Abstract

This paper examines the representation of middle class women’s labor and social class in Park Wansuh’s novels The Beginning of Alive Days and Standing Woman. In so doing, I incorporate Marxist feminist theory to explore the principle of the capitalist system which operates by exploiting not only wage labor but also un-waged reproductive labor. Although the women characters in the two novels are high in social status, they are not free from the exploitation of their reproductive labor in the private sphere by their husbands, thus explaining why the women conflict with other characters and the broader society. This article proposes that this phenomenon exemplifies the “the woman question,” and addresses how the two novels depict the material foundation of society. Park Wansuh’s novels thereby propose how women may resist the sexist stereotypes which they have internalized. In this process, Park’s novels do not directly challenge family gender inequality or the prejudice against divorced women. Neither is the discrimination of economic status explicitly criticized in the novels. Therefore, on one hand, Park’s novels seem to be conservative, but on the other hand, they visualize women’s social status as a class of reproductive laborers entangled in a controversy over reproductive work.