in a state of living death, simply acting out a series of roles. However, for her, death represents a primary source of fear, as it reminds her of the annihilation of the subject. She is shown to deal with her fear in dreams in which she is able to transcend the limits of her lived reality and deal with that which is unsymbolized in her life. In these dreams, death,


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which takes a masculine form, haunts and pursues her, threatening to injure her. It is telling that it is the masculine (subject) that is represented as a threat to subjectivity, and the dreams are highly symbolic of the society the narrator lives in. In one of them, the narrator walks in a village fish market that is crowded with women. All the fish on offer are rotting and putrefied, but the women buy them nevertheless - signifying their acceptance of such an abject existence. As the narrator watches, death in the form of a menacing faceless man, threatens her with violence, and throws a large stone at a young girl who happens to enter the scene. The girl's head explodes 'like a tomato' and her blood splatters over the narrator's face. A few days later Chin appears in another dream, her hair is drenched in blood, suggesting that the girl who died was in fact Chin. At this point of the story, therefore, there is a strong suggestion of a connection between the masculine and the death of the feminine subject. However, this impression is reversed as the storyline proceeds towards a narrative conclusion. At the time of Chin's death the narrator is described as being heavily pregnant, but the idea of budding life within her cannot disperse her fear of death. Even pregnancy and giving birth, both of which are supposed to represent life in its most fruitful form, remind her of the end of life. She perceives reproduction as simply a way of cheating death, and contemplates that even the new life in her womb already carries within it a mark of inevitable death: I felt boundless. My soul drifted out of my body and sat opposite me. I had never regarded my soul before. My soul was staring back at me, at my exterior. It was different from seeing yourself in the mirror, and I could see that both my soul and I were weak and crippled. I was scared. But I wanted to give birth to this child. I clutched my stomach, and thought how giving birth was like having a flower blooming on the top of your head. Or perhaps not. Never that. Instead I was struck by the thought that I can't just decay in a tomb, and reasoned that as we march towards death, giving birth is something that you really have to do [in order to hold onto life, at least on some level]. 51 Eventually, the narrator comes to the conclusion that life itself is simply a series of simulations, and the reminder of reality that people can hold onto is death, 'because it is only through death that one really completes one's existence'. 52 Towards the end of the story the narrator experiences a moment where her real and dream worlds collide, and life itself is revealed to be illusionary. In

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a moment of eternal present, which appears as twilight, and submerged in shades of red and gold, the narrator finally confronts her fear of obliteration. She physically attacks what she perceives to be a personified image of death, plunging a knife into his face, and finds to her surprise that there is no blood as his skin 'rips like rice paper'. It is in this moment that the narrator finds herself released from the fear of that which lies beyond: Staring at the golden field of ripening tall wheat, in the moment between reality and dream, I feel a sense of relief. [... ] I now know the face of death who carries a stone about the size of my head, and chases my shadow. Death is inside my body, and although for now it will only shadow me as if travelling on a parallel path which does not cross mine, I know that I will have to yield to it one day, just like my sister did. 5 3 In this sense, physical death comes to represent a point of becoming-subject, a point of release from known definitions of existence. As death now no longer appears as a threat, but as an innate part of her life, the narrator is able to begin the process of discovering life within herself as she is released from the fear of the unknown. However, the narrative at this point also interrogates the possibility that in the Korean cultural context, despite the social emphasis on motherhood, femininity is, quite paradoxically, symbolically connected with death. Through her poetics of death Chon here then exercises agency as a writer and producer of new cultural meanings. She reclaims death as an ultimate unknown where meanings and signs are nonfixed, thus subverting the comfortable phallic image of Princess Pari. In Chon Kyongnin's story, death remains uncomfortable and threatening, reminding the reader and the narrator of the annihilation of the subject. And although the narrator in the end of the story reconciles herself with the inevitability of her own physical demise, the haunting presence of her sister resists restoration of a stable phallic symbolic order, and works to subvert culturally coded messages about the feminine. Thus, rather than simply lamenting the death of feminine subjectivity in life, the narrative haunts the reader with a refusal to accept the phallic version of the feminine. I would argue that to an extent, through her poetics of death, Chon reclaims the unheimlich that lies beyond patriarchal representation as a resource to breathe life into the existing stagnant image of the feminine in her own cultural context, even if it cannot quite yet achieve a sense of subjectivity within the existing patriarchal order.


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THE OPEN-ENDED FEMININE In terms of reimagining femininity in the Korean cultural context the use of the fantastic in these stories is crucial because it allows the author to present issues of importance from the safe distance of the 'unreal'. Yet, the social-situatedness of the fantastic also allows Ch6n to explore experiences of alienation and disintegration of self-identity, which find no anchorage in traditional roles of wife, mother or dependent mistress. And this, most significantly, opens up a narrative space for Ch6n to mock the familiar elements that represent cultural continuity and unity and so to question the logic behind the patriarchal ideology that upholds cultural stability. All of the female characters portrayed in these stories resist identities fixed to any given role defined within the existing symbolic order. Furthermore, the narratives are marked by fluid metaphors that seek to elude or transcend established physical boundaries: mirror realities, death, floating, a state of weightlessness and metamorphoses. That said, because of the very open-ended nature of the feminine presented in these narratives it is difficult to say to what extent they are subversive of the existing symbolic order, since the narratives never present an alternative, sustainable representation of the feminine to the existing symbolic. In 'Merry-go-round Circus Woman', the protagonist, even in the position of excess of the symbolic order, only obtains a temporary sense of subjectivity through objectivizing an effeminate male character. As excess she is always outside the symbolic order, and functions as a kind of a reminder of that which cannot yet be represented. Similarly, in 'Illusion and Nothingness', the protagonist is never able to conceptualize a new identity for herself in her waking hours, but is able to deal with her fear of the unsymbolized feminine through her dreams. Yet, while she recognizes this, forging an idea of feminine, uncomplimentary subjectivity seems impossible in the perceived 'real'. It is telling, however, that the narrator reconciles herself with the inevitability of physical demise and in some ways claims it as a potential point of self-realization. In 'Mirror', too, it is through renouncing the illusion of subjectivity, that the protagonist reaches the point where she can begin her becomingsubject. In the end, it is probably for a good reason that Ch6n does not attempt to define the 'new' feminine in any of her stories, and this is a significant departure from a lot of Korean literary tradition. After all, this calculated open-endedness also functions to highlight the impossibility of imagining alternative femininities in

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the current symbolic. The very evanescent nature of the feminine in Chon's narratives represents recognition of the very artificial and, indeed, fictional nature of existing definitions of the feminine in contemporary Korean symbolic order. Yet, as the feminine described in these narratives dwells in the outskirts of the existing symbolic as its excess, it also evades all binary positioning. As such they emerge as explorations of identity of a different kind, just waiting for the right moment to flourish into something more tangible. NOTES 1

Karen Green observes that representations of the feminine in the West are equally enduring ('The Other as Another Other', Hypatia

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Pollock, Generations and Geographies in Visual Arts, p. xv. Green, p. 13. Whitford, Luce Irigaray, p. 75. See Margaret Whitford, 'Rereading Irigaray', in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brenham (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 106-26 (p. 117). Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 69. It should be noted that the stories discussed here do not fall within the traditional Asian idea of the fantastic genre, with their portrayals of otherworldly beings with supernatural powers who either help (guardian or mountain spirits, Buddhist deities, heavenly beings) or attempt to harm humankind (mischievous spirits, restless ghosts). The fantastic genre here thus resembles closely the fantastic literary mode of the European and American literary traditions. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 20. Ibid., p. 83-7. Nicholas Ruddick, 'Introduction: Learning to Resist the Wolf', in State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, ed. Nicholas Ruddick (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1992), pp. xiii-xvi (p. xiii). Susan J. Napier, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 8. jackson, p. 3. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London and New York: Arnold, 1996), p. 6. Ibid., p. 2. Reflecting this view in the context of discussing British women's literature, Maggie Humm points out that 'feminist fantasy can explore the contradictions between women's growing awareness

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of their sexuality and the harsh constructs which society creates to control women' (Maggie Humm, Border Traffic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991), p. 55). Butler, 'Bodies that Matter', p. 158. These marginal elements were also the ones referred to in the earlier passage from Marine Lover quoted in this chapter. For example, Ch'oe Yun's The Thirteen-Scent Flower (Yonse k.aji iriim iii kkot hyanggi, 1995) is one such 'postmodem' narrative that engages with the fantastic to a great effect. In some ways, Chon's stories resemble Angela Carter's narratives with her images of 'non-naturalistic, eclectic materials (fairytales, Freud and Jung, mythology) to encapsulate and illuminate in literary shape the kind of de-colonization [Carter] hopes women might be attempting in real life' (Humm, Border Traffic, p. 55). Chon, 'Kouri kour iii poltte', p. 255. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid. Ibid., p. 276. Toksugung palace in central Seoul is probably the most popular location for wedding photography in the city. Consequently, many couples have wedding portraits which are taken in identical surroundings. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 110-11. Ibid., p. 113. Chon, 'Kouri kour iii poltte', p. 257. Ibid., p. 278 (Ellipses in the original). Although there is no Korean myth that would claim so, an existing evolutionary theory states that whales, hippos and cows were originally descended from the same species of mammals. Chon, 'Kouri kour iii poltte', p. 278 lrigaray, Speculum, p. 134. In the corpus of her works, Elemental Passions is a particularly good example of an attempt to do this (Cecilia Sj6holm, 'Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions', Hypatia 15:3 (2000), 92-112 (p. 93)). Chon Kyongnin, 'Merigounraundii sok'osii yoin' (ofl i!l ::i!.~i!}~ E. A"i 74 ~ 01 ~) [The Merry-go-round Circus Woman], in 21 Segi munhak sang susang chakp'um jip, Vol. 3 (2Pl]7] ~~"'d"'T"'J- 3l-*-1l) [A Collection of 21st Century Literary Prize Winning Works] (Seoul: 1999), pp. 25-49 (pp. 26-7).

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5o 51 52

53


Ibid., p. 25 (Ellipses in the original). In this point Chon's character differs from Carter's Fevvers, who actively seeks to defy socially imposed rules and to define her limits of existence by herself. Chon, 'Merigounraundu sok'osu yoin', p. 41. Ibid., p. 31 (Ellipses in the original). lrigaray, Key Writings, p. 24. Chon, 'Merigouraundu sogasu yoin', p. 49. Gerardine Meaney, (Un)Like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p. 197. The final sentence: 'The sun comes out', suggests an open-ended, positive future as such references to natural phenomena are commonly used in Korean literary fiction to suggest this . This tendency is by no means limited to Korean myths and literature. Indeed, in Japanese literature Enchi Fumiko's long-suffering protagonist in 'Onnazaka' asks not be buried but to be dumped in the sea without proper burial, so that her spirit could come back to haunt the living (Nina Cornyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese WriteiS (Stanford Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 110. See Michael L. Pettid's article on shamanistic narratives in 'May the Gods Strike You Dead! Healing through Subversion in Shamanistic Narratives', Asian Folklore Studies 62 (2003), 113-32. Chon, 'Hwan gwa myol', p. 232. lrigaray, Marine Lover, p. 28. David K. Danow, The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin from Word to Culture (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 74. Danow also notes that such technique in fantastic or magical realist genres offers 'a ready potential for a kind of "eternal recurrence", whose principle aspect [. .] is rooted more in dire repetition than in an implicit acknowledgement of eternity'. lrigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 30-1. Sj6holm, p. 107 Chon, 'Hwan gwa myol', p. 228. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., p. 239.

Beyond Representations

women writers occupy a peculiar position in relation to Korean the feminine that they represent in their works. In a society that so emphasizes women's bodies as a site to represent cultural continuities in terms of motherhood and domestic support work, and relegates women's active sexed bodies to negative representations of 'ethically fallen women', the act of writing that speaks of a possibility of moving beyond these representations is nothing short of a mutiny. Indeed, the literary establishment's resistance to allowing women to gain a position of recognized producers of new cultural meanings speaks volumes for the way a woman's reproductive power is perceived as more desirable than the product of her mind and imagination. The indignation of the male literary establishment is, in my view, epitomized in Yi Mun-yOl's novel Choice (Sont'aek) that was published in 1997 when 'new generation' women writers were scooping up all the major awards with their woman-centred stories. Yi's fictional account of the life of Righteous Madam Chang (chOngbuin Chang ssi) describes an artistically talented and intelligent upper class lady who nevertheless chooses to sacrifice her 'selfish' pursuit of artistic excellence to serve the interests of her patrilineal family. It is telling that Yi, himself one of the most respected and best-selling contemporary novelists, presents the narrative as a historical account to 'instruct' the modern generation of women, and his choice to present Madam Chang as a talented writer who chooses silence and obscurity is almost too coincidental to the immense popularity that women writers experienced towards the latter part of the 1990s. The vast popularity of Yi's ode to patriarchal symbolic order upon its publication in Korea (it was a best seller for a few months) shows that the general reading public was still very much in tune and receptive of traditional self-sacrificial feminine imageries. Creating alternative representations of the feminine is then an incredibly

196


complex task, because as Griselda Pollock points out, we are conditioned to produce social realities that are restricted and predictable.1 Or as judith Butler points out, we perceive performances of gender roles as something that are innate to us, even though it is only though these performative acts that we actually 'generate our gender'. 2 However, because we gain symbolic power within the situation we live in through living up to particular gender expectations, subverting or even simply realigning existing representations of femininity comes at a cost. So while there may be an argument for trying to present the feminine in a more positive light, rewriting femininity is not a simple matter of positive self-representation, because the ways in which existing ideas of femininity predispose us to think about what constitutes the limits of women's experience, or indeed what should be considered as unacceptable forms of behaviour for women. My readings of the literary works included in this book confirm this difficulty of thinking outside typologies of femininity and the heterosexual couple, as do the writers' own positioning in relation to the feminine. For Ha Songnan, the world appears as irreversibly masculine. This is not only because of her conscious and vocalized attempts to avoid being defined as a feminist writer on the basis of her gender, but also because in her works most characters appear to have no definable gender as such. They all appear to suffer as androgynous 'human beings', regardless of whether this suffering is connected to an explicitly feminine or masculine condition. In fact, it is telling that the human condition in her works emerges either as masculine, or one that aspires for the masculine power. The portrayals of dystopian, inauthentic modern city existence are never consciously connected to a subjectivity based on masculine values, even though a closer analysis of her narratives reveals just that. This is also why I chose to focus on her works to a lesser extent than the works of the two other writers. It is interesting that Ha, being the youngest of this group of writers, should consider the issue of sexual difference as being of little or no consequence, preferring to concentrate on the issue of an abstract 'human condition' that does not recognize the existence of two irreducibly separate sexes. To an extent, I see this as an indication of how some younger Korean women at the turn of the millennium increasingly believed that engaging in feminist politics was of no wider social consequence, yet they clearly recognized that gender equality did not exist. Un Huigyong, on the other hand, recognizes and laments the contemporary 'feminine condition', but still cannot envisage alternatives that would transcend the existing patriarchal


197

symbolic order. Her heroines deal with patriarchal oppression either by succumbing to it, by escaping into madness or by avoiding relationships with men altogether. Although her stories do describe the perceived realities of domestic life, her characters thus emerge symptomatic (rather than directly subversive) of patriarchal oppression. Moreover, through reiterating the stereotypes of 'the madwoman' or 'the whore', who by their very definition are already excluded from all meaningful positions of speech or action within patriarchy, she creates heroines that are essentially powerless in their prevailing circumstances. Out of these three writers, it is Chon Kyongnin who attempts to actually transcend the limitations of existing representations of the feminine. Through her rewritings of myths and explorations of alternative realities, she challenges accepted notions of the nature of the feminine. What is more, her stories suggest that women's process of becoming subjects does not necessarily have to involve conflict between men and women, but that there exists the possibility of a harmonious existence for both sexes. So while the writers all approach the feminine from different perspectives, they all in one way or another represent the effects of patriarchal repression on women: female characters appear as victims of multiple oppressions; yet within their particular circumstances, they are shown to resist their culturally and socially defined roles, either by actively rebelling or by less conspicuous means. While their feminine 'otherness' mainly appears in negative forms of rebellion (madness, death and sexual promiscuity), which hardly provide models for positive feminine identities, it speaks against the artificial nature of patriarchal ideas about the feminine. These representations are thus not prescriptive: they are not about what real women 'should' be doing with their lives. Instead, they are deconstructive in that they open up a discursive space to show how existing patriarchal representations of femininity are essentially imaginary. Moreover, rather than simply suggesting or representing 'new' kinds of femininity, these narratives vocalize repressed, yet unadulterated anger about the position of the feminine, and a desire to challenge it. This anger that had remained unspeakable and was stifled by the need to represent women's bodies in terms of motherhood or the sacrifice of women's sexed subjectivities for the cultural continuity of what is essentially a male-centred civil society. This anger in these narratives, to me, represents a voice of dissidence, registered and vocalized through rewriting of myths and assumptions of the 'naturalness' of presumably traditional feminine roles. And it is this anger that turns the submissive, docile

198


feminine object into a subject who dares to challenge or even erase the fictional notions of the feminine that she has, until then, been expected to conform to. Whether feminist or not, 1990s women writers in general emerge as dissidents to the patriarchal symbolic order of representation. In this sense they were involved in a feminist enterprise (whether intentionally or not) of challenging (if not yet rewriting) meanings of femininity. As Griselda Pollock notes: Feminism stands for a commitment to the full appreciation of what women inscribe, articulate, a voice and image in cultural forms: interventions in the fields of meaning and identity from the place called 'woman' or the 'feminine'. Feminism also refers to a theoretical revolution in the ways in which terms such as art, culture, subjectivity, politics and so forth are understood. 3 Within this context, 1990s Korean women's literature and its representations of femininity were immensely significant because of the ways they challenged the existing conceptualization of femininity. In fact, many of them could be described as narratives that were exposing potential points of rupture within the phallocentric representations of femininity which would allow its subversion. However, stories located within traditional thematics of femininity reveal a clear difficulty in moving beyond imagining women as the other of the masculine. On the contrary, stories that highlight the importance of positive relationships between mothers and daughters, show that such possibility seems to exist. The fact that mother-daughter relationships have not previously been symbolized in Korean culture suggests that it is only through vocalizing that which patriarchal ideologies have left unsaid about femininity that a potential for subverting the existing symbolic exists. It is interesting to observe then that in the 2000s, many women writers have increasingly focused on the mother as a person rather than a functionary of a socially constructed role. Shin Ky6ngsuk's immensely popular novel Please Look after My Mother (Omma ri11 put'akhae, 2008), is an example of such and recounts a story of a family whose dedicated mother suddenly disappears without a trace. It is only when the family begin searching for her that they realize that while they all profess to love her, none of them actually know very much about her as a person. Kong Chiy6ng's I Will Stand

behind You No Matter What You Choose (Niga otton salm i11 saldi1n na nun no ri11 i1ngwon halkgosida, 2008) is a collection of candid letters that the author has written to her teenage daughter. Perhaps the two most interesting recently published stories, particularly in the context of this book, are Ch6n Ky6ngnin's My Mother's House


199

(Omma iii chip, 2008) and Kong Chiyong's My Pleasant House (Na iii chiilgoun chip, 2007) in which the mother is now presented as the symbolic head of the family, equivalent to that of the father. This apparent symbolic shift away from conceptualizing human relations in terms of patriarchy or patriarchal kinship articulates something much more profound that simple representation of some 'alternative' form of femininity. They are not, perhaps surprisingly, concerned with replacing the phallocratic order with a gynocratic one, but rather, concentrate on disrupting and modifying the existing symbolic order to accommodate the feminine within an un-hierarchical relation to the masculine. There is thus no desire to take the place of the masculine, nor is there an exhortation for the creation of a singular subjectivity that disregards all social relations. Rather, these narrative negotiations, reflecting their sociohistorical con text, call for a formulation of the basis for a new kind of subjectivity that would be conceptualized in-relation to (rather than in opposition to) the other. Bracha L. Ettinger, a feminist artist and psychoanalyst, has explored a possibility of using art as a space to conceptualize such ethical relation to the other, and I find her ideas helpful in this context of explaining this shift. Freud famously describes the development of the ego and of male and female sexualities invariably in terms of separation, and for him the formation of the Ego will always and necessarily have to involve some form of rupture, a separation of I from the not-!. Ettinger, in contrast to this, is interested in considering the extent to which subjectivity could be imagined not as a rupture from the other, but as formed through an encounter with another. Resembling the way in which Freud and Lacan take the phallus to elaborate their critical concepts in psychoanalysis, Ettinger returns to the female body to do the same. Her concept of the matrixial metramorphosis ('matrix' being the Latin word for 'womb') is then, as Griselda Pollock notes, 'a thinking apparatus' which enables Ettinger to move beyond conceptualizing self as not-!, to envisioning a co-affective relationship between self and the Other. The matrixial takes into account the pre-natal, where both the foetus and the mother co-emerge as subjects. 4 It is not thus only the child who is becoming a subject, but the presence of the child means that the mother is co-affected by the child's presence, and so her subjectivity changes through this experience. For Ettinger, then, subjectivity must be considered within the matrixial difference, which 'conceptualizes the difference of what is joint and alike yet not "the same", of what is unrecognized yet recognizable within-in a shared trans-subjectivity'. 5 The matrixial is thus imagined as a space where self-subjectivity does

200


not necessitate rupture and forgetting the other, but recognizes co-subjectivity within which the other co-emerges with self. The borderline between self and the other becomes a threshold; a space for mutual affecting that renders it impossible to imagine the relation between self and the Other in rigid oppositionary terms. In the context of women's literature in the 2000s, it seems to me that the authors are thus engaged in rewriting the maternal feminine, and reclaiming it as one possible platform for imagining meaningful feminine identities. However, instead of necessitating the presence of an authority figure, these women are writing into being a democratic principle which promotes subjectivity as an encounter with the other, and mothering as a gift-giving principle that does not expect anything in return. This effectively subverts the image of a patriarchal Mother, who begets a child to benefit from the status the (son-)child will effectively bring her, or to rely on the child to provide in old age. FINAL THOUGHTS What remains now, I suppose, is the question as to what does this all mean in practice, as a social scientist friend of mine would immediately ask. The purpose of this book has been to read ideologies that still inform literary texts of some modern Korean women writers to demonstrate the extent to which the very signs 'woman' and 'femininity' are still denoting otherness in patriarchal morphology. What transpires is that it is also precisely because femininity is by and large still perceived as an immutable quality that all women possess to a differing degree, challenging the very description of what this 'femininity' entails becomes a complicated task because it involves challenging any existing historically received 'truths' about the perceived nature of the feminine. The discourses that now inform the very notion of femininity in Korea are a complicated mix of often conflicting values in which globalization of cultural production plays no small part. These are in turn intertwined with traditional gender ideologies, and it is important to recognize that there is still no independent space for the feminine within cultural representation that would stand alone and be considered valid in its own right without the need to define it in relation to masculinity or men. And it is this that I hope to draw attention to; the urgent need to recognize the fact that unless there is a new conceptual base for imagining femininity, the patriarchal symbolic order will simply keep metamorphosing without a need for a fundamental change to take place on the level of the symbolic -and this applies to all cultures and societies where patriarchy or


201

any other such organizing principle is at work. For example, even when I am writing this, I am aware that the 'femininities' discussed in this book are perhaps already passing with the ever-increasing focus on attaining the 'right' feminine appearance through surgical intervention: the double eye lid, the long slender calves and the elongated nose. What strikes me about these representations of femininity inscribed in the flesh is how they perpetrate cultural myths about the ideal femininity achieved within the corporeal (now through beauty rather than motherhood), and the need to suffer and self-regulate (diet) to achieve the ideal. Again, these bodily representations of the feminine may allow women to gain some symbolic power (in a Bourdeausian sense), but they do nothing to challenge the underlying issue that I have been talking about here. There is then a need to learn to 'read' cultural signs in a way that is much more aware of this tendency to recreate existing myths about the feminine in the context of Korean cultural representation, as well as beyond the Korean cultural sphere. The short stories discussed in this book emerge as such critical readings of patriarchal culture and will hopefully allow others to do so in the context of other cultural representations of the same. My readings of literary text about the feminine, whether it be written by men or women, show that what is imagined as representing essentially feminine qualities are simply descriptions of patriarchal constructions of mythic femininity. And the fact women writers can only begin to reimagine femininity within spaces that are not currently symbolized, suggests that 'normative femininity' should in fact be termed fictional femininity because femininity, as it is imagined within existing Korean patriarchal symbolic order, does not describe but prescribe femininity. Korean women's writing of the 1990s is particularly revealing of how this presumably normative femininity emerges as an imaginary construct, a mythologizing practice that is presented as an evidential fact about the feminine. So what I hope this book achieves, at least to some extent, is to open up the possibility of dissolving the existing meanings attached to 'femininity' in Korea, which rely so heavily on notions of interiority as the space for the feminine and the maternal as the expression of female sexuality. Creating a new symbolic that would allow multiple representations of the feminine, or even a space for exploring new possibilities for the feminine, thus remains a task for future research and political action. This would require a more thorough examination of the very ideological bases on which existing representations of women's 'realities' in variety of cultural media are built, with the ultimate aim of formulating

202


strategies to subvert them. I emphasize that this is by no means a trivial matter that can be overlooked. Women in patriarchal societies can become equal with men, but this does not necessarily bring any real change to the symbolic representation of masculinity and femininity. Take my native Finland, for example. Women have learned to imitate masculine values quite effectively, or to put it bluntly: they have become quite good men in many areas of life. Women are engineers, doctors and politicians, but the rules of the game are masculine and conform to the neoliberal patriarchal and capitalist principles that people now feel they have to kowtow to in order to succeed in life. But if women try to do things differently, and to emphasize values that draw from the principles of Ettinger's matrixial, they cease to be 'good men' There is therefore a need to theorize and reconceptualize femininity as different but equivalent to the masculine within the symbolic. Yet this does not have to necessitate an antagonistic relationship between the two. I hope then that this study of Korean women's literature will highlight the fact that women in Korea, in the same way as women in patriarchal Western societies, have still got a long way to go in order to be recognized as feminine subjects. While I have found Irigaray's theories useful to this end as a kind of a platform highlighting some misconceptions about the nature of the feminine in the context of Korean culture, there are other theoretical frameworks that will allow for similar readings of cultural signs of femininity, say in the context of analysing cinematic narratives and the mass media. Studies such as these would in turn serve to highlight and map out the persistence of these ideologies that influence Korean perceptions of the feminine to such an extent that women find it difficult to succeed in the work place, politics, or even as civil subjects without considerable personal sacrifice on their part. Korean feminism, and Korean women as activists, academics and perhaps artists, need to address the possibility of creating a new feminine symbolic, in addition to the task of effecting the political changes that such new ways of conceptualizing gender would imply. Contemporary Korean women writers, on their part, are already well on their way to rewriting the script.

1 2

3

NOTES Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, p. xiv. Judith Butler, 'Imitation and Gender Insubordination' in Inside/ out: Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 13-31 (p. 24). Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts, p. xv.

Beyond Representations 4

5

203

Griselda Pollock, Introduction to The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi, Theory Out of Bounds Series Vol. 28 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 1-38 ( p. 3). Bracha L. Ettinger, 'Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event', Theory, Culture & Society 21:1 (2004), 69-94 (p. 78).

Bibliography

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Payne (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1997), pp. 49-73 Eckert, Carter]., 'Exorcising Hegel's Ghosts: Toward Postnationalist Historiography of Korea', in Colonial Modernity in Korea, eds Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Cambridge, Mass. And London: Harvard UP, 1999), pp. 363-78 --, et al., Korea Old and New, a History (Seoul: Ilchokak Publishers, 1990) Elfving-Hwang, Joanna, 'The Improper Desire for Knowledge: De-gendering Curiosity in Contemporary Korean Women's Literature', in Korea: The Past and the Present, eds Susan Pares and James Hoare (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008), pp. 446-54 Eliade, Mircea, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1998; originally published in 1963 by Harper & Row Publishers) Ettinger, Bracha L., Matrixial Metramorphosis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) --, 'Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial EncounterEvent', Theory, Culture & Society 21:1 ( 2004), 69-94 Freud, Sigmund, On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library Vol. 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977) --, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud: The Ego and the Id, Vol. XIX, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961) Foucault, Michel, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998; first published under the title The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction by Allen Lane, 1979) Fulton, Bruce, 'Seeing the Invisible: Women's Fiction in South Korea Today', Manoa 8:2 (1996): 64-8 Gallop, Jane, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) Grayson, james H., 'Female Mountain Spirits in Korea: A Neglected Tradition', Asian Folklore Studies, Nagoya, LV-1 (1996), 119-34 --, Myths and Legends from Korea (Richmond: Curzon, 2001) Green, Karen, 'The Other as Another Other', Hypatia 17:4 (2002), 1-15 Grosz, Elizabeth, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, Winchester, 1989) Hahm, In-hee, 'Modern Korean Views on Marriage', Koreana 17:1 (2003) 25-9 Hansen, jennifer, 'There are Two Sexes, Not One', in French Feminist Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Maryland and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), pp. 201-205 1

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