박현숙 희곡 연구 = A Study on the Plays of Hyunsuk Park

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Hyunsuk Park is an important playwright as she is one of the first Korean woman playwrights and has led them ever after. Since she published her debut play of 「A Plea (Hangbun)」, Hyunsuk Park paid attention to love and family affairs. Her subjects touched on women's interests, but she was never conscious of feministic views. Though she indirectly accused patriarchal society of oppressing women, she kept conservative views to interpret women's matters. She believed an ideal woman to forgive with generosity and to love infinitely.
Hyunsuk Park was also concerned with the devided situation of Korea. Since she fled in her youth from North Korea by herself, she missed her widowed mother all the time. Therefore, her plays that pay attention to society, highlight the pains of the divided Korea and express her wishes for unification.
This essay selects ten plays out of eighteen plays of Hyunsuk Park. The first play, 「A Plea」, dealing with the love-hate relationship between man and wife, expresses her main subjects and interests of the plays to come. 「Because of Love (Sarangul Chajaso)」 describes a scapegoat of the ideological confrontation between the North and the South. Because the heroine travels back and forth between the South and the North following her lover, she is stigmatized as a spy. 「A Woman(Yoein)」, her first full-length play, deals with a couple of melodramatic love triangles, focusing on the heroine's psychology. 「The World is a Magic Glass (Sesang un Yogikyung)」 is a satrical fable of political election, but also exposes the false relationship between man and wife. 「A Masquerade (Kamyon Mudohoe)」 boldly describes a housewife's debauchery. It ends well only because the masked lover turns out to be her husband. In her later plays of 「The Wonderful Inheritance (Kue Chanranhan Yusan)」 and 「The Mother of Nation (Chokuk ue oumoni)」, the playwright definitely broadens her interests toward modem Korean history. 「A Women's Fortress (Yeoja ue Seng)」 and 「The Return Trip (Hoero)」 are typical family melodramas, including love triangles and forgiveness. It is also noticeable that 「The Return Trip」 raises the problem of senile dementia, which even becomes a very recent social problem In these last two plays, the playwright strongly insists forgiveness and love, and suggests them as women's true values.
Indeed, Hyunsuk Park definitely opens the new era of female playwrights in Korea. Her plays mainly focus on love and family affairs, and add women's voices to Korean plays. She is also concerned with the divided situation of Korea. Her view toward the society is still very conservative from the point of feminism. Ironically, it is the very conservative nature of her work that allows her to be effective in bringing forth women's issues in today's still patriachal society.