버틀러의 페미니즘 담론을 통해 본 단편소설 『아내의 상자』의 서사 구조

The Narration of Eun Hee-kyung's Novel, Boxes of Wife in Terms of Judith Butler's Feminism Discourse

This study seeks to analyze the narrative structure of Eun Hee-kyung's novel Boxes of Wife in terms of Judith Butler's feminism as postulated in the concept of 'performative gender' rather than the 'representative gender' of French feminism. In the literary work, there is a young couple who lives with each representative gender identity as man and woman. The husband as a leading gender holds the narrating role and explains what has happened to his wife. In his description, the wife appears as an object that should be abjected because of her irrationality. She is, in Butler's sense, nothing but a vacant “chora” to constitute her husband as a rational and logical subject. She is, so called, "a related and constitutive outside". The wife identifies herself through her husband with her charged "outside" as idealized in sense of French feminism in the rhetoric of metonym as positive “maternity” figure. In spite of this idealization, the wife is jailed in a mind mechanism by her husband. Hence, the possibility to throw down this dictatorial hegemony of the phallus subject doesn't come from the idealizing narrating instance as presupposed in the French feminism. Rather, it comes from the shocking effect of the tragic ending of the narrated accidents that makes the "normal" gender identification problematic.