This thesis examines the sense of family represented by the young playwrights' in the 1950s who emerged to deal with introspective topics, apart from the uniform purpose plays. They express the postwar consciousness in connection with chaos and intern...
This thesis examines the sense of family represented by the young playwrights' in the 1950s who emerged to deal with introspective topics, apart from the uniform purpose plays. They express the postwar consciousness in connection with chaos and internal destruction after the war, by inquiring into the issue of family, in the process of which they present various forms of family and womanhood.
What the thesis focuses on is 'familism' or 'normal family ideology', not 'family.' The confucianist notion of family was universally accepted as the normal type of family in the society, which in turn reproduced oppression of women within family. This idea got fortified along with the in-group bias after the war. That is, patriarchy which took root as the dominant ideology has permeated and existed above and beyond the history, having not disappeared as a premodern system. The writers' perspectives toward this phenomenon were perceived as nonuniform and intertwined with confusion, which motivated this study to reconsider the limitation or potential of the contemporary male writers' attitudes. On the other hand, the trend of realism of the 19th century being modified in the 1950s provided another source for young writers' conservative or progressive consciousness regarding the issue of women within family, in conjunction with the characteristics of genre, i.e. realism's deepening and expanding.
The thesis is organized concentrating on the following themes: the characteristics of patriarchs shown in each writer's dramas, their ideology classified into feudal familism, paternalistic familism and pedigree familism, and women's countermove and image coping with the familism. Section A investigates the actual situation of patriarchical rights, section B looks into how space acts upon women with what meaning and section C examines dramatic devices which create explicit or implicit meaning for women's conditions.
Chapter Ⅱ covers the works by Beom-seok Cha in which a nonexisting patriarch serves as the center of family. Women conspire to sustain the patriarchy, and the author idealizes this type of women in his representation. On the other hand, those women who desire to secede from the system are to die, which results from a male writer's dichotomous recognition of women. However, the mind of women who stick to the feudal value system is also faced with catastrophe in that they dare to commit mental suicide. Their abode also isolates women by holding sexuality under control, by which it acts as protector of father's pedigree ownership. It is worth noting that there is a 'path' to the outside world in every work and that path drives women to ruin. The dramatic devices do not deviate too far from those of the realism at its outset.
The works by Yu-sang Ha examined in chapter Ⅲ represent the familial ideology which associates the control of women with paternalistic protection. The paternalistic patriarchy can take effect only with cooperation by women, this male-oriented ideology of which is practiced by women who are subordinate to men, due to their lack of economic power. In the end, there appears a stagnant cycle of events where women who assert liberation are transferred from paternal authority to marital authority. The living room and study are the space where the controlling power over women is under operation, and they contain the selected objects related with experience of modernity which symbolize confusion of women's consciousness.
Yong-chan Lee, investigated in chapter Ⅳ, is noteworthy in that he revives the communal familism, independent of lineage, and subjective women. He brings into relief women's parity and sisterhood in a positive sense. The external space like mountain or hill is posited as a place where the vices of male-based system do not prevail, and women ascend as whole-minded subjects. Therefore, the escape from the inside, where women exist as fetishistic bodies, to the outside signify off-the-center and rising trend. The dramatic devices are utilized to manifest the female characters' subjective consciousness. The attempt at emphasizing artificial iconicity is progressive in that it expands the genre of realism.
The study of this thesis has implications in the sense that it discovered the progressive familism of the contemporary writers being realized also in expanding the genre of realism.