The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

6 Personality Speaking

164 PERSONALITY SPEAKING When I was in a good mood, everything derived from myself. I had pulled myself up out of nothingness by my own bootstraps in order to provide men with the writings they wanted. In hours of gloom, when I felt the sickening dullness of my own goodwill, the only way of pulling myself together was to lay stress on predestination: I would summon the human race and foist on it responsibility for my life. —Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (emphasis added) In chapter 5 we left off on the di~culties of assessing social mobility—on the Laundress’s various accounts of educating her three sons: various for the extent to which she appreciates her extended family’s contributions, and various for her account of the meaning of that education in South Korea . In both senses, we observed how her view of her own role, or agency, varied. I argued in chapter 5 that the tension between structural constraints and her own contribution to things reflects larger social debates on the course and character of South Korea’s rapid social change or “development .” Similarly, in the education stories in chapter 4, which followed several people’s varying accounts of themselves as authors of their educational pasts, we met accounts that quickly turned to stories of constraint beyond the province of individual agency. And before that, in chapter 3 we observed that the key words of the women of this generation turn on conflicting understandings that in large part speak to social transformation, a story that can be profoundly personal, and at the same time impersonal in that it seems to happen to (or even against) people. Therein we observed the heteroglossia on the matter of individual authorship. Finally, discussion in 6 6 6 chapter 1 of a melodramatic sensibility, and of narrative generally, began this book’s examination of the inextricability of the personal from the social , a cornerstone in the examination of the workings of gender and class. In keeping with these discussions, this chapter takes up a related discourse that we have already encountered: namely, that of personality, which is also seemingly personal, but in fact, ever so social. This chapter reflects my interest in the centrality of personality in social mobility stories as a window to the idioms and epistemologies of selfhood. I argue that the idiom of personality that is so pervasive in the social mobility narratives of the middle-aged South Korean women in this book constitutes a discursive space through which competing epistemologies of selfhood are articulated. While in some narratives, personality weds individual proclivity to the contingencies of social life and even historical causality, in others, it is the province of unbridled individual agency. Thus selfhoods are variously fortified by agency, or overdetermined by larger social and historical forces. And in most cases, these more and less agentive voices combine in the same woman, as we saw in the case of the Laundress in the last chapter. In this way, I understand agency as a particular narrative convention and historical epistemology. I pay particular attention to those narratives on personality and epistemologies of selfhood in which individual agency is subordinated to or blurred with social and historical processes . It is in this vein that women narrate the sociocultural development of personality in the context of particular genealogies, family settings, and historical times. I consider agency not as a property or power exercised against structural determinacy, but rather as a feature of discourses on personality and thus of the epistemologies of selfhood. Following a theoretical discussion of selfhood and personality, I turn to the Moviegoer, the woman who spoke variously in chapter 3 about not having made money: On the one hand, she lamented that she had been foolish (môngch’ônghada) but on the other hand, she was quietly secure that she was not like those other women who put on airs (challan yôja). Thus she wavered in her self-estimation according to competing social values. We can recall that she contrasted herself both with her husband and with other women in her midst, including the long-term friend on a visit, the one who had recently become an insurance agent, who dropped by during one of my visits. We can also recall that it was the Moviegoer’s husband who greeted that friend by teasing his wife for having been stupid (pabo katta) for staying with him, for putting up with him for all...