Abstract

Cafe, the modern amusement quarter spread in urban area like Kyeongseong in 1930s shows the way the commercial distribution of eroticism establishes relations with women like cafe waitress as well as one colonial transformation of the western modernity by way of Japan. The cafe waitress who had economical and educational bases was a subject of enjoying free love and her own pleasure, while professionally supplying decadent service for the male customer. The sportive meetings between the waitress and the male customer in cafe were diversely represented in novels produced in the 1930s. In those novels, cafe waitress appears as a heroine who experiences free love with intellectual males, but she is not allowed to enter the modern marriage system or stays at the marginal spot outside the marriage as a partner of illicit amours with the married man. However, some images of cafe waitress caused and revealed a crack of modern love and monogamy which reconstructed the male dominant desire of the bourgeois class through the threatening images of women who subverted the traditional gender system between man and women and modern norms related with love and sexuality.