From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea by Yoon Sun Yang (review)

In From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men, Yoon Sun Yang provides a new literary history of the earliest period of modern Korean fiction, from Yi Injik's 李人稙's Tears of Blood (Hyŏl ŭi nu 血의涙, 1906) to Kim Kyoje's 金敎濟 Flowers in the Mirror (Kyŏng chung hwa 鏡中花, 1923), focusing on the complexities of gendered representations during the early period of Japanese colonization. Yang's elucidating readings show that elite, mostly male writers confronted both the promise and repression of the global colonial system and the imported discourses of civilization and enlightenment with nationalist and reformist ideas that depended on their rewriting of gender difference. She also shows that this project of rewriting gender did not enact a clean break from the past but rather involved shifting figurations of traditional and modern, barbaric and civilized, and regressive and progressive.

Yang takes the genre of the domestic novel and the "aleatory practices of translating the individual into Korean" as her entry points into the problem of gender and modernity (p. 7). Yang rightly criticizes approaches to modern literature that assume that one literary character is more typically modern than another—male characters, for example, index modernity, while female characters are transparently made to stand in for invented tradition. Through numerous examples from the fiction written from the turn of the century to the mid-1920s, Yang reveals that in order to take literary narrative seriously, against the grain of grand historical claims about the seamless translation of concepts like the "individual," it is necessary to read closely the ambivalences in masculine and feminine subject formation apparent in the form, style, and figurative language of serialized fiction.

The domestic novel is an excellent choice of genre for this exploration because it shows how intertwined representations of the emerging private sphere were with public and social problems of individuality, education, reproduction, labor, the family system, migration, and the like. It also allows Yang to bring to the surface nonnormative figures—from nontraditional families to ghostly social reformers borrowed from folktales—that one would not expect to find in these fictions if one took the dictums of civilization and enlightenment at face value. Furthermore, rather than reading the domestic women characters of this period as temporal precursors to the supposedly modern, sensitive young men of 1920s literature, Yang shows that the domestic novels of this period contain distinct worlds that are just as structured by problems of individuality, education, spectrality, modernity, and tradition as the later works, even if this fact has been ignored because of the androcentric perspective of most modern literary histories.

In this sense, the book offers a highly important revision of the story about the emergence of modernity and modern literature—a story that begins with preeminent colonial-period writers and critics who came later, such as Yi Kwangsu 李光洙 and Im Hwa 林和. This revision includes critical readings of Yi's articulation of male interiority and dismissals of the more critical domestic novels, as well as Im's seminal but overly historicist works on "new fiction" (sinsosŏl 신소설). This revision also intervenes in Cold War readings of early colonial writers such as Yi Injik, who was often castigated as "pro-Japanese" within the reductive framework of anticolonial nationalism.

Yang divides the book coherently into five chapters, each of which deals with a particular literary character and figuration of gender through close readings of a selection of fiction texts. Chapter 1 mainly concerns Yi Injik's classic novel Tears of Blood and provides an enlightening formal reading, which accentuates how taking proper account of the early installments of the serialized text opens up a number of questions concerning the typical reading of the relation between gender and modernity in the text. The usual summary of the story focuses on the journey of a young girl, Ongnyŏn 玉蓮, who is wounded at the...