박경리의 『토지』에 나타난 집 떠나기 모티프와 여성

On Narratives of Travelling Women in Park, Kyung-ri's 『Toji』

이 글은 『토지』에서 나타나는 여성인물들의 여행서사를 살펴봄으로써 식민지 근대를 배경으로 한 가부장제의 폭력과 이에 대응하는 여성주체의 성장과정을 검토하는데 그 목적이 있다. 가부장제는 집을 억압공간으로 만들고 여성은 집 떠나기를 통해 이에 대응한다. 집 떠나기는 남성중심주의의 폭력을 드러내는 것에서부터 남성중심주의의 자장에서 벗어나 자아와 세계를 발견하며 이에 그치지 않고 집 자체를 바꾸어내는 여성주의적 전망에 이르기까지의 다양한 스펙트럼을 제시한다. 사랑과 야심을 위해 집을 떠남으로써 욕망을 드러내기 시작한 여성주체들이 개인의 존엄과 사회적 책임에 대한 각성을 거쳐 가부장적 권력의 장소인 집 자체를 허물어내기에 이르는 전 과정을 통해 집 떠나기는 단순한 장소이동이 아니라 가부장제의 억압에 대응하여 이를 벗어나려는 노력이자 저항이며 나아가 가부장제 자체를 바꾸어내는 능동성임을 확인할 수 있었다.

In traditional Korea, leaving home and traveling was hardly allowed to women, who were expected to stay home and take charge of all the domestic affairs under the patriarchal dominance of men. It was the reason why women's traveling used to have special meanings in that time. This paper tries to explore into women's travel episodes of Park, Kyung-ri's 󰡔Toji󰡕. The episodes reveal various modes of patriarchal violence against women, and women's reactions to such violence, along the way of which women characters could achieve their Buildung(growth). The patriarchal dominance system had distorted women's homes into spaces of violence and oppression, against which women have responded by leaving home and traveling to other places. Leaving home was a kind of accusation of violence which prevailed all over the male-dominated society, where women's travels were equivalent to escaping from the androcentric relationship. Such episodes went further: they could make valuable achievement to find out their self-identities and the world for their own lives, during and after the travel. Sometimes, their journeys posed some wide spectra of prospective feminist visions to re-construct traditional home and domestic systems. The women characters, who could make their own first progress in revealing their desires through leaving home, began to be aware of their dignities as human beings and their social responsibilities as equal members of the society. Such awareness could, in turn, make them deconstruct the existing homes, which were nothing but the spaces where the patriarchal power relationships prevailed. At this point, it can be reminded that women's travels in the novel are not only just changes of the place of their residence, but also forms of reaction to and methods of resistance against the patriarchal oppression: Women can get their own activeness to destruct the patriarchy and reestablish their own way of lives.