Abstract

The present study analyzes the ways in which the state’s official policy on women has conflicted with and changed the everyday reality of North Korean women as reflected in works by North Korean women writers. The analysis focuses on the demands that North Korean policy places upon women in each era and female reaction to such demands. Dating from the post-Liberation period, those works capture the progress and euphoria brought to women by institutional liberation in the form of gender equality laws and, at the same time, imply that it would be difficult to apply such institutions to daily life in a society still haunted by a strong tradition of patriarchy and feudalism. Works penned by women writers during the reconstruction following the Korean War and the 1960s concern various problems such as the depreciation of women that unconsciously occurs at the workplace, women’s self-depreciation, and bureaucratism. Although the critique of bureaucratism is an important theme in North Korean fiction, these works depict and criticize bureaucratism all the more vividly and trenchantly because the female characters are subordinates while their supervisors are male. As for the 1970s, it is difficult to find private voices of diverse characters in the works of women writers due to the prevailing atmosphere of North Korean society. As a result, works from this period generally are but official policies and platforms disguised as fiction. Since the 1980s, even works that seem to support official policies on women once again portray the dual natureof life faced by North Korean women, who are expected to attain subjectivity through social activities yet suffer from the remnants of patriarchy. Fiction from this period depicts in various ways the turmoil that women undergo due to a clash between their identities within the family and self-realization in society.