Abstract

The characteristic of Kang Keong-E's later novels is in the re-construction of diaspora as the female's viewpoint. So this thesis intends to look at her later novels, centering on the experience of diaspora and motherhood. First, <The Salt> deals with the cause of emigration and diaspora in association with the woman's experience and her narrative of survival. Bong Yeom's mother in <The Salt> under goes all sorts of hardships like the husband's death, Chinese landowner's sexual violence, bearing, and children's death. And she wakes up to the subject in the class and nation through these hardships. This novel grasps the complex aspects of motherhood in position of lower class woman, and find out the reality which her motherhood can not be protected at the Korean's marginal position, that is Kando emigrant. Kang Keong-E's later novels, <The Salt>, <The Mother and Son>, <The Drug>, <The Underground Village>, shows the 'maternalization of poverty'. Though the Old(pre-modern) women in her novels have the maternal thought, the dissolution of family is the clear reality to them. The motherhood not only shows why the diaspora and emigration are problematic to the women but also presents how they break through or transcend imaginatively the situation of emigration. Also this motherhood has the social meaning, and ensures the reality because of the concrete experience about female body. In <The Anxiety>, <The Sympathy>, the pity and love for Old(pre-modern) woman are presented in the context of the self-reflection of intellectual woman. In conclusion, the two axes, 'experience of diaspora' and 'motherhood of Old woman', which constituting the world of Kang Keong-E's later novels, shows the mutual relationship between the peculiarity of colonial Chosun and the process of subjectivity in lower class woman.