Questioning Minds: Short Stories by Modern Korean Women Writers

Introduction: Traditions in Modern Korean Women’s Fiction Writing

Introduction Traditions in Modern Korean Women’s Fiction Writing YUNG-HEE KIM Modern Korean women’s engagement with fiction writing began in the late 1910s under the adverse conditions of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), which had put an end to the Chosŏn (or Yi) dynasty (1392–1910) and with it Korea’s political autonomy. Notwithstanding their national plight, first from Japanese colonization and then from national division in 1945, Korean women have kept their voices alive, using their writing to express concerns about both themselves and their society. This pursuit has been anything but easy, but these women have succeeded in forging an unbroken line of their own literary tradition that stretches now through nine decades. Externally, these women writers have had to overcome formidable cultural and sociopolitical obstacles—corollaries of Korea’s own historical vicissitudes. Among these obstacles were Japanese government censorship, including the surveillance of intellectuals and even the banning of the Korean language during the colonial period; the postliberation ideological chaos and the resulting national division; the destruction and social upheaval of the Korean War (1950–1953); and oppressive military rule from 1961 until the reestablishment of civilian government in 1993. Internally, they needed to liberate themselves from centuries-old Confucian gender injunctions imposed upon women—injunctions that demanded they be submissive, silent, and invisible, as stipulated in “Three Rules of Obedience” and “Seven Vices.”1 These actual and symbolic patriarchal mechanisms—the Korean version of “the Angel in the House”2 —to control 1 women’s thought, speech, and behavior contributed to curtailing their dreams and needs and silencing the voice to speak what was closest to their hearts. Women writers who dared to speak out had to negotiate their careers through the male-dominant milieu of the Korean literary world, where established male figures presided as the supreme arbiters of literary standards and taste and even controlled the channels to publication. Furthermore, tagged with the belittling appellation yŏryu chakka (lady writers), Korean women writers also had to conquer the public’s long-standing prejudice against their work as inferior, or at best secondary, to that of their male counterparts—as the Other of Korean literary traditions. Even their Confucian-scripted, other-oriented domestic responsibilities as daughters , wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law negatively affected their literary production, denying them “a room of their own”—unhampered space, time, and material reality—so essential to any creative activity.3 These extraliterary factors may in part account for the brevity of the careers, or the entire disappearance into obscurity, of a number of Korean women writers who boasted promising beginnings. Today women writers such as Pak Wan-sŏ (b. 1931) and recently deceased Pak Kyŏng-ni (1927–2008) command high respect as elders of the Korean literary world. Because of their consistent production of works that may rank as modern Korean classics, they have even become household names. What’s more, highly educated, talented, young women writers of the 1980s and the 1990s are now enjoying unprecedented prominence, particularly in the field of fiction. Their innovative themes, narrative structure, and strategies challenge old practices, and their works repeatedly make the best-seller lists. Many of this new generation of rising women writers have garnered Korea’s most prestigious and coveted literary accolades, such as the Hyŏndae, Tong-in, and Yi Sang literature awards.4 Thus women writers have firmly carved their niche in the literary, cultural, and intellectual history of contemporary Korea. Historical Overview The Pioneers Since most of the writers in this collection are little known outside Korea, it is helpful to begin with an overview of the major developments in the Korean women’s narrative tradition and to ascertain the relative positions these stories and their authors occupy therein. This survey is limited to presenting landmark features and does not pretend to be thorough or even analytic in its approach; it may risk simplification or generalization for the sake 2 Introduction of presenting essential information. Yet this chronological sketch provides a sense of temporal flow and a proper context necessary for a better understanding of achievements by modern Korean women writers as well as their failings. The genesis of modern Korean women’s fiction writing is usually traced to “Ŭisim ŭi sonyŏ” (A girl of mystery; 1917), by Kim Myŏng-sun (1896–ca. 1951). Kim’s story is an implicit critique of the tragic and far-reaching consequences...