Abstract

Park Hyun-sook is 1st generation female playwriter appeared after the Korean War. The advent of female playwriter in late 1950s was so late whereas the origin of modern Korean literature and drama history was placed in 1900s. Such a late advent of female playwriter shows the exclusion to the women in the field of play writing. The major interest of this paper is that the time of advent of female playwriter was, ironically, same to that of nation. In this point of view, the relations between female subject and nation might be a issue in another aspect different from colonialism. Nowadays, in feminism, various discussions on the relations between nation and women were proposed, therefore this relations focused in 1st generation female playwriter were explored in this paper. Among them, Park Hyun-sook identified positively herself to nation since she was a North Korean refugee and a woman. She was lack of both things, not a native South Korean and, what is more, not a man. For this circumstances she had to defend herself and survive. The drama of her early days were mainly melodrama and in her melodrama heroine was characterized by high morality on the stage. Generally melodrama has a dichotomy structure of good and bad, and has a ending of victory of good man. This is the very effective way of showing off her inner justice. And then Park Hyun-sook got a firm position in the Korean literary circles and cultural organization after the Korean War. In spite of such a success, she was not a successful writer because secular success couldn't guarantee the success as a writer. By the internalizing nationalism in her mind she got a reputation but she lost the historical vision which had to be held strongly as a writer.