한국 여성 소설문학과 모성

The Maternity in Korean Women Novels

People have thought the subject of maternity to be an object which provides all things in everyday life to the utmost comfort instead of a human being, woman, and an owner of a subjective ego. That is why in the past studies on women and maternity often portrayed a feminine image of salvation, or of 'great motherhood.' It has taken a tremendous amount of time to come to accept that all women do not uniformly accommodate eminent motherhood that they are subjects of maternity and also that they have conflicts in their minds. But until today this problem has been closely woven into the subjective approach of self-seeking in women. When discussing maternity biologically, maternity is a woman's exclusive possession which enables them to bear and rear children and the same token something instinctive. Nonetheless self-begetting could be said to be instinctive when a woman seeks herself in society instead of in a household. Then what would be instinctive among maternity and self-begetting for the woman of the past where household labour was solely a woman's job and for woman today who are expanding their social activities? All the more if both elements are innate then which is given priority and is it possible that there could be a difference in preferences in each different time period? Unlike other genres of literature, novels are closely related to the real scenes of people's lives. Although, themes and materials that are bleached in novels happen in real life, it is still a literary world created by the author. Through its language, novels reveal actual relationships and conflicts, and unlike in poetry, there exists a time, setting, and a plot in novels which make it the more capable of expressing directly the problems faced in real life. The problems concerned by women had started first to surface in Korean modern novels in the 1920s through Kim, Myung-Soon, Na, Hye-Suk, and Kim, Il-Yup. The concerns of these novels at the time was strongly influenced by the Korean independence from the Japanese colonial rule and the socialism behind the emancipation of production laborer. Since the Independence and the Korean War, women problems that appeared in women's literary works focus on female imagery and ultimately, closely examine how the image of woman is related to the problem concerned with human salvation. In such cases women are depicted in imageries of salvation, or of maternity, and feminists have thought such depictions to be a draw back when it came to searching for women's subjectivity. With the 1970s as the turning point, differentiating life and awareness in women was being pointed out as the fundamental issue than of considering woman as a subject of men. What emerged with determination in the 1980s was a way of regarding literature through a feminine perspective as women problems were accumulated into an operation of finding one's identity. In such a case the object is self-awakening but is discussed as mature women novels. This piece will deal with maternity problems portrayed in modern Korean novels in general and reflect upon the different ways each period has depicted maternity. Also, it will look into how the mothers themselves were conscious and disillusioned of their own maternity, and how the resulting maternal acts are similar or have evolved from those of the past. But by using these two methods of approach collectively than individually one will be able to elucidate the periodical changes in the role of maternity and in maternal consciousness. The limitations of such an operation would lie in selecting literary works, having to judge at one's own discretion whether or not the works are able to represent their respective periods. But the criterion used in selecting the works was whether or not the literary works contained the features of a feminine literature. Therefore, similar portrayals were considered to be of the same period. We have seen Korean women trying to find their own standpoin