Abstract

The Emotional Education and The Birth of the Modern Man ― The World of Lee, Gwang Soo's Early Novels ― Novels of Kwang-soo Lee which were published on The Youth, are successful in describing sensitively what a modern man means by containing a series of records of a man's initiation. According to the novels, a modern male, among other things, was an existence which internalized dispositions which had been regarded as those of females by then-existing customs, for example recognition of loneliness and aspiration for love originating from the former. They are the first men in human history who subverted pre-existing masculine heroes and experienced the life as a series of events which induced emotional reactions. These new male heroes can be seen as "females" in terms of gender who demolished the boundaries of gender and equipped themselves with "performative feminity." However, this transfer cannot be admired or encouraged forever. Desire to stir up the boundaries of gender with performative feminity always collides with social institutions or taboos. This is why emotional education becomes very important. "Emotion" tends to lose voluntariness of human's inborn nature through "education." But, if there is no such education, society cannot be maintained. Novels are agency of the desire of civil class to carry through preservation of social institutions and maintenance of taboos. Civil classes who go through this agency can mediate between their voluntary desire and social customs and finally achieve refinement of their emotion based on new internal moral rules. Kwang-soo Lee is the novelist who described this apparition in most typical way in our history of novels. This is why we call him emotional educator or inventor of internal moral rules. However, it is necessary for us to note the gender devices he elaborately utilized and appropriated in this process. Without the performative feminity which appropriated virtues which had been regarded as feminine dispositions, internal moral rules of modern males could not have been so widespread in our times with such a speed. He is not anything else than a gender inventor of our times.