Abstract

This article has analyzed literature of Giyeong I, one of the renowned writers in the colonial period in view of feminism. The writer who had literary view of Marxism and women's liberation revealed confused aspects due to his growth in a feudalistic family of patriarchal confucianism. First, seeing the idealized aspect of woman described in male oriented view, it is as a result of early separation by death of his mother and heart broken experience from early marriage in his childhood. The classified characters described such as warrior and fighter is the result that the writer has just infused ideology without proper understanding on the reality of women in agony. Also, all the wives in his works described as selfish or hypocritical and completely materialistic person, opportunist, and realist with strong sexual and material desire while the women in his novels are referred to as beautiful and mystified sexual objects. In the sexual difference of man and woman with the view of awakening, it is noticeable part that there is difference in the process of recovering subjectivity for a woman from that for a man. A woman became to undergo the world of man in order to achieve self-awakening and if a man's personal process of problem is to say as a result of aspiration for self-improvement or internal suffering, most of women appeared to have self-awakening after suffering from broken heart with a man and even a man intellectual is related in the process of self-consciousness. Also the hero became to run away from home to be an individual of trouble and return home and to the farm after a few years. Then he solve difficulties in his hometown. But on the other hand, most of heroines do not return to their home and break from the border of the dichotomy of public and private. Such factors indicate that still woman is the object dependent and to be trained and enlightened by man and it is because the writer sticks the man initiative view not getting out of fidelity ideology. Finally, the inferior position of Korean women in colonial period is frankly revealed in the motive of purchase marriage and Simcheong under the triple suppression of gender, people and class. It displays the reality that woman does not establish identity of herself due to failure to acquire decision making authority on sexuality, be under control by the head of family such as father or husband and shared as property of man. Though the writer had the literary view of Marxism and women's liberation with the attitude of anti-feudalism and anti-imperialism under the rule of Japanese imperialism, he left contradictory world of his works with the limit of Marxist feminism focused on liberation of the class without awareness on characteristics of gender. Because his growth process under the feudalistic patriarchal family contended tightly with his literary view and his works. However, the issue on woman continuously pursued in his literature has considerable meaning and it is left as the matter of today in the fact that his weak point still reappears in the works of male writers today.