Abstract

Novels written by Oh Jeong-hee provide a possibility for a new ‘feminine gaze’ by talking about desire for breakaway and senses of guilt and nervousness caused by the gender system since modernization. The gaze by a woman narrator initiates an aesthetic world of female novels revealing the presence of a new female subject. The subject with the gaze describes some gaze for feminity with cruel motherhood and motherhood eliminated. Meanwhile, the gaze also lies upon male located between absence and existence. This feminine gaze beautifies a point where unconscious pain and refusal of patriarchal symbolic order would coincide. That is found to be related to some peculiarity the infinite monologue that would never pursue monologue language and narrative completion, the discourse features found in early novels by Oh Jeong-hee. The language of the feminine gaze can be described as a language of personal gaze and existence creation by a unconscious, schizophrenic subject. Oh Jeong-hee’s novels have been proving the aesthetic possibility beyond the privilege of male subject, and because of such achievement, Oh’s novels are considered a problematic example on the aesthetic modernity as a breakaway to another modernity as the society system order.