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Politics of purity: the making of girlhood in South Korean literature
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Content
Politics of Purity
The Making of Girlhood in South Korean Literature
by
Kyunghee Eo
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Kyunghee Eo
ii
For
Chun-ja Seo (1930-2010)
Sang-a Choi (1982-2013)
Jinnam Kim (1957-2020)
You are the ones who nurtured me into the woman I am today.
iii
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have come to fruition had it not been for all the support and
encouragement I received from my two brilliant advisors, Karen Tongson and Sunyoung Park. It
was in Karen’s 2015 grad seminar on queer musicality that I first began to toy with the idea of
writing a dissertation about the queerness of girlhood. Ever since then, Karen has not only helped
me grow this tiny seed into the full manuscript that it is today, but has also shown me, in the
magical hole-in-the-wall restaurants and karaoke bars of Los Angeles that we visited together,
how to live joyfully and magnanimously as a queer woman of color in academia. Meanwhile,
meeting Sunyoung in 2013 was perhaps one of the biggest turning points in my academic career,
as she is the one who led me into the exhilarating world of Korean literary studies. I have
discovered in Sunyoung a true lifelong role model: a scholar who produces knowledge with
equal amounts of passion and intellectual rigor, as well as a mentor who nurtures her students
with enduring patience and generosity. I thank her deeply for the numerous comments and
suggestions that she offered me throughout the writing process.
I am also grateful to the faculty and staff at the University of Southern California for their
intellectual guidance and practical support. I would first like to thank Viet Thanh Nguyen for
remaining such a steadfast mentor and supporter at many different crucial junctures in my
graduate studies. Emily Anderson, Joseph Boone, and Devin Griffiths, Jeanne Weiss, Christine
Shaw, Linda Kim, and especially Javier Franco, for providing me with valuable institutional
support in times of need. I thank the USC graduate school, the Korean Studies Institute, and the
Center for Transpacific Studies for funding my many research trips to South Korea. Trisha
Tucker at Thematic Option, who taught me how to be a better teacher. And of course, Joy Kim,
who helped me excavate all the archival treasures that made their way into this dissertation.
iv
I was blessed to have met a number of Koreanists and East Asian studies scholars who
helped ease my intellectual transition into the field of Asian studies with their warm advice and
mentorship. I would especially like to thank Todd Henry and Kyung Moon Hwang, not only for
serving as members of my dissertation and prospectus committee, but also for supporting my
academic development and collaborating with me in various other capacities. I am also grateful
for the feedback I received from Samuel Perry, Petrus Liu, Howard Chiang, and James Welker
on earlier drafts of my dissertation chapters. My book chapter in the edited volume Revisiting
Minjung is deeply indebted to the valuable comments I received from Jaeeun Kim, Nam-hee Lee,
Hye-Ryoung Lee, Jin-kyung Lee, and Ruth Barraclough.
Finally, I express my deepest gratitude to my friends and family who were there for me
through all the ups and downs of the graduate school experience. I fondly recall the many meals
and messy paper drafts I shared with my fellow comrades in USC English: Ali Pearl, Sam
Cohen, Lisa Lee, Viola Lasmana, Michelle Brittan-Rosado, Corinna Schroeder, and Marci
Vogel. Minwoo Jung, a friend, colleague, and intellectual interlocuter who always inspires me to
do better. A very special thank you to my dearest friends Jenny Hoang, Dagmar Van Engen, and
Chris Chien, who now feel as close as kin to me. My sister and best friend, Kyungjin Eo, who
sent me so much strength and comfort despite the geographical distance that divides us. I thank
my dad, Daesu Eo, for all the sacrifices he made for the family over the years. And my mother,
Jinnam Kim, whose presence I still feel all around me.
And last but not least, my beloved Zoe Sua Cho, without whom I surely would not have
survived the past year. The warmth of your love was what kept me going. Thank you for
bringing so much joy and happiness into my life.
v
Table of Contents
Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………….. ii
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………... iii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………….. vi
Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Sexual Purity in the New Chastity Debates of Colonial Korea…………………………. 5
Purity in the Pure Literature of Cold War South Korea……………………………...… 11
Girlhood as Cocoon: Queer Refractions of Purity……………………………………… 16
Chapter 1: The Invention of the Girl in Postliberation Korea (1946-1950)……………….. 27
The (Pre) History of the Sonyŏ in Colonial Korea……………………………………… 30
The Emergence of Girl Magazines in Postliberation Korea……………………………. 38
The Fetishized Sonyŏ in Postwar Pure Literature………………………………………. 49
Chapter 2: Catholic Virginity and Girlhood in Cold War South Korea (1945-1968)…….. 61
Catholic Sensationalism: Cultural Representations of Nuns in the Colonial Period…… 64
Catholic Discourses of Virginity in Cold War Korean Girls’ Culture…………………. 79
Perpetuating Virginity: No Chŏn-myŏng and Single Womanhood……………………. 89
Chapter 3: Adolescent Same-Sex Romance in South Korean Women’s Literature and the
Problem of Lesbian Literary History……………………………………….. 105
Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Chŏn Hye-rin in Munich……………………………….. 107
Homoromantic Feeling in the Essays of Chŏn Hye-rin……………………………….. 120
In Search of a Korean Lesbian Literary History………………………………………. 134
Coda……………………………………………………………………………………………147
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….. 151
vi
Abstract
Purity is often deemed as a concept that is fundamentally antithetical to an emancipatory
politics and its principles of heterogeneity and inclusiveness. This dissertation argues that purity
deserves to be reconsidered as an expansive discourse that generated a wide array of political
effects in South Korea. It takes as a starting point the literary trope of the girl, whose virginal
body was fetishized as the very embodiment of purity within nationalist discourses both before
and after Japanese colonization. However, a closer examination of South Korean girls’
magazines, canonical literary texts, and critically neglected popular nonfiction by women writers
reveals how many girls and women were also deeply invested in the idealization and
aestheticization of female adolescent purity. In these texts, new sexual positions and pleasure
regimes are developed not only against the ideal of female sexual purity but often times with and
around it. The girls’ magazine Yŏhaksaeng (1949-1950), for example, shows how girls in this
period drew inspiration from Catholic discourses of virginity to celebrate the physical and
spiritual purity of girlhood. In her poetry and essays, No Chŏn-myŏng (1912-1957) further
develops out of this cult of Catholic virginity a distinct poetics of celibacy that is centered on the
pleasures and eroticism of ascesis. Another key aspect of South Korean girlhood that is discussed
in this dissertation is the prevalence of female same-sex romance in literature for and about girls
from the colonial period onward. The idealization of schoolgirl intimacies in the popular essays
of Chŏn Hye-rin, moreover, calls for a deeper contemplation on how to locate representations of
same-sex loving girls within a South Korean lesbian literary history.
The erotic practices of female celibacy and homoromanticism that emerged out of South
Korean girl culture force us to reconsider the feminist critique of purity as an unequivocally
vii
oppressive ideology that was mobilized for the regulation of female sexuality. It also challenges
the more general assumption that purity is synonymous to political inaction or conservatism, a
view that was upheld by leftist nationalist writers and intellectuals since the colonial period. By
illustrating the ways in which non-heterosexual female desires were culturally articulated
through the figure of the virginal girl, my dissertation ultimately questions how we define
compliance and resistance, tradition and modernity, and queerness and normativity within ethno-
nationalist, Cold War developmentalist and neoliberal regimes such as those of South Korea.
1
Introduction
…Let’s buy a soft-serve ice cream machine
and eat ice cream all day long. In the evening we can eat omurice
with red ketchup hearts on top, blow soap bubbles, and mend broken things
with stickers shaped like gems. We can spend our days on the second floor
of the Andersen shop, marveling at their silk scarves. Even though everyone seems
saner than us, even though we forget how to walk once we open our eyes,
we’ll turn on the electric fan, strong enough
to make our tables and hats float up into the air.
Pak Sang-su, “Girl Talk”
With its pale pink book cover littered with brightly colored candy balls, Like a Lady
(Sungnyŏ ŭi kibun) is a 2013 poetry collection by Pak Sang-su that itself became a kind of fetish
object in the popular imagination. In 2016, online media outlets published photographs of the K-
pop star Sulli cradling a copy of the book in her arm at the Inchon international airport, a popular
spot for tabloid journalists to grab candid shots of celebrities.
1
The book sold thousands of copies
in a matter of days, a notable sales spike for any book of contemporary poetry in South Korea.
2
Sulli’s endorsement and the public’s concomitant embrace of Like a Lady was surely an
unforeseen literary event. The book was, after all, part of the prestigious Munhak tongne poetry
series and Sulli was widely known as a member of f(x), one of the most popular girl groups in
Korea; their two worlds were not usually known to converge. Nevertheless, the image of Sulli
with her copy of Like a Lady illustrates one important point: the high and low cultures of
contemporary South Korea are united in their enchantment with the figure of the girl.
1
“Sŏlli, rŏbŭlli han miso,” Sports Chosun, May 22, 2016,
https://sports.chosun.com/news/ntype.htm?id=201605220100169660011959&servicedate=20
160522
2
Im Mi-na, “Sŭt’a ka ilgŏ tŏ mŏtchyŏ poinŭn si sosŏl,” Yonhap News, April 22, 2018,
https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20180420170300005?input=1195m
2
The speakers who inhabit the poems in Like a Lady are late-teen to early-twenties female
college students who embody what is commonly referred to in South Korea as sonyŏ kamsŏng,
the translation of which would be a “girl sensibility” or “girl aesthetic.” The clichéd objects of
femininity that constitute poems such as “Girl Talk”—“soft-serve ice cream,” “soap bubbles,”
“gem-shaped stickers”—play a crucial part in the articulation of this sensibility.
3
For one, these
objects supposedly represent the whimsical and immature interiority of girls, a characterization
that may be criticized for reinforcing misogynistic stereotypes of adolescent femininity. One way
to absolve the book from such criticisms is to understand Pak’s rendering of girl sensibility as a
form of kitsch, a playful challenge to the authority of poetic language through the self-conscious
deployment of insipid hyperfeminine artefacts.
4
However, there is a way in which the book
defies such ironic readings, as it compels the reader to affectively identify with—rather than
aesthetically distance themselves from—the girl in her un-self-consciously earnest desire to
remain in her world of pretty little things. This tension between identification and objectification,
I suggest, encapsulates the complex relationship that South Korean literature holds with the
figure of the girl.
This same tension can be found in the many Korean modern and contemporary literary
texts that interpellate girls under the signifier of sonyŏ. From Pŏmnye in Kim Myŏng-sun’s A
“Girl of Mystery” (Ŭisim ŭi sonyŏ) to the unnamed girl in Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “A Shower”
(Sonagi), Korean literature is populated with iconic girl characters who illustrate how the word
sonyŏ cannot be detached from the naïveté and sentimentalism that constitute the sonyŏ
3
Pak Sang-su, “Kŏl t’ok’ŭ,” 30.
4
For more on kitsch in poetry, see Daniel Tiffany, “On Poetry & Kitsch,” Harriet Books (blog),
Poetry Magazine, November 6, 2013, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-
books/2013/11/-on-poetry-kitsch
3
sensibility. Despite her prevalence, however, the girl has not yet received the critical attention it
deserves. In the field of Korean literary studies, the study of women has proven to be an
incredibly productive way to understand the contours of larger structures of power such as
colonialism, nationalism, the Cold War and the dictatorial regimes of Korea. For scholars who
are committed to envisioning a transformative politics, however, girls have tended to remain an
uninspiring object of study because oftentimes they seem all too eager to remain in the realm of
innocence, too embracing of purity, an ideal that appears to be inimical to the interests of
women.
In this dissertation, I examine the figure of the girl in South Korean literature, whose
virginal body was often adulated as the very embodiment of purity within both colonial and
nationalist discourses. What my eclectic archive of South Korean girls’ magazines, canonical
literary texts, and critically neglected popular nonfiction by women writers reveals is how purity
(sunsu) functioned as an aesthetic, spiritual, and sexual ideal for women in complex and
sometimes unexpected ways. No Chŏn-myŏng, for example, draws inspiration from a cult of
Catholic virginity that existed in Korea since the nineteenth century, to develop a unique poetics
of celibacy, one that portrays female celibacy as a sexual position replete with its own erotic
meaning and potential. The autobiographical essays and German travelogues of Chŏn Hye-rin,
moreover, demonstrates how within an increasingly militarized and ideologically polarized Cold
War society that denied them political and sexual agency, platonic same-sex romance came to
constitute the very fabric of normative Korean girlhood. The unique girl sensibility and aesthetic
that emerged out of these texts show how women and girls in South Korea developed new sexual
positions and pleasure regimes not only against the ideal of sexual purity but often times with
and around it.
4
My dissertation builds on and further extends queer and feminist scholarship by using
sexuality as an analytical tool to contemplate how political agency is exercised within given
structures of power. The erotic practices of female celibacy and homoromanticism that emerged
out of South Korean girl culture force us to reconsider the feminist critique of purity as an
unequivocally oppressive ideology that was mobilized for the regulation of female sexuality. It
also challenges the more general assumption that purity is synonymous to political inaction or
conservatism, a view that was upheld by leftist nationalist writers and intellectuals from the
colonial period onward. By illustrating the ways in which non-heterosexual female desires were
culturally articulated through the figure of the virginal girl, my dissertation ultimately reframes
purity as a powerful discourse that various political agents in postcolonial South Korea invoked
to contend with the legacy of colonialism, Cold War militarism and rapid industrialization.
In the following sections, I illustrate how the concept of purity was defined and contested
within two major debates that left a significant mark in modern Korean intellectual history: first,
the controversies surrounding female sexual purity (sun’gyŏl), a concept that emerged out of the
so-called “new chastity” (sin chŏngjo ron) debates of the 1920s and 30s, and second, the “pure
literature” (sunsu munhak) debates that began in the 1920s and extended well into postcolonial
era. Retracing the parameters of these debates is important to the subject of this dissertation, as
the definition of purity that developed out of them was later displaced onto the virginal body of
the girl. I then present an overview of preexisting scholarship that will form the theoretical
foundation of this project, focusing specifically on Korean women’s literary studies, the
emerging subfield of girls’ studies, and queer East Asian studies scholarship. Ultimately, I
propose that the study of girls in the Korean context requires a queer methodological approach,
one that can unpack the complex discursive formation that is female adolescent purity.
5
Sexual Purity in the New Chastity Debates of Colonial Korea
In the 1920s and 30s in colonial Korea, a number of intellectuals sought to revise the
meaning and social significance of chastity by proposing their theories of a “new chastity” (sin
chŏngjo ron). A notable figure in these heated debates was Na Hye-sŏk, who was widely known
as one of the “New Women” (sin yŏsŏng) of colonial Korea: a coterie of élite women who had
received modern education in their youth and became public figures for their accomplishments in
literature, journalism, education, medicine and the arts.
5
In her oft-quoted 1935 essay, “Starting a
New Life” (Sin saenghwal e tŭlmyŏnsŏ), Na provocatively claims that “chastity involves neither
morals nor laws. It’s merely taste,” going so far as to suggest later on in the essay that “our real
liberation begins with our liberation from chastity.”
6
Born right during the midst of the 1894-96
Kabo reforms—which included the abolition of long-held familial customs such as early
marriage and the ban on widow remarriage—Na was famous not only for her professional
success as a writer and painter, but also for challenging social conventions in her private life with
her so-called “free marriage” (as opposed to arranged marriage), extramarital affairs and
subsequent divorce, all of which were exposed to and heavily scrutinized by the public. “Starting
a New Life” was an essay she published several years after her divorce was finalized. For New
Women and Men such as Na, chastity was considered as an outdated, feudal concept that should
somehow be updated to better fit into a society that was heading toward newer and more modern
ways of life.
5
Choi, Hyaeweol, “Introduction,” 6.
6
Na Hye-sŏk, “Sin saenghwal e tŭlmyŏnsŏ,” 147-148.
6
Before discussing the new definitions of chastity presented by these modern intellectuals
in closer detail, I first examine existing scholarship on the concept that has been produced in the
field of premodern Korean studies. In this scholarship, there seems to exist two conflicting
viewpoints on the relationship between women and Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea: first, the
liberal feminist perspective, represented by scholars such as Martina Deuchler and Sook-in Lee,
who see Confucianism as a patriarchal ideology that negatively impacted the lives of Chosŏn
women. Deuchler pays special attention to the paradigmatic shift that took place in Korean
society when the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) adopted Neo-Confucianism as its state ideology,
and how the patrilineal reorganization of society and subsequent reinforcement of the virtue of
chastity during this time greatly reduced the social and economic freedoms of women.
7
The ideal
of the “chaste woman,” she contends, was “the most powerful manifestation of a woman’s
subordination to men as demanded by Confucian social doctrine.”
8
Meanwhile, Lee Sook-in’s
research examines post-Imjin War (1592-1598) Chosŏn as a time in which the chastity mandate
became even more stringently imposed upon women. This, she argues, was mainly because
emphasizing female chastity was an effective means for the mid-Chosŏn state to bolster social
cohesion among its people in its struggle for postwar reconstruction.
9
Much like Deuchler, Lee
views chastity primarily as a tool of oppression, a “mechanism for controlling women’s sexuality
and maintaining patriarchal social mores.”
10
In more recent years, however, there has emerged a new generation of feminist scholars
who step away from preexisting approaches that frame chastity within a critique of Confucian
7
Deuchler, Martina, “Propagating Female Virtues in Chosŏn Korea,” 143.
8
Ibid., 161.
9
Lee Sook-in, “The Imjin War and the Official Discourse of Chastity,” 137.
10
Ibid., 156
7
patriarchy. In her study on widow suicides in nineteenth century Chosŏn, for example, Jungwon
Kim contemplates whether these women could be seen not as victims of an oppressive
patriarchal system that forced them into suicide, but rather as conscious agents capable of
autonomous choice and rational decision making. Focusing specifically on the case of Madam
Chang, a widow who committed suicide in reaction to local rumors that alleged she engaged in
unchaste conduct, Kim points out that Chang’s “honorable” death propelled the local authorities
to punish the rumor spreader for slander, which, in an honor-based society such as Chosŏn, was
considered a serious crime.
11
Chang’s suicide, then, Kim suggests, could be seen as a strategic
choice that the widow made both to protect her own dignity and avenge her slanderer.
12
Kim’s
alternative approach is heavily indebted to the work of postcolonial feminist scholars such as
Gayatri Spivak and Dorothy Ko, who respectively examine the Hindu rite of Sati and Chinese
foot-binding to show how the instinct among Western liberal subjects to condemn these practices
as “oppressive” and “barbaric” often ends up flattening out the agency of the women that they
initially intended on advocating for.
13
These studies, therefore, provide good examples of how
not to let Western epistemologies obscure the symbolic meaning as well as practical utility that
the ideal of chastity might have held for Korean women in both premodern and modern times.
Meanwhile, modern Korean studies scholarship on chastity begins by marking a firm
distinction between this premodern Confucian virtue of chastity and the modernized version of
the concept. The paradigmatic shift in the discourse on chastity that took place in Korea in the
early twentieth century is well illustrated by Ko Mi-suk in her book, The Age of Romance (Yŏnae
11
Kim, Jungwon, “You Must Avenge on My Behalf,” 131.
12
140.
13
For more details, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,”; Dorothy Ko,
Every Step a Lotus.
8
ŭi sidae). First of all, chastity (chŏngjŏl) in premodern Chosŏn was, according to Ko, a virtue
that members of the community voluntarily upheld through various forms of ethical practice.
14
The twentieth-century iteration of chastity (chŏngjo), however, is centered on the modern
concept of sexual purity (sun’gyŏl), a norm that was externally imposed upon the general public
by the modern state as a means of control and governance.
15
Ko’s scholarship charts a larger
Foucauldian turn in research on female sexuality in Korean studies, mainly in the way she argues
that the proliferation of modern sexual discourses in colonial Korea does not by any means
signal a liberation from sexual repression. These new discourses entailed new rules of
appropriate sexual conduct that demanded from women different forms of sexual self-restraint
and micromanagement of desire throughout the entire heterosexual mating process. In short,
New Women such as Na Hye-sŏk were not necessarily “liberating” themselves by abolishing the
premodern virtue of chastity but were rather inserting themselves into a new sexual regime, one
that imposed different types of norms and restrictions upon the female body.
What precipitated the development of such new discourses were sexological studies from
Europe that were introduced to Korea in the 1920s, mainly by way of Japanese translations.
Much like in other East Asian nations, new concepts of human sexual anatomy and behavior
developed by Western sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing were not
only widely studied by the leading intellectuals of colonial Korea but also circulated to the
masses for education and entertainment.
16
What especially intrigued the popular imagination
were theories that claimed female virginity was scientifically detectable in the female body. See,
14
Ko Mi-suk, Yŏnae ŭi sidae, 119.
15
Ibid., 120-121.
16
For a comprehensive overview on the reception of Western sexology in colonial Korea, see
Pak-Ch’a Min-jŏng, Chosŏn ŭi k’wiŏ.
9
for example, an opinion survey piece on pre-marital sex published in a 1935 issue of the
magazine Samch’ŏlli. Among the discussants is a medical doctor, Chŏng Sŏk-t’ae, who, stressing
that he is speaking “from a medical point of view,” contends that a series of physical changes
occur in a virgin woman’s body when she has sex: “Her breasts enlarge, her buttocks become
round, and her voice gets hoarse.”
17
What reinforced even more the notion that sexual experience
is physically discernible was the pseudo-scientific theory of “sperm absorption.” In 1914, the
Austrian scientists Edmund Waldstein and Rudolf Ekler conducted an experiment on copulating
rabbits, reaching the conclusion that the female specimen developed a type of “ferment” post-
coitus, so as to break down the testicular matter that was introduced into her vaginal canal.
18
While this theory did not gain much traction in Europe, it attracted massive popular interest in
Japan and its colonies with endorsements from renowned Japanese sexologists such as Sawada
Junjirō and Habuto Eiji, leading to the development of so-called “virginity tests”—a blood or
urine test that would allegedly prove whether sperm had ever been introduced into a woman’s
body.
19
These theories of sexual purity formed the conceptual basis of the new chastity
discourse, which undoubtedly imposed upon women new (and in some ways even harsher) forms
of self-regulation against female sexual desire and practice.
Meanwhile, it is interesting to see how New Women in colonial Korea contested these
notions of bodily purity not by negating the concept of purity itself, but rather embracing the idea
of spiritual purity as a form of counter-discourse against the former. This discursive struggle can
be found in the heated debates surrounding romantic love (yŏnae) that took place at around the
17
“Yakhon sidae e hŏsinham i choe ilkka?,” 184.
18
Waldstein, Edmund and Rudolf Ekler, “Der Nachweis resorbierten Spermas im weiblichen
Organismus.”
19
For more details on discussions of these virginity tests in colonial Korean mass media, see Han
Pong-sŏk, “Chŏngjo tamnon ŭi kŭndaejŏk hyŏngsŏng kwa pŏpchehwa,” 192-193.
10
same period. As Kwon Podurae well elucidates in her seminal book, The Age of Romance (Yŏnae
ŭi sidae), romantic love was a revolutionary idea and practice in that it was an opportunity for
the newly emerging modern individual to internalize and practice the basic liberal tenets of free
will, autonomy and self-realization in the private sphere.
20
What is more interesting, however, is
the fact that romantic feelings between woman and man were understood primarily as a spiritual
experience as opposed to a physical one. This particular bent toward the spiritual could be traced
back to the works of Ellen Key (1840-1926), a Swedish feminist whose book Love and Marriage
(1911) was a formative text for many New Women and intellectuals, not only in Korea but the
wider East Asian region under Japanese colonial rule.
21
What must be noted is the fact that Key’s
theories of love derive from a decisively evolutionist standpoint, one that views the spiritual
union as the more “civilized” and enlightened form of mating compared to ones that are based on
libidinal instinct or economic necessity.
22
This is why even though Key surmised “great love” as
the “unity between senses and soul,” the emphasis almost always fell on the latter as the crucial
element that ennobles the individual as well as the human race.
23
Many New Women in the 1920s embraced this idea of romantic love as a spiritual
experience and argued that chastity should be reconceptualized as a spiritual—rather than
physical—commitment to one’s partner. Their critique of chastity—such as the one proposed by
Na Hye-sŏk in “Starting a New Life”—is often interpreted as arguments for the radical
abolishment of the chastity mandate, but this is actually a misreading of their intentions. After
20
Kwon Podurae, Yŏnae ŭi sidae, 70-71.
21
Suzuki Michiko, Becoming Modern Women, 13; Amy Dooling, Women's Literary Feminism in
Twentieth Century China, 70.
22
For more details on the evolutionist aspects of Ellen Key’s feminism, see Merle Weßel, “An
Unholy Union? Eugenic Feminism in the Nordic Countries, ca.1890-1940.”
23
Key, Love and Marriage, 106.
11
suggesting that chastity is merely “a matter of taste” in the beginning of the essay, Na also
concedes that chastity is “necessary for our personal integrity and the unity of life,” and echoing
the language used by Ellen Key, claims that those who guard it “can achieve integrity in their
conduct and spirit.”
24
Kim Wŏn-ju’s 1927 essay “My View on Chastity” also provides better
insight into New Women’s stances on chastity. She begins by criticizing the way how chastity
had up until then been viewed as a “material object” that could be tainted and damaged even
after a single sexual encounter with a man.
25
“Chastity,” she argues, “gains its meaning only
when one loves someone. If she is no longer in love with him, she is no longer obliged to keep
her chastity for him… [it is] the ultimate expression of her emotions and passion for her lover.”
26
As such, New Women such as Kim contested the aforementioned sexological discourses on
virginity and bodily purity by anchoring chastity to the idea of a pure and spiritual love. What the
new chastity debates ultimately illustrate, therefore, is the fact that there was great deal of
investment among colonial period intellectuals across gender lines in the idea of one’s purity,
whether it be in the physical or spiritual sense.
Purity in the Pure Literature of Cold War South Korea
In February 1946, the girls’ magazine New Girl (Sin sonyŏ) published its inaugural issue
with the following mission statement:
24
Na Hye-sŏk, 148.
25
Kim Wŏn-ju, “Na ŭi chŏngjogwan,” 141.
26
Ibid., 141.
12
But girls, please remain pure (sonyŏ tŭra, sunsu hara)! Purity is the only privilege that
you can claim as exclusively yours, a virtue through which you will cleanse this world
from evil. And remember that your utmost duty is to one day become the wives and
mothers of this nation.
27
In this statement, the chief editor of New Girl, Ko Chae-sŏn, is clearly imposing the previously
discussed notions of female sexual purity onto the figure of the girl, whose presumed physical
and spiritual innocence makes her an ideal vessel to embody it. As such, it is not difficult to
imagine how the fascination with female virginity that began in the colonial period eventually
resulted in the fetishization of the girl’s unsullied body. There are, however, some contextual
specificities in this excerpt that must be noted. The fact, for example, that Ko mentions an
unspecified point of “evil” that the girl must quench with her innocence, or the way in which his
description of the girl’s transition into wifehood and motherhood is heavily infused with
patriotism. I suggest that the “evil” that Ko speaks of here broadly refers to the political turmoil
that the newly liberated nation was steeped in soon after its liberation from Japanese occupation.
Considering the overall conservative ideological slant of the magazine, moreover, it is highly
likely that by “evil” Ko was specifically referring to the impending threat of communism. What
is happening here, then, is a strange conflation between purity as female sexual virtue and purity
as anti-communist patriotism.
In order to fully articulate the fraught relationship between the concept of purity and anti-
communist ideology, we must first examine the history of “pure literature” (sun munhak, or
sunsu munhak), a literary concept that was initially introduced into the Korean language from the
27
Ko Chae-sŏn, “Sonyŏ tŭrŭi kil,” 44.
13
Japanese term jun bungaku in the early twentieth century. Jun bungaku in the Japanese context
vaguely referred to fictional writings that were “essay-like, highly-personal, and frequently
lyrical” in style, a high-brow literary form that refused both the didacticism of proletarian
literature as well as the commercialism of popular literature.
28
This semantic usage remained
more or less intact when the term was widely circulated in the 1930s in colonial Korea, to
describe the literary avant-gardism and aestheticism of modernist writers such as Pak T’aewon
and Kim Tong-in.
29
As Jin-kyung Lee well elucidates, the “art for art’s sake” philosophy (yesul
chisangjuŭi) that undergirded the concept of pure literature during this period held “real
emancipatory effects,” as it gave writers such as Kim Tong-in the imaginative space to explore
the emotional and interior depth of the modern subject without being incumbered by the
dogmatism of Marxist ideology or the pressures of the literary marketplace.
30
The political and aesthetic function of the concept of purity, however, changes drastically
with the onset of the Cold War, as right-wing writers and intellectuals reappropriated the term to
purge the national literature of South Korea of leftist thought. In September 1946, for example,
the writer and critic Kim Tong-ni (1913-1995) published “The True Meaning of Pure Literature”
(Sunsu munhak ŭi chinŭi), an essay in which he defines pure literature against that which it is
decisively not:
28
Seidensticker, Edward. “The ‘Pure’ and the ‘In-Between’ in Modern Japanese Theories of the
Novel,” 185.
29
For more discussions on pure literature in colonial Korea, see Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian
Wave, 270 4n; Christopher Hanscom, The Real Modern, 9, Janet Poole, When the Future
Disappears, 103.
30
Jin-kyung Lee, “Art as Freedom and Power,” 17.
14
In Korea today, however, special circumstances in politics and society… have led to the
ascendancy of mechanistic scientism, a disease characteristic of underdeveloped
societies. Thus, writers belonging to the Writers’ Alliance are continually proposing
formulaic theories within the schema of a materialist conception of history…
31
By “Writers’ Alliance” Kim is referring to Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng, a group of left-leaning
writers and critics that was formed in 1946 but soon disbanded due to the South Korean
government’s purging of leftist intellectuals from the national body. It is when Kim positions
pure literature in an antagonistic relationship with this allegedly “mechanistic” and “formulaic”
leftist realist literature that its contours come most clearly into vision, as a form of writing that is
decisively “anticommunist” in its political orientation.
For South Korean literary critics who inherit a leftist worldview, the concept of purity is
inherently of an oppressive nature, a convenient ideological tool for the dominant group to purge
the cultural sphere of dissenting voices. After all, the writings of right-wing ideologues such as
Kim Tong-ni made it clear that purity signified a removal from Marxist ideology and class-based
politics, and pure literature specifically referred to a genre of writing that refused the socialist
realist ethos of leftist literature in both form and content. Under the auspices of the anti-
communist authoritarian regimes, the pure literature camp maintained a hegemonic grasp on
South Korean national literature well into the 1970s, until a new generation of left-leaning critics
such as Paik Nak-chung and Kim Hyŏn emerged in the literary sphere.
32
The fierce critique of
pure literature presented by leftist nationalist critics such as Paik in the ensuing decades is hardly
31
Kim Tong-ni, “Sunsu munhak ŭi chinŭi,” 202.
32
For more details on leftist nationalist literary criticism in South Korea, see Youngju Ryu,
Writers of the Winter Republic.
15
to blame. From their perspective, the word purity is indelibly attached to a body of politically
inert art that endorsed and further propagated the anticommunist ideologies of the state.
In recent decades, however, scholars have increasingly questioned the political efficacy
of reading Korean literature through this binary lens of pure versus engaged literature. The
emerging consensus is that this idea of two opposing literary canons and criticisms is itself an
historical product of the ideologically polarized Cold War order. Jin-kyung Lee offers a
particularly insightful analysis as to why the South Korean literary historiography must strive to
overcome the rigid opposition between the anticommunist right-wing and leftist nationalism. She
suggests that both factions held a rather reductive notion of what constitutes the “political”—that
is, a class critique from a nationalist standpoint—and proceeded to identify themselves either
with or against (above) it.
33 As progressive as it purported itself to be, then, the canon of engaged
literature endorsed by the leftist nationalists is also limited, especially as it tends to homogenize
and render invisible other categories of difference such as gender, sexuality and race, categories
that have already become politicized in post-authoritarian contemporary South Korea.
34
What I
find to be particularly conducive about Lee’s essay, moreover, is the recuperative gesture it
makes toward pure literature. Rather than dismiss pure literature as apolitical or reactionary, it
seeks to “reconceive pure literature as having had a differently politicizing function, though as
yet unrecognized and uninterpreted as such.”
35
This approach opens up new and more generative
ways of assembling literary texts from the past for more comprehensive understandings of
gender, sexual and racial formations in a given historical era.
33
Lee, Jin-kyung, “Afterword,” 281-282.
34
Ibid., 284.
35
Ibid., 282.
16
What I find to be a common ethos underlying the archive of pure literature is a distinct
form of idealism, a utopian longing to escape the moral and material destitution of Japanese
colonialism and the Cold War. This idealism has already been noted upon by a number of
Korean literary scholars in recent years; Theodore Hughes, for example, discovers in the nativist
landscapes of Pak T’ae-wŏn and Hwang Sun-wŏn a certain utopianism, a longing to find refuge
in an imagined rural space beyond the onset of colonial industrialization and national division.
36
Dafna Zur, moreover, insightfully shows how the figure of the child in the children’s literature of
colonial Korea was infused with a certain “yearning for innocence,” a nostalgic desire to recover
a prelapsarian past untainted by colonization.
37
These cultural articulations demonstrate how the
desire for purity—or the impulse to preserve the integrity of the self against the other—has
historically been shared and enacted not only by members of the dominant group but also the
marginalized and dispossessed. The “differently politicizing function” of pure literature that Jin-
kyung Lee speaks of, then, is perhaps fueled by utopian and nostalgic longings for the future that
inhere in the ideal of purity.
Girlhood as Cocoon: Queer Refractions of Purity
“The Statue of Mary” (Maria-sang) is a short story by Kim Song that was published in
the March 1950 issue of the South Korea girls’ magazine, Schoolgirls (Yŏhaksaeng). It begins
with the girl protagonist In-sun stopping on her way home from school in front of a store
window display of a small white statue of the Virgin. In-sun yearns to purchase the statue but is
36
Hughes, Theodore, Freedom’s Frontier, 78, 199.
37
Zur, Dafna, Figuring Korean Futures, 74.
17
discouraged to hear from the shop worker that it costs 1000 wŏn, a hefty amount of money for
any middle-school aged girl. The statue is meant to be a gift for Yang-sun, with whom, as the
narrator pointedly explains, In-sun “is not just good friends but shares such intimate feelings as
to border on same-sex romance (tongsŏng kan ŭi yŏnae).”
38
In the end, In-sun ends up giving the
statue to Yang-sun after purchasing the statue with her tuition money. Delighted by In-sun’s
visit, Yang-sun “rubs her face against Insun’s, cheek to cheek, before planting a kiss on her
lips.”
39
“The Statue” is an intriguing text that encapsulates the many contradictions inherent in
postcolonial discourses of female adolescent purity. What is initially striking about the story is
the unique role that Mary’s statue plays in the relationship between the two girls:
The Virgin Mary, carved in white marble—draped in her white cloak, with downcast
eyes staring far away into the depth ahead—represented all that was pure, immaculate,
and sacred. In-sun placed the statue on Yang-sun’s desk and together, the two girls gazed
at it for a while, yearning to emulate the piousness of the Virgin.
40
In the story, the icon of Mary is presented as a coveted item for girls, worthy enough to be a
fashionable gift for a friend. As I will further show in Chapter Two, Catholicism in this context
is neither a patriarchal religious institution nor a tool of Western colonialism in the way it was
for many other female subjects in the non-West; for young teenage girls in South Korea such as
In-sun, Catholic narratives and artefacts offered new models of feminine beauty and
38
Kim Song, “Maria-sang,” 39.
39
Ibid., 40.
40
Ibid., 41.
18
comportment that they could not find in conventional discourses on Korean girlhood. Second,
although the narrator does make sure to introduce to the readers the character of Yang-sun’s
brother as a potential love interest for In-sun, “The Statue” is still a story that is largely centered
on the same-sex relationship between the two girls. The fact that such a text made its way into
magazines such as Schoolgirls illustrate how passionate bonds between girls were considered a
part of normative girlhood, even if it included some forms of physical intimacy. As I will show
in the following chapters, “The Statue” is but one example of literary texts for and about girls
that ask us to rethink how we define tradition and modernity, and queerness and normativity in
relation to Korean adolescent femininity.
Despite such critical potential, the study of girls has, for a long time, remained outside the
purview of mainstream feminist scholarship in Korea. One of the reasons might be the way in
which girls do not quite seem to serve a feminist historiography that privileges sex radicalism as
a form of political resistance. So as to avoid the flattening of colonial female subjects into
homogeneous victims of imperial regimes, many feminist scholars in East Asian area studies
have emphasized the sexual agency of women in their work. This strand of scholarship resulted
in the creation of a genealogy of sexually transgressive female figures, the starting point being
the New Women of the 1920s who, as the first generation of modern educated women in East
Asia, challenged the conservative sexual norms of their respective societies in both their writings
and private lives. The fashionable and self-sufficient “modern girls” of the 1930s are considered
as their successors. Keeping to this East Asian feminist genealogy, recent Korean studies
feminists have focused on the Madame Freedoms and après girls of the 1950s as postwar
inheritors of this desire for sexual freedom. The goal of this type of scholarship is cultural
19
recuperation, to find and rehistoricize female archetypes that had been vilified for defying the
social mandates of female sexual chastity.
This feminist privileging of the transgressive “promiscuous” woman over the passively
“virginal” girl, however, entails certain discursive limitations. First, the political visions
articulated by this genealogy of “dangerous women” are in many cases limited to the tenets of
West-originating liberal feminism, thereby reinforcing the misconception that East Asian
feminisms are belated, insufficient copies of that of the West. Second, the emphasis on the
sexually “liberated” woman inadvertently leads to an erasure of queer subjectivities and desires,
since culturally visible forms of female sexual expression is more often than not limited to the
expression of female heterosexual desire. Third, a mechanical subversion of the virgin/whore
dichotomy runs the risk of overlooking what purity might have actually meant for women who
participated in its idealization, by reducing it as a form of false consciousness, or a mere
symptom of the systemic repression of female sexuality in general.
The emerging subfield of girl studies in East Asian area studies reflect a growing
acknowledgment of the fact that there is much to be lost in this critical oversight of the girl
figure. There is a way in which the girl sensibility and aesthetic that emerged out of the Korean
context can also be discovered in similar form in the girl cultures of neighboring East Asian
countries such as Japan, China and Taiwan, mainly due to the shared historical experience of
Japanese colonialism: a celebration of virginity, an emphasis on spirituality over corporeality,
and same-sex intimacies of varying forms. In her study on Japanese girl magazines and manga
from the pre- and postwar periods, Deborah Shamoon illustrates how “prewar girls’ culture
coopted the discourse of spiritual love (ren’ai) not to describe heterosexual love, which was
fraught with danger and difficulty, but instead to describe the passionate friendships girls formed
20
with each other.”
41
Discovering the same features within Taiwanese and Chinese representations
of the girl, Fran Martin confirms that the genre of “women’s homoerotic school romance [in
Chinese cultural production] is undergirded by the history of early-twentieth-century cultural
flows between China and Japan.”
42
It could be said, then, that the shōjo cultures of early
twentieth century Japan had an immediate and long-lasting impact on the construction of modern
girl identities in East Asian regions under imperial Japan’s reach.
A common feature that I notice in much of East Asian girls’ studies scholarship,
however, is the researchers’ reluctance to use West-originating terminologies such as “queer” or
“lesbian” in their historical analyses of female adolescent same-sex intimacy. The main
argument here would be that none of the girls who partook in these homoerotic relationships
would have considered themselves to belong to a fixed sexual identity category, and therefore to
approach these practices with contemporary Western understandings of lesbian identity obscures
the cultural specificity of the phenomenon. Shamoon, moreover, argues that insofar as the term
“queer” in the Western context entails a distinct politics of anti-normativity, it does not have
much to do with the phenomena of schoolgirl love, which was accepted as sexually normative
behavior for girls within prewar Japan.
43
These interpretations reflect what Jia Tan considers to
be a rather confining aspect of sexuality studies within area studies in general, namely, the way
in which their rejection of “queer theory as Western and hence irrelevant to Asia paradoxically
reify the whiteness and universalism of queer theory.”
44
While I acknowledge the need for
cultural and historical specificity in the study of sexuality, I believe there are many fruitful
41
Shamoon, Deborah, Passionate Friendship, 29.
42
Martin, Fran, Backward Glances, 35.
43
Shamoon, 46.
44
Tan, Jia, “Beijing Meets Hawai’i,” 146.
21
discussions to be had by contemplating East Asian girl identity alongside larger theoretical
discourses on queerness, especially considering the transnationality and cross-temporality of the
former’s manifestations.
I hope to initiate such discussions by examining female adolescent sexuality not only as
an object of study, but more as an analytical tool to rethink normativity and its operation within
social constructions such as nationality, gender and race. For this purpose, I take on a temporally
expansive analysis of sexuality that spans the early twentieth century to the present moment. As I
do so, I am mindful of the dangers of subsuming historical alterity under a teleological
identitarian narrative. Many queer theorists have criticized the first generation of lesbian cultural
historians such as Lillian Faderman for imposing contemporary understandings of lesbian
identity and politics onto the distant past.
45
But as Valerie Traub and Heather Love point out, the
attempt to compensate for the historical elision of lesbians by identifying with same-sex loving
women of the past is an intellectual desire and political practice that cannot be easily dispensed
of.
46
A diachronic study of sexuality, then, can be justified by paying attention not just to the
queer sexual practice itself, but what it tells us about the social context of each given historical
moment.
For this purpose, I position my project in close relationship with US-based queer of color
critique and queer diaspora studies, many of which point out the insufficiency of Euro-American
discourses on gay and lesbian identity in the study of non-Western sexualities. Scholars such as
Evelyn Hammonds, Marlon Ross and C. Riley Snorton remind us that the politics of visibility
constituting the closet narrative and “coming-out” stories have limited applicability outside of
45
Jagose, Annamarie, Queer Theory, 14-15.
46
Traub, Valerie, “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography,” 125; Heather Love, Feeling
Backwards, 41.
22
white middle-class gay and lesbian identity formation.
47
Meanwhile, queer diaspora studies
scholars such as Martin Manalansan and Gayatri Gopinath offer a valuable critique of the
globalization of queer liberalism and the way in which Euro-American discourses conflate non-
Western queer sexuality with a colonial notion of primitive, pre-“modern” homosexual
practice.
48
These scholars have astutely illustrated how instead of passively succumbing to the
inevitable onset of a global queer identity, queer diasporic subjects actively push against the
“permeable boundaries of two coexisting yet oftentimes incommensurable cultural ideologies of
gender and sexuality.”
49
The theoretical and methodological framework developed by these scholars have greatly
contributed to the emergence of a new queer Asian studies. Scholars such as Lisa Rofel, Fran
Martin and Petrus Liu have played an especially prominent role in the study of queer sexualities
in contemporary post-socialist China. A common thread that binds their works together would be
a preoccupation with China’s transition into a neoliberal state, and how queer liberal discourses
that arrived with the post-socialist nation’s integration into the global world order have impacted
the queer lives and cultures in China. Lisa Rofel, for example, focuses on the production of the
“desiring (queer) subject” as a welcome effect of liberal politics and/or neoliberalism.
50
Petrus
Liu, on the other hand, argues that a queer Marxist tradition of thought had existed in mainland
China and Taiwan long before the influx of global lesbian and gay identitarian discourse, and
that this rich cultural tradition continues to define queer subjecthood and cultural production in
47
Hammonds, Evelyn, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” 128;
Marlon Ross, “Beyond the Closet as a Raceless Paradigm,” 161; C. Riley Snorton, Nobody is
Supposed to Know, 18.
48
Manalansan, Martin, Global Divas, x-xi; Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 11.
49
Manalansan, 21.
50
Rofel, Lisa, Desiring China, 13.
23
the two Chinas.
51
Whether aligned with or against China’s neoliberal “turn,” the ethnographic
subjects and cultural texts that appear in these scholar’s works attest to the existence of a
politically vibrant and self-aware community of queer subjects.
While I remain deeply indebted to this rich body of scholarship, there seems to exist a
certain commitment to a politics of “affirmation” in this work that does not quite align with the
complex political function of purity in the Korean context. The biggest accomplishment of queer
of color critique/queer diaspora/queer area studies would be their joint critique of Euro-American
queer liberalism as a discourse that treats non-Western, non-white sexualities as “belated copies
of the liberal West, evolving along the same path with no local history and no agency.”
52
A new
queer theoretical framework that provincializes the West, then, must present non-Western queer
desire and sexual practice as a contemporaneous alternative to the former. Herein I discover an
overly optimistic emphasis on the political and sexual agency of the non-Western queer subject.
The Filipino gay men in Manalansan’s study “chart hybrid and complex paths that deviate from
a teleological and developmental route to gay modernity,” and Gopinath discovers within queer
South Asian diasporic culture female homoerotic desires that “challenge a Euro-American
‘lesbian’ epistemology that relies on notions of visibility and legibility.”
53
Meanwhile, the gay
and lesbian subjects in Lisa Rofel’s ethnographic study proclaim that they are “leading China
toward its proper place in a cosmopolitan global world,” and Petrus Liu celebrates a “rich and
complex tradition of postwar queer Chinese works that retool and revitalize Marxist social
analysis.”
54
But what about non-Western queer subjects that do not feel capable of contesting old
51
Liu, Petrus, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, 4.
52
Ibid., 4.
53
Manalansan, xi (emphasis added); Gopinath, 26 (emphasis added).
54
Rofel, 2 (emphasis added); Liu, 4 (emphasis added).
24
ideas and blazing new paths? What about queer desires that remain “stuck” in a fabricated past,
because of the foreclosure of a viable future?
As in the case of many other postcolonial nations, the mid-1990s in Korea is marked as
the watershed moment in which the “homosexual” began to appear in the public sphere as a self-
representing political subject. As the first (and still to this day the only) tenured academic to have
publicly acknowledged their homosexual orientation, the young Marxist sociologist Seo Dong-
jin stood at the very center of the mass controversies surrounding homosexuality during this
period. In a 2001 essay he published in the US-based Journal of Homosexuality, Seo describes
the birth of LGBT politics in 1990s Korea for a non-Korean audience, only to conclude on a
surprisingly glum and pessimistic note: “I have a hard time looking at this as a firm victory, or
the beginning of positive changes that will guarantee a rosy future.”
55
Twenty years have passed
since then, but the skepticism and melancholy that marked Seo’s essay is still prevalent in the
queer community in Korea today. As Todd Henry notes, the majority of the queer population in
Korea still chooses to maintain an “under-the-radar” presence due to the high risk of social
ostracization.
56
I would suggest that for many of them, an optimistic outlook on the future is a
luxury that they cannot afford to maintain in their day-to-day struggles for survival. For these
subjects, neither the past nor the future, an indigenous tradition of leftist struggle nor first-world
liberal discourse, offers a viable alternative that scholars like Liu or Rofel speak of. This political
“standstill,” I argue, has everything to do with the nation’s semi-peripheral status within the
global world order as a postcolonial yet sub-imperial, quasi-liberal yet intensively post-industrial
East Asian nation.
55
Seo, Dong-jin, “Mapping the Vicissitudes of Homosexual Identities in South Korea,” 78.
56
Henry, Todd, “Introduction,” 4.
25
The persistently recurring, nostalgic figure of the girl within South Korean literature is a
reflection of this paradoxical political situation, namely, a queer suspension between a receding
past and an impossible future. In this sense, the perpetual virgins and same-sex loving schoolgirls
that I look to are intimately tied with Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the queer child who
“grows sideways” because they are not given the option to grow up.
57
While the material
conditions that had enabled “spiritual love” between innocent girls in the past (such as gender-
segregated schools and a female-dominated domestic arena) are rapidly disappearing due to
drastic neoliberal restructuring of public and private spaces, the Western model of an identity-
based cultural politics is met with indifference by the middle-class majority and the state.
Collective memories of “passionate” girl friendships live on in the cultural imaginary but are
appropriated and reified by a transnational pop culture industry that packages this figure of the
homoerotic yet innocent girl into a product for the global market. Given these conditions, my
project’s focus on girlhood might have much more to do with the negative identification with the
past that Heather Love speaks of in Feeling Backward.
58
Here I offer the concept of the “cocoon” as an alternative to the Euro-American notion of
the “closet,” to describe how the unique desires, pleasures, and epistemologies of girlhood
survive by remaining hidden in plain sight. In her study of black lesbian identity, Evelyn
Hammonds draws a firm distinction between (white) queer discourses that bemoan lesbian
invisibility and apparitionality within cultural representation, and the black female lesbian
subject who opts for a “self-chosen invisibility” in response to racist and homophobic violence.
59
While the claustrophobic metaphor of the closet requires a liberatory “coming out” narrative to
57
Stockton, Kathryn Bond, The Queer Child, 3.
58
Love, Feeling Backward, 4.
59
Hammonds, 132.
26
ensue, the cocoon is characterized by a soft and protective outer layer, which then creates a
nurturing yet confining interior space for those who wish to hide within. It is no surprise, then,
that some girls choose to perpetually remain within this cocoon stage, to evade their future
destinies as “butterflies” for sale. Through an intricate politics of purity, the figure of the girl
conjures up queer desire and pleasures while serving as the very foundation of normativity at the
same time, thus representing the conundrum that queer cultural production and politics is placed
in in contemporary South Korea.
27
Chapter One
The Invention of the Girl in Postliberation Korea (1946-1950)
It would be safe to say that Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi” (A Shower) is a short story that
almost all South Koreans across generations know by heart. It is one among a handful of literary
works in the Korean language that have been included in government-issued literature textbooks
from the 1960s up until 2007. The story is centered on a shy country boy who develops an
infatuation with a newly transplanted girl from the city. The narrative depicts in loving detail the
one summer day that they spend together, dallying across the valleys and fields of an unnamed
rural village in postcolonial South Korea. Their brief relationship is infused with a watercolor-
like sentimentality, one that is accentuated by the sudden shower of rain that falls during their
excursion into the scenic landscape. This sentimentalist mood reaches a climax at the end of the
story when the girl dies from an unspecified illness; her dying wish is to be “bur[ied]… in the
clothes she’d been wearing” on that one day she had spent with the boy outdoors.
60
In a 1965
commentary, the literary critic Ku Ch’ang-hwan describes “Sonagi” as a “romantic and poetic
depiction of the pure and innocent love between boy and girl,” and praises Hwang for the way he
articulates a “uniquely Korean ethos” with his skillful use of a “nativist lyricism” (t’osokchŏk in
sŏjŏng).
61
Many scholars and critics since then have also agreed that the writer’s successful
articulation of nostalgic feeling and compelling pastoral landscape is what earned the story its
place within the Korean literary canon.
60
Hwang Sun-wŏn, “Sonagi.” Trans. Brother Anthony of Taize An Sonjae, accessed March 17,
2021, http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/Shower.htm.
61
Ku Ch’ang-hwan, “Hwang Sun-wŏn munhak sŏsŏl,” 34-36.
28
A fuller consideration of “Sonagi” requires an examination of the story against the
historical context in which it was produced, which was the last years of the Korean War (1950-
1953). As noted by literary historians, Korea’s insertion into a global Cold War order after
liberation from Japanese occupation on August 15
th
, 1945 resulted in the bifurcation of the
literary sphere into two competing camps: proletarian literature and pure literature.
62
By the time
“Sonagi” was published in 1953, most of the writers and intellectuals who were sympathetic to
the leftist cause had already defected to the North, and their writings were placed under state
censorship and banned from circulation up until the 1980s. Meanwhile, the pure literature camp,
led by the likes of Kim Tong-ni and Cho Yŏn-hyŏn, gained hegemonic power in the South
Korean literary field, with their writings, including that of Hwang Sun-wŏn, coming to dominate
the South Korean literary canon for the ensuing decades. Left-leaning literary scholars and critics
who foreground this political context tend to present less generous readings of Hwang’s works.
What they find in Hwang’s insistence on a childlike innocence in texts such as “Sonagi” is a
problematic ahistoricism that turns a blind eye to the political struggles that were actually taking
place at the time of its production.
63
In recent years, however, there has emerged a body of scholarship that seeks to revisit
literary texts produced from this period beyond the ideological divide between leftist nationalism
and right-wing anticommunism. Youngmin Choe’s examination of “Sonagi” and its many
transmedia adaptations offers a good example of the productive potential of such new
approaches. Using affect theory as an analytical lens, Choe contends that the twinge of nostalgia
62
For a more detailed examination into the literary field in postliberation Korea, see Theodore
Hughes, Freedom’s Frontier, 66.
63
For a recent example of this kind of reading, see Ch’a Hye-yŏng, “Kugŏ kyogwasŏ wa chibae
ideollogi,” 112.
29
evoked in the reader by the story is “linked to a universal affect that was internalized as personal
feeling for many Koreans,” which is why the original text and later adaptations were such a
popular success. In other words, the story is embraced by Korean readers precisely for the way in
which its idealization of purity (sunsu) offers them an affective space to dwell in as a type of
coping mechanism against the traumas of the Korean War.
64
Choe’s use of affect theory is
generative in the way it challenges preexisting readings that attribute the critical and popular
success of “Sonagi” to its alignment with a conservative political ideology. It draws attention,
moreover, to the story’s potential to conjure a certain fellow feeling among Koreans across
generations, one that could potentially serve an alternative political function that is not always
visible in plain sight.
Keeping this insight in mind, I focus my attention specifically to the character of the girl
in “Sonagi,” who is arguably one of the most iconic girl characters in Korean literary history.
What perhaps justifies my particular approach is the interesting yet lesser-known fact that in its
first publication in the November 1953 issue of the magazine Hyŏptong, the story had initially
been printed under the title of “Sonyŏ” (A Girl). As a term that first emerged in Korean literary
writings from the colonial period, the dictionary definition of sonyŏ is more or less equivalent to
the meaning of the English word “girl”: a female gendered subject who has not yet reached full
maturation. From the postliberation period onward, however, the word has come to refer more
specifically to the kind of girlhood presented in “Sonagi”: with her fair skin, glimmering doe
eyes, and the faint blush on her cheeks, the girl in “Sonagi” became an archetype for a countless
number of girl characters that later followed in South Korean literary history who embodies an
idealized adolescent feminine beauty and innocence. In the following sections of this chapter, I
64
Choe, Youngmin, Tourist Distractions, 113-114.
30
will examine how this powerful trope emerged from the various cultural formations that
inhabited the national space at different historical turns, namely, Japanese colonialism, Cold War
developmentalism, and the pure literature discourse.
The (Pre) History of the Sonyŏ in Colonial Korea
In his seminal study on the “invention” of childhood in late eighteenth-century Europe,
Phillippe Aries contends that children and adolescents are categories that emerge in response to
larger socioeconomic shifts in a modernizing society.
65
His findings help us recognize the
historical significance of the magazine Sonyŏn, the first ever periodical that exclusively targeted
a non-adult readership in Korea. As the magazine’s founder and chief editor, the literary
vanguard Ch’oe Nam-sŏn (1890-1957) proclaims in the inaugural issue that Korea must become
“a nation of youth/boys (sonyŏn),” for they are the ones who will “bring glory to the nation’s
history and make great contributions to world culture.”
66
With its emphasis on the role of the
child in the material and cultural advancement of the nation, Sonyŏn was one among many of the
sure signs that early twentieth-century Korea was transitioning into the new historical phase of
modernity.
The founding of the magazine was a meaningful event in terms of Korean literary history
as well, as it was one of the first periodicals that emerged in the colonial period that used the
word sonyŏn in its title.
67
In her study of the magazine, Dafna Zur also pays special attention to
65
Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 10
66
Ch’oe Nam-sŏn, Sonyŏn 1, no. 1.
67
Other periodicals of the colonial period that were marketed toward this demographic were
Sonyŏn hanbando (1906), Sin sonyŏn (1923), Sonyŏn segye (1929), and Sonyŏn chungang
(1935).
31
Ch’oe’s choice of title. Her suggestion is that sonyŏn, which has the dual meaning of “youth”
and “boys,” was chosen over other candidates such as chŏngnyŏn (young men), chŏngchun
(youth), or ŏrini (children), most likely because it designated a pre- or early- teen age bracket
that was “more impressionable… still malleable yet primed for reform.”
68
By hailing them under
the signifier of sonyŏn, Enlightenment-era intellectuals such as Ch’oe were not only imposing
upon the “impressionable” young readers of Korea the crucial task of modernizing the nation
state, but also encouraging them to develop a sense of identity as a coherent group formed by
virtue of their age.
Another thing that is often mentioned about Sonyŏn is the noticeable absence of the word
sonyŏ from both the title and pages of the magazine. While pointing out this absence, Han Chi-
hŭi notes how even today girls are often subsumed under the signifier of sonyŏn, a linguistic
practice that is reflective of a larger phallocentric culture in which the female gender is
considered as a mere collateral or “surplus” existence (ingyŏjŏk chonjae) to man.
69
In fact, the
word sonyŏ appears with much less frequency compared to its male gendered counterpart in
other publications from this period as well. Kim Pok-sun suggests that this is partially because in
the colonial period, the female gendered non-adult population was too fractured by other
sociocultural factors to be unified under a single common signifier such as sonyŏ.
70
This
argument is evidenced by how the many different terms that were used to describe underage
woman at the time marked differences in marital status and social caste. For example, kyejip and
agassi were both words that referred to young women, but the latter implied that the addressee
was someone of a higher social status. Ch’ŏnyŏ and puin were terms that were used to refer
68
Zur, Figuring Korean Futures, 32-33.
69
Han Chi-hŭi, “Ch’oe namsŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏn’ ŭi kihoek kwa ‘sonyŏ’ ŭi ingyŏ,” 127.
70
Kim Pok-sun, “Sonyŏ ŭi t’ansaeng kwa pan’gongjuŭi sŏsa ŭi kyebo,” 205.
32
respectively to unmarried and married women; a thirteen-year-old girl could potentially belong
in either category due to the custom of early marriage.
71
In any case, the relative paucity of the
word sonyŏ in writings from the colonial period suggests that the category of the girl—or the
belief that all non-adult women share a common identity based on their age—did not yet exist in
this period.
Meanwhile, a word that was used most frequently to describe non-adult female subjects
in writings from the colonial period was yŏhaksaeng, the English translation of which is
“schoolgirl.” The relative prominence of the figure of the schoolgirl reminds us that education
and literacy are important factors to consider when examining cultural representations of non-
adults. What must first be recognized here is that modern education was difficult to access for
Korean children, regardless of gender. Statistical data shows that in 1912, which is around the
time that Ch’oe Nam-sŏn founded Sonyŏn, only 2.1 percent of children were enrolled in primary
schools. This figure went up only as high as around forty percent toward the very last years of
the colonial period.
72
Historians point to the colonial government’s lack of initiative for
education to be the main cause behind such slow development of public education in Korea.
Enrollment rates in Japan had already reached over ninety percent by the year of 1900 after the
Meiji government had made primary school education for children compulsory in 1872. In
Korea, however, the colonial government repeatedly dismissed public demands for compulsory
education, citing “low morale and poverty” as reasons for the policy delay.
73
In the absence of a
public school system, it was up to intellectuals and educators in the private sector to combat the
71
For a more detailed description of the semantic uses of these terms, see Han Chi-hŭi, Uri sidae
taejung munhwa wa sonyŏ ŭi kyebohak, 71, 95.
72
Yi Ki-hun, “Singminji hakkyo konggan ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwa pyŏnhwa,” 74.
73
No Yŏng-t’aek, “Ilje sigi ŭi munmaengnyul ch’ui,” 117.
33
problem of illiteracy. Despite their best efforts, the rate of illiteracy, which was at a staggering
ninety-five percent in the 1910s, remained quite high throughout the entire period of Japanese
occupation, estimated at around seventy percent of the total population in the early 1940s.
74
As colonial subjects growing up in a gender discriminatory culture, Korean girls were
doubly disadvantaged when attempting to obtain literacy and a modern education for themselves.
Out of the 2.1 percent of children who were enrolled in primary school in 1912, for example,
only 0.4 percent were girls. Girls’ enrollment rates remained in the single digits up until at least
1935, whereas those for boys hit the twenty percent mark by 1923 before reaching 36.7 percent
in 1935.
75
It could be said, then, that the prominence of the schoolgirl figure in colonial period
mass media and literature was an overrepresentation of the group, a phenomenon that occurred
precisely for the fact that they were a very small and highly privileged minority of the non-adult
female population.
As readers, therefore, girls remained a minor group within the Korean publishing market
throughout the colonial period. It was only after liberation, when mass education became
available to girls, that they were able to read books and magazines in the Korean language that
specifically catered to their tastes and interests. Within these circumstances, some girl readers in
colonial Korea found Japanese publications to be a good source to turn to for information and
entertainment:
Back then I would often spend my time daydreaming about what I had read in the girls’
magazines from the dormitory library, magazines such as Shōjo kurabu and Shōjo no
74
Ibid., 157.
75
Yi Ki-hun, 75.
34
tomo. Afterwards, while munching on popcorn with Kŭm-nang and the other girls, I
would tell them all the sad and romantic stories that I had read in those magazines.
76
I remember how as a seven-year-old girl I would visit my friend’s house after school and
snoop around the bookshelf in her older brother’s room.… The children’s books and
Japanese student magazines such as Shōnen kurabu or Shōjo kurabu that I found in his
room back then were what first introduced me to the pleasures of reading.
77
These excerpts are autobiographical essays authored respectively by the painter Ch’ŏn Kyŏng-ja
(1924-2015) and essayist O Kyŏng-ja in the later years of their life. The publications that they
refer to—Shōjo kurabu (The Girls’ Club) and Shōjo no tomo (The Girl’s Friend)—were two of
the most popular girls’ magazines that were circulating in Japan at the time. In her research on
the reading practices of girls in the late colonial period, Kim Mi-ji offers these two excerpts to
illustrate the popularity of Japanese girl magazines among elite Korean girls who were taught
how to read the language.
78
This suggests how Japanese girl culture likely played a crucial part
in the intellectual formation of literate girls, such as the young Ch’ŏn and O, who later grew up
to become important female leaders and cultural producers in the postcolonial period.
It would be helpful, then, to take a cursory glance into the girl cultures of prewar Japan.
As Deborah Shamoon illustrates in her book, Passionate Friendship, the shōjo was a category
that emerged in Meiji Japan (1868-1912), a period in which more girls in the urban middle and
76
Ch’ŏn Kyŏng-ja, Nae sŭlp’ŭn chŏnsŏl ŭi 49 p’eiji, 83.
77
O Kyŏng-ja, Por umul, 221.
78
Kim Mi-ji, “Singminji chosŏn ŭi ‘sonyŏ’ tokcha wa kŭndae·taejung·munhagŭi
tongsidaesŏng,” 27.
35
upper classes began to obtain advanced education in all-girls secondary schools.
79
By the mid
1920s, there existed at least four periodicals that targeted this demographic: Shōjo sekai (A Girls’
World), Shōjo no tomo (The Girl’s Friend), Shōjo gaho (Girls’ Pictorials) and Shōjo kurabu (The
Girls’ Club). These magazines played a crucial part in the formation of a unique girls’ culture —
or shōjo bunka—in the prewar period. As Shamoon explains, one was not born but made a shōjo
by being exposed to and internalizing the girls’ culture disseminated through these magazines,
one that required them to comport themselves with certain “models of speech, dress, behavior,
and style” that would distinguish them as “refined” modern subjects.
80
In her examination of the
reader contribution section to Shōjo no tomo, which were divided into regional subsections,
Shamoon discovers that the Japanese colonies of Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan were also
represented as distinct regions, a fact that again points toward the existence of a sizable
readership for these magazines in Korea.
81
An interesting text to consider when discussing the influence of Japanese shōjo culture on
the intellectual formation of girls in colonial Korea would be “A Girl of Mystery” (Ŭisim ŭi
sonyŏ), a 1917 short story by Kim Myŏng-sun. The story is often credited as the first work of
modern fiction by a woman writer that was published in Korea. Pak Suk-cha, however, contends
that the historical significance of the story lies in the fact that it was the first instance in which
the word sonyŏ was featured in a Korean literary text.
82
The publication of “A Girl of Mystery,”
then, is an event that is at least as meaningful as the founding of Ch’oe Nam-sŏn’s Sonyŏn a
decade earlier. The story was chosen as the third prize winner in a literary competition sponsored
79
Shamoon, Deborah, Passionate Friendship, 2.
80
Ibid., 2.
81
Ibid., 51.
82
Pak Suk-cha, “Kŭndaejŏk chuch’e wa t’aja ŭi hyŏngsŏng kwajŏng e taehan yŏn’gu,” 271.
36
by Ch’ŏngch’un (Youth), another magazine that also happens to be founded by Ch’oe. Yi
Kwang-su, who served as one of the judges on the competition, praised the story for moving
away from the didacticism of premodern narratives, embodying instead a truly “modern” literary
ethos in its dedication to a realistic depiction of its subject matter.
83
Since then, however, the story’s reputation has been tarnished by allegations of
plagiarism, first raised by none other than Yi himself in 1942.
84
These suspicions are still yet to
be verified, as no one to date has been able to identify a likely source. Kim Yun-sik suggests that
the original source would have most likely been a Japanese story from the Meiji era, as the
subject matter and style of “A Girl” share many similarities with texts that were produced during
that period.
85
Sŏ Chŏng-ja, who co-edited the 2010 anthology of Kim Myŏng-sun’s complete
works, corroborates Kim’s theory, pointing out how certain details in the story—description of
houses that appear to be more Japanese than Korean in their architectural structure, or
vocabularies used in the story that are literal translations of Japanese words—suggest that Kim
may have taken certain elements from a Japanese source when she wrote the story.
86
There is no
doubt that Japanese literary works were a crucial part of Kim’s literary upbringing; after all, the
writer was studying abroad in Japan only a year prior to the publication of “A Girl.” As verifying
the originality of the story is beyond the scope of this chapter, it would suffice to say that the
structure and style of modern Japanese literature was an important source of inspiration for the
young writer.
83
Yi Kwang-su, “Hyŏnsang sosŏl kosŏn yŏŏn,” 99.
84
Yi Kwang-su, “Ch’unwŏn yohan kyodamnok,” 53.
85
Kim Yun-sik, “Inhyŏng ŭisik ŭi p’amyŏl,” 223.
86
Sŏ Chŏng-ja, “tiasŭp’ora kim myŏngsun ŭi sam kwa munhak,” 39-40.
37
If we take this assumption further, it is possible to consider “A Girl of Mystery” as a type
of incomplete literary experiment, one in which Kim, inspired by the figure of the Japanese
shōjo, tries her hand at creating the archetype of the Korean sonyŏ. The story is centered on a
nine-year-old girl (Pŏm-nye) who moves to the rural town of Saemaul with an old man and
becomes the object of curiosity among the locals, a plot structure that is curiously reminiscent of
Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi.” The aura of mystery surrounding the character is what gives the
story its captivating appeal:
The beautiful Pŏmnye seemed eager to get to know the other girls in the neighborhood.
On the occasions when she stood outside the house and watched the village girls harvest
greens, her lovely face and appearance dazzled them, making them glance at one another
in admiration.
87
Her white forehead looked as if it had been carved from marble, and a couple of strands
of hair on either side of her forehead fluttered now and then as the cool breeze blew,
heightening her beauty…Compared with the girls of Saemaul, she stood out like a crane
among chickens. She and the old man both walked in silence. Her lovely face wore a
grief-stricken expression, unusual for a child.
88
What Kim ultimately presents to colonial Korean readers through the character of Pŏm-nye, Pak
suggests, is the new and alluring literary figure of the sonyŏ. Pŏm-nye is an illustration of how
87
Kim Myŏng-sun, “A Girl of Mystery,” 17.
88
Ibid., 19.
38
the word sonyŏ does more than simply denote any underage girl. She stands out “like a crane
among chickens” in her beauty and demeanor; her “grief-stricken expression” hints toward a
complex interiority of a modern subject, one that shrouds her with mystery in the eyes of the
villagers.
89
In this sense, Pŏm-nye is a character who stands at the forefront of a long lineage of
iconic sonyŏ figures that appear in Korean literary history, foreshadowing the development of a
girl aesthetic and culture in the years to come.
The Emergence of Girl Magazines in Postliberation Korea
Korean society between the years of 1945 and 1950 offers a good example of what a
newly liberated, postcolonial nation state actually looked like in the aftermath of the Pacific War.
Specifically in the case of Korea, the urgent task of nation-building was severely inhibited by
two events. The first was the military occupation of the nation by the Soviet Union and the U.S.
(1945-1948), which deferred the formation of independent governments on Korean soil until
1948.
90
The second, of course, was the Korean War (1950-1953), which devastated whatever
social infrastructures were left standing from the colonial period. Out of these historical
conditions emerged what Theodore Hughes refers to as the Cold War developmentalism of South
Korea: a discourse sponsored by the U.S.-occupied state that attempted to build up South Korea
under the guiding ethos of anti-communism and state capitalism through the mobilization of
culture.
91
As Hughes explains, the rise of Cold War developmentalist discourse led to the severe
89
Ibid., 19.
90
The official term for the U.S. military government that occupied South Korea from September
8
th
, 1945 to August 15
th
, 1948 was the United States Army Military Government in Korea,
hereinafter referred to as USAMGIK.
91
Hughes, Freedom’s Frontier, 10.
39
impairment of the political autonomy of the South Korean government, as it required the nation’s
subjection to U.S. hegemony to ensure its affiliation with the so-called “free world.” It also
interfered with the disposal of the material and immaterial legacies of Japanese colonialism, as
its tactics of mass mobilization remained heavily indebted to those previously deployed by the
colonial state.
92
One of the tasks that the state attempted to accomplish early on in the nation-building
process was to establish new gender relations that were better aligned with the liberal democratic
values of equality and freedom espoused by the U.S. For this reason, liberation on August 15
th,
1945 was soon followed by a string of new decrees and governmental policies that seemingly
aimed to elevate the social status of women: the passing of anti-trafficking laws in May 1946, the
establishment of the Women’s Department (punyŏguk) in the USAMGIK, and eventually,
women’s suffrage in September 1947.
93
Another structural shift that had an especially positive
impact on the female population was the legislation of the Education Act in 1949, which
guaranteed the right to a primary school education for all.
94
As a result, the primary school
enrollment rate, which was recorded at sixty-four percent in 1945, drew a sharp upward curve,
amounting to 74.8 percent in 1948 and eventually reaching ninety-nine percent in 1959.
95
With
more educational opportunities available, the female illiteracy rate, which was estimated to be as
high as eighty percent in the last years of the colonial period, dropped to 32.1% by 1955.
96
92
Ibid., 10.
93
Im Mi-jin, “1945-1953 nyŏn han’guk sosŏl ŭi chendŏjŏk hyŏnsil insik yŏn’gu,” 1.
94
The Committee on Educational Planning (kyoyuk simŭihoe), which was established under the
USAMGIK in November 1945, was charged with the democratization of education in South
Korea.
95
Kim Chae-in et al., Han’guk yŏsŏng kyoyuk ŭi pyŏnch’ŏn kwajŏng yŏn’gu, 229, 231.
96
No Yŏng-t’aek, 157; Statistics Korea, “Sido/sŏngbyŏl munmaengja piyul (12se isang).”
40
While these legislations and reforms did to a certain extent help better the lives of women in
postliberation Korea, the state simultaneously enforced a policy that sought to mobilize the
masses into the hegemonic family unit, which entailed the reinforcement of conservative gender
roles. A good example of these ambivalent conditions could be found in the surge of new
periodicals for women that emerged during this period. Between the years of 1946 and 1949,
there were at least five newspapers and six magazines for women that were newly established, a
phenomenon that could be interpreted as a reflection of increased social recognition for
women.
97
In their close readings of these periodicals, however, Pak Yong-gyu and Yun Sŏn-ja
explain that discussion of women’s opportunities in the workplace was rather limited in these
periodicals, with a greater amount of emphasis placed on the importance of their role as
housewives (kajŏng chubu) in the domestic sphere.
98
Both Pak and Yun attribute this editorial
slant to the fact that many of these newspapers and magazines were strongly associated with
right-wing women’s groups that operated under the sponsorship of the Women’s Department of
the USAMGIK, such as the Patriotic Women’s Association for the Acceleration of Korean
Independence (Tongnip ch’oksŏng aeguk puinhoe).
99
This means that the editorial board and
main contributors sought to propagate the state’s views toward women and family, which were
to organize the citizenry into the gendered roles of provider husband and reproducer wife. It
could be said, then, that any aspirations for meaningful social change in the status of women that
might have manifested in the pages of these publications were subsumed under the
developmentalist discourse of nation-building.
97
Kajŏng sinmun, Punyŏ sinmun, Punyŏ ilbo, Yŏsŏng sinmun, Puin sinbo (newspapers); Yŏsŏng
munhwa, Yŏsŏng kongnon, Puin, Sinwŏn, Puin kyŏnghyang, Sin yŏwŏn (magazines).
98
Pak Yong-gyu, “Mi kunjŏnggi ŭi yŏsŏng sinmun kwa yŏsŏng undong,” 145; Yun Sŏn-ja,
“Haebang chikhu yŏsŏngji e nat’anan yŏsŏng munhwa wa yŏga e kwanhan tamnon,” 96.
99
Pak Yong-gyu, 132-33; Yun Sŏn-ja, 95.
41
It is from within this context that the first girls’ magazines in the Korean language
emerged: Girls Academy (Yŏhagwŏn) and New Girl (Sin sonyŏ). These magazines published
their first issues back-to-back in 1946; Girls’ Academy in January and New Girl in the following
month.
100
The launching of these magazines can first be contextualized as a result of the
increased literacy rates among girls. Since the colonial period, there had existed a general lack of
publications on the market that specifically catered to the newly emerging non-adult female
readership, and it is not difficult to imagine that the publishers saw an opportunity for profit with
these magazines. In any case, these magazines were now tasked with articulating for themselves
and their readers who the Korean girl was, and more importantly, who she must aspire to
become. The magazines’ answers to these important questions can be understood a result of a
process of negotiation between various political discourses that were competing against each
other in the postliberation space.
A closer examination reveals these two magazines to be quite similar in terms of content,
although minor differences in editorial directions do exist. The editor of Girls Academy, Kim
Chŏng-su, was also the owner of Haksaengsa, an educational publisher that specialized in
magazines and curriculum materials for the student population. This specialization is reflected in
the pages of Girls Academy as well, with both issues of the magazine dedicating many of its
pages to lessons and study guides for the core academic subjects of Korean grammar, Korean
history, English, and home economics. The magazine also offers informative non-fictional pieces
on a wide array of subjects, some examples including an essay about schoolgirls in China by the
Sinologist Chŏng Rae-dong, a series article that visits prestigious women’s colleges in Korea,
100
There are currently only two surviving issues of Girls’ Academy (January 1946, March 1946),
three of New Girl (February 1946, June 1946)
42
and a health article about women and tuberculosis.
101
Its main attraction, however, are the
opinion pieces and essays solicited from famous educators, politicians and writers such as Ko
Hwang-gyŏng, Hwang Sin-dŏk, Pak Sun-ch’ŏn, and Yi T’ae-jun.
102
Fiction and poetry take up
only a slim portion of the magazine; each issue offers only a couple of poems along with one
short story based on ancient Korean folklore (yŏksa sosŏl).
103
Meanwhile, the magazine’s March
1946 issue includes a small reader contribution section, featuring poems and letters solicited
from the magazine’s actual readers.
New Girl, on the other hand, puts more editorial effort into its literary content compared
to its competitor. Each issue includes a number of original poems, short stories, and serialized
novels, some of which are by well-known writers such as Sŏ Chŏng-ju, Chŏng Pi-sŏk, Kim
Tong-in, and Kim Tong-ni. There is also a “World Literature” section that introduces the works
of famous writers such as Heinrich Heine, Tagore, and Sappho in translation. Other than that,
however, the magazine offers content fairly similar to Girls Academy; some examples would
include a journalistic sketch of girls in the U.S., a health article explaining physical changes that
occur in the female body during puberty, and an editorial column titled “The Way of a Girl”
(sonyŏ tŭrŭi kil). Meanwhile, few archival records remain that document the background or later
life trajectory of New Girl’s chief editor, Ko Chae-sŏn, aside from the fact that he had been
101
Chŏng Rae-dong, “Chungguk ŭi yŏhaksaeng” (January 1946); “Yŏja taehak kŭp chŏnmun
hakkyo pangmun’gi” (January 1946, March 1946); Chŏng Ku-ch’ung, “Kyŏrhaek kwa
yŏsŏng” (March 1946).
102
Ko Hwang-gyŏng, “Ch’anggan ch’uksa,” Hwang Sin-dŏk, “Haebang kwa yŏhaksaeng,” Pak
Sun-ch’ŏn, “Na ŭi haksaeng saenghwal ŭl hoesangham,” Yi T’ae-jun, “Mugunghwa” (January
1946).
103
Hŏ Kok, “Ondal kwa kongju” (January 1946), “Tomi ŭi anae” (March 1947).
43
employed at the Chosun Ilbo prior to liberation and was allegedly kidnapped to North Korea
some time during the Korean War (ŏllonin nappukcha).
104
One of the more striking similarities between the two magazines is how much of its
content takes on the language of mass mobilization. This type of nationalistic tone is perhaps
more apparent in Girls Academy, particularly in the opinion pieces they solicit from famous
contributors. The titles alone of the following three pieces in the inaugural issue speak volumes:
“The Determination of Women in a New Nation” (Kŏn’guk yŏsŏng ŭi kago) by An Ho-sang,
“Liberation and Schoolgirls” (Haebang kwa yŏhaksaeng) by Hwang Sin-dŏk, and “Schoolgirls
and National History-building” (Yŏsŏng kwa sidae kŏnsŏl e taehan kwan’gyŏn) by Kim Ho-sik.
Although New Girl features more literary pieces, the ultimate message in many of them are also
deeply nationalistic in nature. The titles of some of its poems, short stories and serialized novels
include “Bring the 38th Parallel Down” (Munŏjira 38to), “The Patriot’s Daughter” (Chisa ŭi
ttanim), and “The Mugunghwa Girl” (Mugunghwa sonyŏ). The magazine also makes use of
editorials to convey its message of patriotism more directly. The following is an excerpt from a
manifesto titled “The Heroism and Determination of the Girls of Chosŏn,” included in the
inaugural issue:
We, the girls of Chosŏn, are aware of our sacred duties to bear the future of this nation
along with our male peers. We believe that the full independence and reconstruction of
our nation will be obtained through the hard work of us boys and girls, and for that we
104
“Segye ŏdisŏdo ŏpsŏttŏn ŏllonin ŭi sunan,” Wŏlgan chosŏn (June 2002),
http://monthly.chosun.com/client/news/viw.asp?ctcd=&nNewsNumb=200206100040
44
will strive for our physical and intellectual growth. We, the girls of Chosŏn, vow to study
extra hard, much more than girls in other countries, in order to meet that task.
105
The militant tone of this piece is strongly reminiscent of the type of propagandist language used
by imperial Japan in the last years of the colonial period, thus confirming Theodore Hughes’
elaboration of the colonial legacies within Cold War developmentalist discourse. In any case, the
ultimate point the writer seeks to convey in many of these magazine’s pieces is that girls must
also participate in the sacred project of postcolonial national building.
Another common aspect between the two magazines is the strong emphasis they place on
women’s duties as wife and mother. The following is an excerpt from the opening statement of
Girls’ Academy, published in its inaugural issue in January 1946:
Shall I describe how tough are the daughters of this nation? Paedal’s mother was a
resolute woman, with the patience to accomplish whatever she set her mind at. With her
wisdom and bravery, she succeeded in raising her son into the great King Chumong.
Although she never swung a sword or rode a horse on the battlegrounds, Ondal’s wife did
her deed by encouraging her weak-kneed husband to become a war hero.
106
The structure of this piece is rather interesting, as it posits an imaginary girl speaker introducing
to a non-Korean audience the virtuousness of Korean women. While the emphasis on their
“toughness” may sound empowering, the women that she holds up as role models are both
105
“Chosŏn sonyŏ ŭi ŭigi wa kyŏrŭi,” 53.
106
“Ch’anggansa,” 1.
45
unnamed female figures from ancient Korean history who are celebrated for being the good
wives and mothers of national heroes. A similar message can be found in the following excerpt
from an editorial in the inaugural issue of New Girl:
The girls of Chosŏn will one day become the wives and mothers of Chosŏn. The bosom
of a wife is like a springtime garden; the bosom of a mother is like fertile land. Whether
flowers bloom in the garden and fruits grow on the land is entirely up to the dedication
and diligence of girls.
107
Social expectations for a female-born subject’s linear progress from girlhood to marriage and
motherhood is spelled out even more clearly in this editorial. Here, girlhood is portrayed as
nothing more than a transitional stage in which one must prepare for her future duties as wife and
mother. These statements are good examples of how much these magazines reinforced state-
sanctioned discourses on the ideal housewife.
An interesting phenomenon to consider against these two magazines is the emergence of
Yu Kwan-sun (1902-1920) as a nationalist hero in the mass media at around the same period. Yu
was a female independence activist who was executed at the age of eighteen after participating in
the 1919 March Uprisings against Japanese occupation. Although she is now one of the best-
known historical figures among South Koreans, Yu’s life and death went largely unknown in the
immediate decades after her death. It was only after the publication of Pak Kye-ju’s “The
Martyred Virgin” in the Kyŏnghyang sinmun in February 1947 that her story came to garner such
nation-wide attention. As its title might suggest, Pak’s short biographical essay presents Yu as a
107
Ko Chae-sŏn, “Sonyŏ tŭrŭi kil,” 44.
46
young martyr, whose piousness and patriotism led her to sacrifice her own life for the nation.
The public response to “The Martyred Virgin” was quite enthusiastic, and a revised version of
Pak’s essay appeared in Korean literature textbooks for middle school students in the following
year. The essay also prompted the establishment of the Yu Gwansun Memorial Foundation in the
same year, the main accomplishments of which included the erection of a memorial monument
in 1947, and the launching of Yu’s biography in both book and cinematic format in 1948.
108
The posthumous canonization of Yu in postliberation South Korea was in many ways a
process that came hand in hand with the anti-communist right-wing’s rise to power during that
period. As literary historian Chŏng Chong-hyŏn contends, there were certain aspects to Yu’s
biography that made her a likely candidate as a conservative political icon. Many members of the
Memorial Foundation such as Pak In-dŏk and Sin Pong-jo, for example, were Ewha Women’s
School alumni who also had a history of collaborating with Japan in the last years of the colonial
period. Chŏng points out how their enthusiastic participation in the nationalist mythmaking of
Yu was part of their larger efforts to absolve themselves of this history in the new political
climate of the postcolonial period.
109
There was also a certain Christian ethos inhering in the
story of Yu’s life and death that aligned well with the religious sensibilities of pro-American
right-wing conservatives, as many members of the Memorial Foundation were practicing
Christians who appreciated the narrative of martyrdom imposed upon the activist.
110
The
frequent allusions made to Joan of arc in biographical accounts of Yu could be understood in this
context. Pak Kye-ju’s “The Martyred Virgin,” for example, includes a scene in which the
narrator imagines how before heading out to the streets of Seoul to join the protest, the young
108
Cho Han-p’il, “Yu Kwan-sun palgul kwajŏng ŭi kŏmt’o,” 56.
109
Chŏng Chong-hyŏn, Cheguk ŭi kiŏk kwa chŏnyu, xx
110
Ibid., xx.
47
activist “spent her nights praying to God, just like Joan of Arc, the Maiden of Orléans.”
111
In any
case, the concerted efforts of right-wing politicians and intellectuals to erect Yu Kwan-sun into a
nationalist symbol proved to be successful, as the figure of the self-sacrificial girl patriot that
they created was embraced by the public with remarkable enthusiasm.
In a way, then, Yu Kwan-sun exemplifies another type of ideal girlhood that was being
developed within dominant political discourses in postliberation South Korea. This is the figure
of “the eternal girl,” one who forever remains an emblem of pure and self-sacrificial patriotism,
much like the iconic Joan of Arc. In his historiographical study of the process of Yu’s
postcolonial canonization, Cho Han-p’il concedes that the editorial committee for national
textbooks in the USAMGIK (kyogwasŏ p’yŏnsuguk) was actively searching for stories of
“patriotic girls who were similar to Joan of Arc” to include in literature textbooks for students.
112
An essay by Pak Ch’ang-hae, who was at the time a member of the literature textbook editorial
committee, confirms this fact:
One day, I was discussing the content of foreign textbooks with Pastor Chŏn Yŏng-t’aek,
who was in charge of editing literature textbooks for fourth to sixth grade-level students.
He mentioned how in France, there was once a woman called Joan of Arc who led the
French army to victory when they were embattled by enemies. He said that he was
searching for a comparable figure who might have played a heroic role during the March
First Uprisings.
113
111
Pak Kye-ju, “Sun’guk ŭi ch’ŏnyŏ,” Kyŏnghyang sinmun, February 28, 1947.
112
Cho Han-p’il, “Yu Kwan-sun palgul kwajŏng ŭi kŏmt’o,” 61.
113
Pak Ch’ang-hae, “Na ŭi kugŏ p’yŏnsusa sijŏl,” 60.
48
Pak further recounts how after this conversation, he visited Ewha girls’ school (which also
happened to be Yu Kwan-sun’s alma mater) to interview the school’s alumni for possible leads
on finding such a figure.
114
It is worth noting that all of this occurred prior to the publication of
Pak Kye-ju’s “The Martyred Virgin” and Yu’s concomitant rise to national acclaim. It could be
said, then, that there existed a pressing pedagogical need for proper role models for girls in the
postliberation period, and as the immaculate yet fierce girl patriot, Yu Kwan-sun was a figure
who easily fitted into that role. When Pak Kye-ju’s “The Martyred Virgin” (Sun’guk ŭi ch’ŏnyŏ)
did end up appearing in the national literature textbook in 1948, the title was changed to “The
Martyred Girl” (Sun’guk ŭi sonyŏ). This revision again suggests how textbook editors were
encouraging schoolgirls to relate to—and perhaps further emulate—Yu’s acts of patriotism.
As such, models of girlhood that were offered to girl readers in the immediate aftermath
of liberation was either a future mother and wife, who must diligently educate herself so as to
one day prove her worth to the nation through her domestic labor, or a girl patriot, who must be
willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good of the nation. In either case, the moral, physical
and intellectual education of girls in this period was ultimately subsumed under the development
discourse of nation-building. What remains unknown is how this propagandist message in
magazines and textbooks was received by girl readers during this period. Perhaps a good
indicator of their response is the fact that neither of the two aforementioned girls’ magazines
were able to survive more than a couple of years. Granted, many periodicals that were founded
during the post liberation period were shut down due to financial difficulties, state censorship,
and the eventual onset of the Korean War.
115
Nevertheless, it is not difficult to imagine that the
114
Ibid., 60.
115
Yun Sŏn-ja, 82.
49
dry and didactic tone of these magazines did not hold much appeal to a newly emerging girl
readership that was thirsty for content that reflected their desires and interests. It was through
such trials and errors that Korean adolescent femininity was taking shape in the postcolonial
period.
The Fetishized Sonyŏ in Postwar Pure Literature
The unnamed character of the girl in Hwang Sun-wŏn’s “Sonagi” provides a good
starting point in discussing aestheticized representations of girls in the pure literature of
postcolonial South Korea. The following is an excerpt from the opening sequence in the story,
which describes how the boy protagonist first comes to interact with his love interest:
The next day, he arrived at the stream a little later. This time he found her washing her
face, sitting there in the middle of the stepping-stones. In contrast to her pink jumper with
its sleeves rolled up, the nape of her neck was very white.
…Then she plucks something from the water. It was a white pebble. After that,
she stands up and goes skipping lightly across the stepping-stones.
Once across, she turns round: “Hey, you.”
The white pebble came flying over.
The boy found himself standing up.
Shaking her bobbed hair, she goes running off.
116
116
Hwang Sun-wŏn, “Sonagi.”
50
In the first couple pages of the story, the reader already acquires a memorable first impression of
the girl: she is a fair-skinned city girl in the countryside, donning a fashionable pink jumper and
bouncy bobbed hair. It is through this desiring gaze of the boy protagonist that the reader also
sees the unnamed sonyŏ for the first time and falls in love with her, the slightly stuck-up but
irresistibly sweet and endearing girl. This alluring image is further embellished by the many
visual descriptions of her physique scattered throughout the story:
Unthinkingly, he turned round. He found himself facing the girl’s bright dark eyes.
117
The girl pretends to be holding the valerian like a parasol. At the same time, [a] delicate
dimple appears in her slightly flushed face.
118
The girl’s pale face, pink jumper, indigo skirt, together with the flowers she is holding all
turn into a blur. It all looks like a great bunch of flowers. He feels dizzy.
119
As seen in these excerpts, the story devotes a great amount of effort in describing the girl’s
physical beauty, as seen through the eyes of the boy protagonist. The idyllic setting and elegant
style of Hwang’s writing, moreover, heightens the character’s charm to an even greater degree.
Hwang’s idealization of the girl in “Sonagi” must be understood in relation to pure
literature’s larger attachment to the idea of a certain prelapsarian realm of purity, an imaginary
space that remains untouched by the ideological warfare that was, at the time, bifurcating not
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid.
119
Ibid.
51
only the literary sphere but the nation state as a whole. This particular yearning for a pre-political
(or apolitical) state of being has often been assumed by leftist nationalist critics to be an
expression of the pure literature camp’s indifference toward the proletariat struggle. Jin-kyung
Lee, however, suggests that the work of pure literature writers such as Kim Tong-ni, O Yŏng-su,
and Hwang Sun-wŏn should be reinterpreted for their potential to have served a “differently
politicizing function” outside of the leftist nationalist cause.
120
The starting point for such
alternative interpretations would be to recognize, as Youngmin Choe contends, that the “longing
for sunsu” in texts such as “Sonagi” was an expression not just of anti-communist ideology but
rather of a desire widely shared among Koreans to take refuge in a pastoral realm of innocence
far removed from the traumatic realities of Cold War division and the Korean War.
121
While I
generally agree with Choe’s approach, I would like to draw attention to the way in which this
collective desire to transcend the political and moral turmoil of postliberation Korea was
articulated by male writers of the pure literature camp specifically through the (assumed) virginal
body of the girl. The fetishization of adolescent female innocence in their work is a subject that
deserves more critical attention, especially when considering recent public controversies that
have emerged in South Korea on the sexualization of minors in literature.
In recent years, feminist literary scholars in Korea who pioneered the subfield of girls’
studies have been keen on pointing out problematic representations of girls in modern and
contemporary Korean literature. In her insightful study on the cultural history of the sonyŏ, for
example, Han Chi-hŭi places the girl in “Sonagi” within a longer genealogy of iconic girl
characters in Korean literature, one that includes the premodern character of Ch’unhyang as well
120
Jin-kyung Lee, “Afterword,” 282.
121
Youngmin Choe, Tourist Distractions, 114.
52
as Pak Yŏngch’ae in Yi Kwang-su’s novel Mujŏng. These characters embody what she calls “the
cult of true girlhood”: a patriarchal ideology that emerged during the colonial period and reached
effervescence after liberation, which demands undying innocence (sunjin) and vivacity (yŏllyŏl)
from girls.
122
As one of the more modern and widely read variations of the character, Han
concedes, the girl in “Sonagi” is particularly toxic for the way she effectively propagates the cult
of true girlhood to present-day teenage girls, breeding within them the desire to emulate the
character’s beauty, innocence, vulnerability, and docility for more social acceptance.
123
As such,
Han’s critique of the idealized form of girlhood in “Sonagi” is directed toward the disciplinary
effect it potentially has on the actual adolescent female reader.
Another crucial aspect to consider in this context is how girl characters often end up
being positioned as an object of sexual desire in the process of such aestheticization. Heinz Insu
Fenkl’s 2015 reading of “Sonagi” is an important study that examines the ethical implications of
such sexualized representations, which he argues are rather questionable when considering how
in most cases the writers themselves are adult men. The “psychosexual subtext” that Fenkl
discovers underneath the seemingly innocent narrative recasts the story into a tale of sexual
initiation.
124
In his Freudian reading, the natural objects that are presented as part of the story’s
setting are imbued with insidious meaning. The girl crouched over a running stream in the first
scene, for example, is suggestive of a urinating posture, while the “little fish” she attempts to
“catch” out of the water symbolizes the boy and his little phallus. The reed field that she runs
through after throwing the white pebble at the boy, moreover, can also be read as a genital
122
Han Chi-hŭi, Uri sidae taejung munhwa wa sonyŏ ŭi kyebohak, 25.
123
Ibid., 160.
124
Heinz Insu Fenkl, “Buried in a Stained Sweater,” 209-210.
53
symbol, as swaying reeds are reminiscent of pubic hair.
125
A symbolic intercourse occurs in the
climactic scene where the two characters take shelter from the rain in a stack of sorghum
sheaves. The boy’s “symbolic deflowering” of the girl is evidenced by the “dark brown smudge”
that she later discovers on her pink sweater.
126
It is due to this sexual subtext, Fenkl argues, that
the story evokes a certain “uneasiness” in readers who initially assume it to be a tale of innocent
love between prepubescent boy and girl.
127
Fenkl’s psychosexual reading is rather reductive in the way it locks the many scenes and
objects in the text into a single narrative without giving them much room for other
interpretations. There is a way in which it seems to suggest that the characters themselves were
consciously engaging with one another with sexual intent, when there is very little evidence in
the text that actually supports this kind of interpretation. I contend, however, that Fenkl’s
discomfort derives not from any potential sexual intentions of the two characters in the story, but
rather from his meta-textual awareness of the adult male writer, who apparently endowed the
story with such sexual innuendo. “Hwang,” he argues, “sexualizes [the girl], making her an
object not merely viewed by the naive boy, but one he presents for the reader’s voyeuristic gaze
as well. Hwang symbolically bestows upon the girl a precocious sexuality and knowledge.”
128
As
such, the ultimate target at which Fenkl aims his critique is Hwang Sun-wŏn, whose treatment of
the girl in “Sonagi” is, in his view, reflective not only of the writer’s distorted views of child
sexuality but also a deeper-rooted “misogyny” that manifests in Hwang’s other literary works as
well. He further criticizes the general readership in Korea for their failure to notice these
125
Ibid., 211.
126
Ibid., 216.
127
Ibid., 205.
128
Ibid., 210.
54
misogynistic themes, concluding that perhaps it is “because the cultural context makes such
themes so commonplace that they do not, ironically, even register.”
129
Another story that Fenkl mentions alongside “Sonagi” as an example of Hwang’s
problematic representations of girls is “A Sick Butterfly.” Written in 1942, this short story is
centered on Old Man Chŏng, a spiritually depleted widower who spends his days building his
own coffin at the carpenter’s yard, a hobby that illustrates his rather morbid preoccupation with
death. His will to life increasingly diminishes, to the point where he gives up his old habits of
tending flowers and painting, as “the shock of the pungent ink or the intensity of the flowers’
fragrance often made him dizzy.”
130
The story, however, pivots to a dramatic ending, when one
day on his way back home from the carpenter, Chŏng spots a young girl playing in the
elementary school grounds:
He thought one of the girls who’d been jumping rope had come running toward him. She
squatted, urgently. And he saw her urinate—right there. That was it.
What was it? Old Man Chŏng stopped walking, as if this were something
incredible, as if he had made some great discovery. He put his eyes on that certain spot.
And he thought he heard something, like something bursting in a place deep inside his
body. Flower! Truly—isn’t that a flower? Flower!
131
129
Ibid., 219.
130
Hwang Sun-wŏn, ““Pyŏngdŭn nabi,” 150.
131
Ibid., 155.
55
Fenkl points out how this scene also depicts a urinating girl, a sexual image that he argues
“mirrors” the opening scene in “Sonagi” where the girl is squatting over the stream.
132
In “A
Sick Butterfly,” the sight of the urinating girl suddenly incites the old man to a state of ecstasy,
shortly after which he blissfully collapses to his long-awaited death. What “that certain spot”
refers to, I might point out, remains rather unclear in the original text. Many present-day
scholars, Fenkl included, tactfully assume it to be the “flower”-like pattern that the girl’s urine
creates on the ground, but it is also possible to infer that the text is in fact referring to the girl’s
genitals that are exposed in the moment of her urination.
Had this been a text published in more recent years, such descriptions would have most
likely invited scrutiny for veering dangerously close to a pedophilic gaze, especially when
judged by the cultural sensibilities of a contemporary readership. Even as he couches the word in
parentheses, Fenkl also concedes how he sees in Hwang’s literary works a “misogynistic (and
pedophiliac) aesthetic perhaps most clearly defined by America’s Edgar Allan Poe.”
133
While I
generally agree that a certain fetishization of girlhood takes place in these texts, whether
“pedophiliac” is an apt description for them is a question that warrants further contemplation.
This is mainly due to the way in which the word has been historically deployed in the U.S. to
serve the political agendas of the sex-conservative Right. Working in the vein of Michel
Foucault, queer theorists such as Gayle Rubin and James Kincaid have illustrated how over the
course of the twentieth century, the legal and medical apparatus of the state were jointly
mobilized to pathologize all forms of cross-generational sexual desire as inherently pathological
and morally abhorrent, a discourse that is problematic not only for the way it assumes a
132
Fenkl, 219.
133
Fenkl, 218.
56
paternalistic view of child sexuality but also for how it was often abused to demonize the gay
community for its historical practice of pederasty.
134
My goal here, then, is to analyze how and
why the girl became the object of the fetishistic imagination in South Korean literature without
resorting to a discourse of moral panic that deems any erotic representation of children as taboo.
Another writer whose work may help further illuminate the fraught relationship between
pure literature and girlhood is Kim Tong-ni. As a leading figure of the pure literature camp, Kim
is primarily remembered for the critical essays that he produced during his heated debates with
leftist critics, as well as his widely read short stories such as “The Shaman Painting (Munyŏdo)”
(1947) and “Lifesized Buddha (Tŭngsinbul)” (1961), fictional works that drew inspiration from
Korean folk culture and religion. Interestingly, many of his stories feature a girl character who
serves a pivotal symbolic function in the overall narrative. “The Shaman Painting,” for example,
arguably one of Kim’s most well-known short stories, depicts the murderous conflict between a
shaman mother and her Christian son, each of whom represent tradition and modernity in the
story. The third character who survives this family tragedy, however, is Nangi, the mysteriously
deaf and artistically gifted teenage daughter in whose “lithe body” live on the folk spirits that
possessed her mother.
135
In his 1950 story “Human Proposal” (In’gan tongŭi), moreover, a
middle-aged schoolteacher is driven to madness and suicide after falling in love with one of his
students, Chi-ae, an innocent yet femme fatale-like character who symbolizes ultimate beauty
and youth, much like the Wildean character of Dorian Gray. As such, the literary universe of
134
For more details on queer theory’s critique of the stigmatization of cross-generational desire,
see Michel Foucault, “Sexual Morality and the Law,” Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex” and “The
Leather Menace,” and James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence.
135
Kim Tong-ni, “Munyŏdo,” 48.
57
Kim Tong-ni is populated with girl characters whose beautiful bodies serve as a vessel for the
sacred or the sublime.
Kim Tong-ni himself is not shy to discuss his particular penchant for young girls. In a
1985 essay titled “Girls and Spring,” he ruminates as follows:
Whenever I see girls or the early sprouts of spring, I find myself falling into a sentimental
mood. It is a habit, or might I say, a certain proclivity that I have had since my youth.
The feeling becomes even more acute when the girl that I see is beautiful, or when
the verdure is at the height of its growth, around the first or second week of May.
Most everyone would agree that beautiful young girls and tender green leaves are
pleasing to the eye. In my case, however, that pleasure is experienced too intensely, to a
degree where it almost seems like an obsession. For me, this is not a mere phase that one
might go through in their youth; it is a condition that I have continuously had throughout
my entire life.
136
In this excerpt, Kim confesses his love of beautiful young girls, with an unfiltered honesty that
would make some contemporary readers rather squeamish. In a 1973 essay titled “Tong-ni’s
Taste,” moreover, fellow writer Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi further confirms Kim’s aesthetic preference
for young girls:
A few years back when Kim and I were traveling through the Southwestern region
together, our group came across a circus troupe attracting passersby to their tent on the
136
Kim Tong-ni, “Sonyŏ wa sillok,” 42.
58
riverside. There was a strikingly beautiful woman there who looked to be around thirty
years old and I said, “I like that woman.” To this, Kim responded, “Who, her? She’s no
good. I like the other one.”
…I realized that by “the other one” he was referring to a young girl who, if we are
speaking of chickens, would have been a chick who had barely shed her down feathers;
she looked no more than seven or eight years of age.
I heard that in a certain magazine survey, Kim was chosen first place for the
category of “men who like younger girls.”
137
Before progressing any further, it is important to first question how we, as contemporary readers,
might intellectually process such accounts without resorting to knee-jerk accusations of
pedophilia against the writer. The first thing to keep in mind is that the strong taboo placed
against any expression of cross-generational desire for minors is a social attitude that has
developed only recently, especially in Korea. The fact that Ch’oe presents her memory of Kim in
a teasing, lighthearted tone of voice suggests that Kim’s appreciation of a prepubescent girl’s
beauty was, at the time, not in and of itself considered to be problematic. Another thing that we
might contemplate is whether Kim’s desiring gaze toward young girls in these excerpts is
necessarily of a sexual (and therefore predatory) nature. In a 1973 essay titled “About Girls,”
Kim elaborates why girl figures play such a crucial role in his literary works. He begins by
pointing out that all of great modern writers have centered their stories around memorable girl
characters: “Shakespeare’s Ophelia (Hamlet), Goethe’s Margaret (Faust), Hugo’s Cosette (Les
Misérables), Tolstoy’s Natasha (War and Peace), Dostoevsky’s Sonya (Crime and Punishment),
137
Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi, “Tongni ŭi ch’wimi,” 189.
59
Turgenev’s Elena (On the Eve), Gide’s Alissa (Strait is the Gate), and Hardy’s Tess.”
138
Many of
these characters, he further observes, embody transcendental goodness and integrity, traits that
often lead them to a life of self-sacrifice or hardship. The conclusion he reaches at the end of the
essay is that in his writings, “girls are flower-like beings who represent the purest aspects of
human life.”
139
As such, the many girl characters who appear in Kim’s literature function more
as symbolic figures, rather than being presented as actual living beings with their own interior
thoughts and desires.
While what Kim specifically means by “the purest aspects of human life” remains rather
vague, it is possible to further infer the meaning of this phrase by reading this essay against
Kim’s other theoretical writings on pure literature. In “The True Meaning of Pure Literature,”
Kim defines pure literature as a “literature that defends humanity.”
140
Humanity here refers to a
type of spiritual essence that transcends the constraints of historical time or materiality. This
relative disregard for the material aspects of life is what leads Kim to denounce the engaged
literature of the left, which he sees takes a formulaic approach to literature that “restricts the
desire for cultural creation.”
141
As such, Kim attempts to establish pure literature as a form of
literary writing that focuses on the spiritual aspects of humanity beyond the mires of political
conflict and materialist strife. In his reading of “Human Proposal,” literary critic Kim Yun-sik
further explains that in Kim Tong-ni’s particular worldview, the love of beauty is what
ultimately elevates humans into such supra-material beings. In other words, the self-consuming
desire that the protagonist Chang Ik holds for Chi-ae in the story symbolizes Kim Tong-ni’s own
138
Kim Tong-ni, “Sonyŏ e taehayŏ,” 95.
139
Ibid., 95
140
Kim Tong-ni, “Sunsu munhak ŭi chinŭi,” 201.
141
Ibid., 202.
60
quest for transcendental beauty in his life and literature. For this reason, Kim Yun-sik specifies
Kim Tong-ni’s particular brand of aestheticism (t’ammi chuŭi) with the term “girlism” (sonyŏ
chuŭi).
142
It is possible to apply this interpretation of Kim Tong-ni’s girl characters to the work of
other pure literature writers such as Hwang Sun-wŏn. The exquisite beauty of the girl in
“Sonagi,” for example, is inseparable from the rural nativist landscape that Hwang placed her in,
an idyllic national space that is far removed from the dire realities of Korean War. “A Sick
Butterfly,” moreover, is a story similar to “Human Proposal” in the sense that it uses the figure
of the girl to illustrate the formidable powers of the aesthetic experience. As such, while it is true
that pure literature writers such as Kim Tong-ni and Hwang Sun-wŏn often explicitly propagated
anti-communist ideas in their writing, to characterize pure literature as nothing more than an
anti-communist literature is reductive at best. Their denunciation of communist ideology was, as
Youngmin Choe confirms, couched within a larger “denunciation of materiality, and by
extension corporeality.” Hence was born one of the most pervasive tropes that persists in South
Korean literature and culture to this day: the figure of the innocent and beautiful girl who
remains untainted by politics, ideology, or sexuality.
142
Kim Yun-sik, “T’ammi chuŭi ŭi punch’ul rosŏŭi in’gan tongŭi,” 238.
61
Chapter Two
Catholic Virginity and Girlhood in Cold War South Korea (1945-1968)
Few would debate that No Ch’ŏn-myŏng (1912-1957) is the most widely read woman
poet of her generation. She is the only woman writer in Korea whose poems have been included
across all seven editions of the national literature textbooks since 1955.
143
Among her poems,
“Deer” (Sasŭm) is by far the most well-known and beloved by the general public:
Your elongated neck is proof of your sadness.
O beast, you are ever so regal and silent.
A crown of fragrance rests on your head.
You must be the descendant of a magnificent clan.
Peering into the water, you see your own reflection,
And memories of a long-forgotten legend return.
Struck with nostalgia,
You stretch that sad neck of yours to gaze up at the far mountains.
144
Included in Coral Forest (Sanhorim), her first book of poetry that was published in 1938, the
poem encapsulates the three most recurrent literary themes in all of No’s poetic oeuvre: solitude,
143
Kim Yang-sŏn, “Kŭndae yŏsŏng munhak ŭi hyŏngsŏng wŏlli yŏn’gu,” 258, 17n.
144
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Sasŭm,” 53.
62
nostalgia, and an idealization of nature. Coral Forest was read favorably by leading poets and
literary critics of the period, including the poet Pak Yong-ch’ŏl, who praised No’s poetry for its
“elegantly refined form and exquisite sentiments.”
145
Another common review of No’s work—in
either an appreciative or pejorative sense—was that it conveys a type of “girlish” sensibility. In
his 1938 review of Coral Forest, for example, the renowned poet and critic Ch’oe Chae-sŏ
remarks:
I can see in No Ch’ŏn-myŏng’s poems the shadow of a literary girl (munhak sonyŏ) who
worked diligently to develop her craft. After all, her poetic speaker is one who
nostalgically yearns for the sea, who finds exotic beauty in a Western-style stagecoach,
who sees an innocent young girl in a chrysanthemum flower, and sheds endless tears of
solitude.
146
Since then, the general critical consensus among literary scholars has been that her ability to
articulate feminine sentimentality with a certain modernist withholding of emotion is what
constitutes the literary value of No’s poetry.
Despite such popular and critical acclaim, No Ch’ŏn-myŏng usually does not takes center
stage in feminist anthologies and literary histories. Granted, this relative lack of interest in No
partially derives from the constraints of lyrical poetry as a medium; important scholarly
discussions in modern Korean literary studies have generally tended to take place around fiction,
a genre that offers more realistic and expansive representations of how structures of power such
145
Pak Yong-ch’ŏl, “Ch’ulp’anmul ŭl t’onghae pon siindŭl ŭi ŏpchŏk.”
146
Ch’oe Chae-sŏ, “No Ch’ŏn-myŏng sijip sanhorim ŭl ikko.”
63
as gender, coloniality and modernity intersect with one another. Nevertheless, the fact that No’s
name is not mentioned even once in Yi Sang-kyŏng’s 2002 A History of Modern Korean
Women’s Literature is noteworthy, considering that the book is one of the most comprehensive
historical overviews of twentieth-century Korean women writers to date. Critical attention in
Yi’s account and elsewhere tends to skew toward other women writers such as Na Hye-sŏk,
Kang Kyŏng-ae or Pak Wan-sŏ, whose works are celebrated for their critical insight into the
structures of male domination conditioning the lives of Korean women. Compared to these
writers, No’s poetic persona is perhaps too introspective, her subject matter too focused on her
own interior world or the mundane objects and surroundings of her everyday life to offer any
meaningful critique of the subordination of women.
I argue, however, that the undue amount of popular and critical writing that was produced
on the topic of No’s (presumed) celibacy makes her a figure worthy of a deeper feminist and/or
queer analysis. As one of the few women writers in Korea who had never been married, an
excessive amount of focus was placed on whether the poet had ever formed romantic
relationships with another person, and if the relationship was of a sexual nature. The public and
poetic persona that No stubbornly clung to in the face of such scrutiny was one of an untainted
virgin, perpetually pure and innocent, like the solitary deer in her own poem. We can find two
things in her literary writings that seems to have contributed to the making of this public image:
first, the way in which she places adolescent femininity at the center of her literary aesthetic, and
second, the frequent allusions she makes to models of virginity presented in Catholicism, a
religion she was familiar with since childhood and was baptized into in her later years. As I will
show in the following sections of this chapter, there exists an intimate relationship between these
two cultural formations apart from No Ch’ŏn-myŏng’s poetry, as there emerged a unique girls’
64
culture in postcolonial Korean society that idealized not only cloistered nuns but also Catholic
cultures, rituals and religious art in general.
In this chapter, I examine a certain fascination with Catholic narratives and artefacts
among girls and women in Cold War South Korea. Drawing inspiration from aestheticized
images of Catholic nuns and the Holy Virgin, girls in this period defined their sexual selfhood
around the concept of virginity, a concept that is generally understood to be a harmful
masculinist ideology. I first examine the religious virgins that emerged in the early Catholic
communities of late Chosŏn. These women, who risked persecution in their stringent
commitment to religious abstinence, shed light on the potential menace that female virginity
imposed upon societies structured upon the domestic family unit. I then examine sensationalist
representations of Catholicism that proliferated in the mass media and popular literature of the
colonial period. The exotic images of Catholic nuns that were presented in this period, however,
reemerged in the girls’ culture of Cold War South Korea as a model of female adolescent purity,
one that No Ch ŏn-myŏng deployed in her poetry and nonfictional writing to articulate a unique
poetics of celibacy.
Catholic Sensationalism: Cultural Representations of Nuns in the Colonial Period
Published in 1874, Charles Dallet’s Histoire de l’Église de Corée is one of the most
authoritative historical records that document the reception, development and persecution of
Catholicism in late Chosŏn Korea. What particularly stands out from this expansive 1170-page
book are the stories of women who died to protect their vow of abstinence as well as their faith.
This would include the martyrologies of women such as Yun Chŏm-hye Agathe (1778-1801),
65
who, “wishing to consecrate herself to God without reserve…secretly dressed herself in men’s
clothes and fled to one of her uncles,” and Yi Yŏng-hŭi Magdalene (1809-1839), who “stained
her clothes with blood and tattered them to make her parents believe that she had been devoured
by a tiger” as she fled from an arranged marriage.
147
Another striking story is that of Yi Sun-i
Luthgarde, who married a Catholic man but successfully maintained her virginity by keeping the
marriage unconsummated.
148
According to Dallet’s Histoire as well as other records produced
during the persecutions, many young female Catholics left their natal homes to join one of the
many communities of virgins (ch’wihoe) that were scattered across the country at the time.
Coming from both high and low castes of society, the members of these communities practiced
their faith, evangelized, and even performed some forms of domestic and agricultural labor
together, with a degree of social and economic self-sufficiency that was unavailable to most
other women during this period. The term that came to identify them, both to themselves and
others, was “religious virgins” (tongjŏngnyŏ).
149
Before discussing these religious virgins and their communities in more detail, a short
overview of the history of Catholic reception in Korea may be helpful for contextualization. The
establishment of the first Catholic church on Korean soil is dated to around 1784, which precedes
the nation’s reception of Protestantism by more than a century. There formed a small group of
followers around Yi Sŭng-hun, an elite yangban scholar who had returned to Korea after being
baptized by a French Catholic priest in China. Evangelization occurred rapidly among Yi’s
147
Dallet, Histoire de l’Église de Corée, vol. 1, 164; Ibid., vol. 2, 139
148
Ibid., vol. 1, 180-181. For English-language scholarship on Yi Sun-i Luthgarde’s biography
and her “prison letters,” see Cawley’s “Dangerous Women in the Early Catholic Church in
Korea.”
149
Kim Ok-hŭi’s Han’guk ch’ŏnjugyo yŏsŏngsa is a compilation of the stories of female
devotees and martyrs of the early Catholic Church that appear in Dallet’s Histoire. It is a
useful source to look to for biographical details of these religious virgins.
66
fellow scholars in the Namin faction and beyond, mainly through private networks built around
family members and friends. As the number of followers grew, the state eventually came to
perceive the Catholic church to be a political threat to the Neo-Confucian social order,
particularly the caste system. The first round of persecutions occurred in the year of Sinhae
(1791), when the Chosŏn government caught wind of Catholic devotees refusing to perform
ancestral memorial rites for their late parents. A total of five major persecutions took place over
the course of the century, with the estimated number of martyrs—both male and female—
ranging from 8,000 to as many as 20,000. These persecutions led most of the remaining
followers to retreat to secluded, underground communities as a means of survival until the
Chosŏn government officially established diplomatic ties with France in 1886.
150
It is from
within this context that religious virginity emerged as a distinct subject position for women in
Korea. It was during the Kihae persecution of 1839 that their evasion of marriage officially
became a crime punishable by death. In a Neo-Confucian society such as Chosŏn Korea,
marriage functioned as the very foundation of ethics, the social caste system and state
governance.
Over the past forty years, the historical significance of Catholic virginity has been
examined in close detail by scholars not only of ecclesiastical history but also in the various
fields of sociology, education, women’s studies, and premodern literature. Song Jee-Yeon’s 2015
study provides an excellent historiographical overview of the parameters of these debates. Since
the 1970s onward, Song concedes, scholarship on Catholic virgins has been mainly preoccupied
150
For more details on the reception of Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea, see Baker and Rausch,
Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea.
67
with the subject of modernity and modernization.
151
The argument that is usually presented in
this type of work is that their rejection of the Confucian mandate of marriage and formation of
self-sufficient female communities signal the virgins’ embodiment of a nascent modern
consciousness.
152
Song explains how this interpretation of the virgins derives from the field’s
larger investment in what is known as the “internal development theory (naejaejŏk paljŏnron),” a
nationalist anti-colonial discourse of the 1970s that sought to discover the early seeds of
modernity in Korean history prior to the beginning of its colonial relations with Japan in the late
nineteenth century.
153
Many proponents of the theory identify the starting point of Korea’s
modernization process to the sirhak (practical learning) movement, espoused by a group of
scholars who were interested in political reform and the development of scientific technologies.
Meanwhile, there is a significant overlap between members of the sirhak movement and early
converts to Catholicism, as both groups were affiliated with the Namin faction of yangban elites.
The idea that Catholic virgins were modern female subjects resisting the Neo-Confucian state,
then, came hand-in-hand with the view that sirhak scholars were the harbingers of Korean
modernity.
Song warns, however, that this perspective runs the risk of reinforcing the type of
Western imperialistic rhetoric that frames itself as a catalyst of enlightenment and progress to
justify its colonial enterprises in the non-West. Catholicism, she suggests, did not so much
“liberate” Korean women from Neo-Confucian oppression but rather replaced one form of
patriarchy with another. An interesting piece of evidence she offers is how the French Catholic
151
Song Jee-Yeon, “Chosŏn sidae ch’ŏnjugyo yŏsŏng ŭi yŏksa tasi ikki: tongjŏngnyŏ e taehan
nonŭi rŭl chungsim ŭro,” 34.
152
Ibid., 37.
153
Ibid., 46-47.
68
missionaries who entered Korea in the late 1830s actively discouraged female devotees from
taking a vow of abstinence, urging them to instead consider marriage as a part of their religious
duties.
154
As a result, there was a significant decrease in the number of virgins and virgin
communities in Korea by the 1860s.
In this regard, Song’s assessment of the Catholic church’s relationship with Korean
women aligns with Hyaeweol Choi’s insightful critique of American Protestant missionaries in
precolonial Enlightenment Korea (1894-1910). In her book, Gender and Mission Encounters in
Korea, Choi questions the commonly held assumption that American women missionaries
played an important part in Korea’s modernization process during this period by introducing new
medical technologies and educational systems to its people. Often mentioned in this context are
the mission schools for girls that were established during this period, many of which produced
the first generation of New Women in Korea.
155
In their historical accounts of such mission
activities, American church historians present the argument that Christianity was an enlightening
force that helped advance and liberate Korean women from the throes of Neo-Confucian
oppression. Choi, however, points out how the Victorian emphasis on domesticity that largely
formed the basis of women missionaries’ educational and evangelical activities in Korea went
hand-in-hand with the colonial government’s efforts to breed colonial Korean girls into models
of the “good mother and wise wife” (ryōsai kenbo) of the Japanese empire.
156
As such, both
Song and Choi challenge the idea that Christianity was a modernizing force in premodern
154
Ibid., 60-62.
155
Among the graduates of Ewha Girls’ School, for example, which was founded in 1886 by
Mary Scranton of the American Methodist Church, are Kim Chŏm-dong (otherwise known as
Esther Pak), the first female medical doctor in Korea, as well as leading female educators such
as Kim Hwal-lan and Yu Kak-kyŏng.
156
Choi, Hyaeweol, Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea, 178.
69
Korean society by foregrounding the conservative gender ideologies that were propagated to
Korean women by the Churches.
Despite their similarities, crucial differences between Catholic and Protestant
interpretations of female sexuality persist that must be acknowledged when considering their
historical impact on Korean womanhood. An examination of Reformation England may be
conducive in illustrating this point. In the introduction to their book, Menacing Virgins, Kathleen
Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie examine the heated debates that arose in England as Catholic and
Protestant interpretations of virginity came into conflict during the Reformation period. First of
all, the Catholic Church remained faithful to the patristic tradition established by St. Paul, who
took virginity to be the most spiritually superior sexual position, even more than a consummated
Christian marriage.
157
Protestantism, on the other hand, which emphasized the role of the
domestic family as the foundational unit for both the Church and the state, viewed virginity as a
transitory phase for girls to pass through before reaching sexual maturity within a Church-
sanctified marriage.
158
Proponents of the Reformation, therefore, launched vitriolic campaigns
against Catholic monasticism to prevent “the specter of an active virginity…[from] haunt[ing]
English Protest discourses on the household and its theoretically analogous sphere, the state.”
159
What Kelly and Leslie’s study illustrate is how a unique contradiction inheres in Catholicism
when it comes to its position on virginity, one that emerged not just in nineteenth-century Korea
but in many different cultures and time periods. Therefore, while Song and Choi’s critique of
Christianity as a colonial and patriarchal institution holds true, there is still room to consider in
more detail how Korean society grappled with the “menacing” aspects of Catholic virginity at
157
Kelly and Leslie, “Introduction: The Epistemology of Virginity,” 10.
158
Ibid., 21.
159
Ibid., 8.
70
various historical turns. I now turn to the colonial period to examine Korea’s encounter with the
figure of the Catholic nun.
In July 1888, four nuns set foot on Korean soil at Inch’ŏn Port, two years after the
Chosŏn government officially established diplomatic ties with France. Their arrival marks the
founding of the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres, the first and only official Roman Catholic convent
in Korea until the subsequent arrival of missionary nuns from the U.S. and Germany four
decades later. The nuns quickly established their living quarters at the Chonghyŏn Church in the
Myŏngdong district of Seoul along with the Korean novitiates they had newly appointed, most of
whom were girls from Catholic families that had weathered the long century of Catholic
persecutions. These nuns—both foreign and Korean—initiated various forms of charity efforts to
serve the most vulnerable populations in the city, especially orphans and the elderly. They also
provided education for young children by dispatching nuns to schools in various regions, as well
as building a few of their own mission schools, albeit at a much more modest scale compared to
their better-funded Protestant counterparts.
160
Growing in numbers throughout the first half of
the twentieth century, nuns were rapidly becoming a visible social presence in modern Korean
society.
What ensued was an increased volume of mass media portrayals of nuns, mainly in the
form of investigative journalism in the popular press. An early example was an article series
published in the Donga Ilbo in 1925, titled “Leaving a World of Vanity behind.” In the first two
installments of the series, an unnamed female journalist (puin kija) describes her experience of
visiting the Chonghyŏn Convent, which she introduces to her readers as an “otherworldly no-
160
For more details on the early history of French Catholic missionary nuns in Korea, see No
Myŏng-sin, “Han’guk esŏŭi p’ŭrangsŭ yŏja sudohoe ŭi hwaldong.”
71
man’s land.”
161
Through an interview with one of the nuns on site, the article provides a detailed
sketch of the nuns’ daily routine, which consisted of various tasks, including liturgical practices,
French and Latin language lessons, chores at the annexed orphanage, and weekly fasting on
Good Fridays. One of the more striking aspects about this article is how much effort it dedicates
to describe the nuns’ physical appearance, particularly their attire:
Upon initiation, the nuns wear a black Western-style dress with a white scarf that covers
their upper torso from shoulder to chest, almost like a vest. On their head they wear a
white cap similar to the ones worn by Western nurses, but they cover this cap with black
lace when they are in the chapel. After four or five years of training…they wear a
different headpiece, this time a long and narrow cloth that wraps around their head and is
fastened at the ear.
162
What these vivid descriptions suggest is the fact that the article was intended for a readership that
had never seen a nun in Catholic habit in real life. The article also includes a striking photograph
of a large group of nuns assembled inside the church, an effective visual aid to complement the
journalist’s textual descriptions of the nuns.
Another article about the Chonghyŏn convent published in the Chosun Ilbo a decade later
allows us to see a certain discursive pattern emerging in mass media portrayals of Catholic nuns.
This time the journalist identifies himself as male, a detail that lends the article heightened
161
“T’yŏnjugyo sudowŏn 1” [The Catholic Convent], Hŏyŏng ŭi kŏri rŭl ttŏna, Dong-a Ilbo,
February 11, 1925.
162
“T’yŏnjugyo sudowŏn 2” [The Catholic Convent], Hŏyŏng ŭi kŏri rŭl ttŏna, Dong-a Ilbo,
February 13, 1925.
72
dramatic effect as he goes through the process of clearing various hurdles to access a location
that normally forbids entrance to men. In all other aspects, however, this article is strikingly
similar to the preceding one, such as the way it catalogs the day to day of monastic life after an
interview with one of the nuns: a regimented daily schedule that begins at the break of dawn,
long hours of praying, and austere living quarters without any heating through the cold
winters.
163
Another similarity is the fascination it displays with Catholic liturgy and sartorial
protocol, which the journalist gets a glimpse of upon attending afternoon mass:
There were seven or eight large sized candles lighted at the altar. The twenty or so girl
students present were all on their knees facing the altar, with white scarves covering their
heads. The ceremony itself, which lasted around thirty minutes, alternated between prayer
and singing hymns. The choir was gathered around the organ at the very back of the
chapel. It consisted of five or six nuns, with black scarves covering their heads in many
layers.
164
Interestingly, this article was part of a five-part series titled “No Loitering, No Trespassing”
(hanin murip), in which journalists visit specific locations that the public normally would not
have easy access to. Such locations include a girls’ school dormitory, a dance theater
performance, and a kwŏnbŏn, which is a training facility for kisaeng (female entertainers). The
fact that the Chonghyŏn convent is included in this particular selection of women-majority
163
“Myŏngdong ch’ŏnjugyo sunyŏwŏn p’yŏn” [The Myŏngdong Catholic convent], Hanin
murip kaebanggi, Chosun Ilbo, February 4, 1934.
164
Ibid.
73
spaces suggests that the article was published with the assumption that the convent would appeal
to the voyeuristic male gaze of its main readership.
What we see in these articles is the development of a literary practice that might be
characterized as “Catholic sensationalism,” a type of writing that spectacularizes the Catholic
Church, its rituals and religious art for the reader from a voyeuristic angle. The term was first
coined by Maureen Moran, to describe the representation of Catholicism as a religion and culture
of extravagance, deviance and exquisite beauty in nineteenth-century England.
165
One caveat
here is that the sensationalization of Catholicism in colonial Korean media was not rooted in a
longer history of anti-Catholic sentiment as it was in the context of post-Reformation Britain; it
is better understood as the modernizing nation’s larger fascination with Western culture in
general, and by extension its religion, Christianity. It is possible, however, to identify certain
characteristics of Catholicism that may have piqued the colonial public’s interest in a way that
Protestantism did not—the first being the innately spectacular nature of Catholic liturgy,
devotional art and architecture. Catholic churches were otherwise known as the “pointy house”
(ppyojok chip), a nickname bestowed by Koreans at the time of the 1898 construction of the
Neo-Gothic Chonghyŏn Church. Statues of Christ and the Holy Virgin on Catholic Church
grounds stimulated the eyes of writers such as Mo Yun-suk, who describes them as “the beautiful
bodies of Gods” upon her visit to a church in Hamgyŏng province in 1937.
166
What most
captured the attention of the reading public, however, was the asceticism embodied by Catholic
priests and especially nuns, as reflected in the previous journalistic sketches of the Chonghyŏn
165
Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature, 1.
166
Mo Yun-suk, “Pujŏn esŏ: igukp’ungjŏng ttiin homyŏn ŭi kamsang.”
74
convent. Victorians and colonial Koreans were agreed in their perception of Catholic
monasticism as the epitome of its strangeness and extremism.
In this context, what characterizes the secular public’s gaze toward nuns is a certain
incredulity toward the idea that any woman would choose to turn away from the joys of secular
life to join a religious order that demanded a life of discipline, modesty and abstinence. The
aforementioned news articles on the Chonghyŏn Convent, for example, both question whether
the choice was entirely voluntary; the journalist who penned the 1934 Chosŏn Ilbo article asks
his informant “whether there are any young women who choose to leave the order,” to which she
responds, “Yes, of course; we do not keep anyone here against their will.”
167
The 1925 Donga
Ilbo article approaches the issue in more depth, devoting the majority of its second installment to
highlighting the “sorrows” (piae) of cloistered life. The article divides the nuns into three
categories: first, there is a small minority whose “human instincts” cause “waves of loneliness
and grief” in their hearts and who end up leaving the convent to rejoin society. The second,
larger group would fear the judgement of their religious peers and family even if they
experienced such a change of heart, and are thereby “forced to endure life in the convent with a
heart full of longing for secular society.” The majority, however, are the ones who are
“anesthetized” with the promises of heaven and remain more or less content with monastic
life.
168
The article ends with the journalist’s eulogy to the thirty or so nuns buried in the
Ch’ŏngsujŏng Cemetery in Yongsan, who the writer pitifully imagines had “writhed with
loneliness on their solitary beds, only to reach a futile death in the end.”
169
The underlying
167
“Myŏngdong ch’ŏnjugyo sunyŏwŏn p’yŏn.”
168
“T’yŏnjugyo sudowŏn 2.”
169
Ibid.
75
implication here was that the nuns’ celibacy is a lifestyle that goes against what is assumed to be
the “natural” physical and social inclinations of a human being.
The question of why any woman would voluntarily choose such a lifestyle is also
explored in popular novels of the same period, albeit in a much more imaginative and
exploitative way. Examples of this type of writing include Yi Kwang-su’s A Woman’s Life (Kŭ
yŏja ŭi ilssaeng, 1934) and Yi T’ae-jun’s The Three Daughters (Ttal samhyŏngje, 1939), both of
which were commercially successful novels serialized in major newspaper outlets and later
published in book format. Both are Madame Bovary-esque tales with similar plot structures: a
woman born of great beauty—Kŭm-bong in A Woman’s Life and Chŏng-mae in The Three
Daughters—dabbles in romantic relationships with men only to become subject to rape, which
then leads to a series of misfortunes including bad marriages, unwanted pregnancies and
subsequent extramarital affairs. Another thing that these two characters have in common is how
in the midst of their suffering they consider joining the Catholic order as a means of departing
the turbulent course of their lives.
Kŭm-bong yearned to expose the whole truth [of her illegitimate child] to everyone, run
away from home, and as per [her brother] In-hyŏn’s advice put an end to this unnatural
and immoral lifestyle by becoming a nun.
170
Chŏng-mae suddenly stopped in her tracks.
“Maybe I should join a convent,” she thought to herself.
170
Yi Kwang-su, Kŭ yŏja ŭi ilssaeng, xx.
76
In her mind, she pictured the pointy church roofs that seemed to touch the sky, the
plaintive yet holy sound of mass bells…the snow-white scarves and black dress of nuns,
who would confess their sadness and sorrows only to the Holy Virgin while keeping a
solemn silence to the rest of the world.
171
The implication here is that it would only be, as articulated by the character of Kŭm-bong, “types
of women who cannot live normally in this world, such as a woman who is widowed at a young
age, or one who is traumatized by a bad romantic relationship” that would populate the
convent.
172
The way in which these novels imagined nuns as sexually tainted or traumatized
women is fully reflective of the sensationalizing tendencies in cultural representations of nuns
that were being produced at the time. It also attests to the inability of mainstream society to
imagine that religious celibacy could be an attractive and desirable life choice for women.
Meanwhile, the figure of the Catholic nun also reminded colonial Koreans of the fact that
female religious celibates had long existed in the nation’s history, even before its reception of
Catholicism. The previously mentioned 1925 Donga-Ilbo article series, for example, features in
its third and final installment the T’apkol Sŭngbang, a Buddhist monastery for women in the
Pomun-dong district of Seoul.
173
The journalist describes the monastery with much of the same
language that she used in her earlier coverage of the Chonghyŏn convent, emphasizing the
“loneliness” and “sorrows” of the nuns, one of whom, when asked if she ever misses secular
society, confesses how she yearns to “return to the outside world, but lack[s] the means to
171
Yi T’ae-jun, Ttal samhyŏngje, 352.
172
Yi Kwang-su, Kŭ yŏja ŭi ilssaeng, xx.
173
T’apkol Sŭngbang was the common name for Mita-sa and Pomun-sa, Buddhist temples that
still exist in Seoul today.
77
survive there.”
174
The heroines of A Woman’s Life and The Three Daughters, moreover, both
oscillate between the two options of becoming a Catholic or Buddhist nun. While monastic life
remains in the realm of fantasy for Chŏng-mae in The Three Daughters, A Woman’s Life actually
ends with a scene of Kŭm-bong shaving her head to join her brother in a Buddhist monastery.
This ending feels abrupt, considering that the novel devotes many of its pages to describe the
process of Kŭm-bong becoming a Christian during her time in a mission school in Japan, as well
her debating whether or not to actually become a Catholic nun to escape her moral wrongdoings.
What can be inferred is that it was most likely inspired by the real-life case of Kim Wŏn-ju, a
celebrated “New Woman” poet and journalist who became a Buddhist nun right around the time
Yi Kwang-su was serializing the novel. In any case, these works reveal how a comparison with
female celibates within the Buddhist tradition was a convenient way for Koreans to gain some
level of understanding of the much more novel and foreign figure of the Catholic nun.
At the same time, however, significant differences emerge in the way these works
describe Catholic and Buddhist nuns. In The Three Daughters, an anguished Chŏng-mae visits a
Buddhist monastery, hoping to discover a means to overcome her experience of rape and
concomitant failure in marriage. While she is initially comforted by the “bright and holy light”
shining from the Buddha’s statue, she soon becomes repulsed at the sight of “tasteless
shamanistic fabrics adorning the temple,” as well as the “tanch’ŏng paintings” inside the shrine,
one of which was a religious image of a “dragon that to her looked more like a snake.” She is
further dismayed by the “boorish and uncouth” comportment of a Buddhist nun keeping the
174
“T’apkol Sŭngbang 4” [The T’apkol monastery], Hŏyŏng ŭi kŏri rŭl ttŏna, Dong-a Ilbo,
February 20, 1925.
78
temple grounds.
175
The novel presents Chŏng-mae’s thoughts in an interior monologue as she
leaves the temple:
If only the Buddhist temples of Chosŏn could be more like the Western churches and
convents that we see in pictures! So pure and holy, they remind me of lily flowers and
sentimental thoughts, and my goodness, the nuns always look well refined as well…
176
Chŏng-mae’s views toward the Buddhist temple reflect an internalized colonial gaze, one that
views the religion as backwards and superstitious compared to the “refined” modern sheen of
Christianity. The Donga-Ilbo article on the T’apkol monastery, moreover, further illustrates
another crucial difference in the way the general public perceived Buddhist and Catholic nuns:
“Anatomically speaking these nuns are female, but in their pants-and-frock attire and closely
shaved head, they do not appear as anything other than a man.”
177
The journalist further explains
how the nuns repress their “natural instincts” to seek attention from the other sex, and instead
live their lives as “middlesexed” (chungsŏng) beings, an interesting term that she did not use
when describing the nuns’ physical comportment in the previous installments.
178
Despite the fact
that they both dress in habits that are designed to deflect sexual attention away from the body,
the journalist sees in Catholic nuns a type of femininity and attractiveness that the Buddhist nuns
do not embody.
175
Yi T’ae-jun, Ttal samhyŏngje, 351.
176
Ibid., 351-352.
177
“T’apkol Sŭngbang 3.” [T’apkol monastery], Hŏyŏng ŭi kŏri rŭl ttŏna, Dong-a Ilbo, February
18, 1925.
178
“T’apkol Sŭngbang 4.”
79
As such, representations of nuns in popular writings of the colonial period may have
raised the public’s awareness of the existence of Catholic nuns, but seldom engaged in deeper
contemplation on what religious celibacy meant to the nuns or to the larger Korean society.
Distracted by the spectacle of their exotic attire and monastic lifestyle, colonial Koreans
perceived the nuns’ practice of celibacy as at times the embodiment of a transcendental purity,
and in others, a form of self-imposed masochistic torture. In the more extreme cases of
sensationalistic representation, Catholic nuns merely functioned as another receptacle for the
misogynistic imagination, one that found titillation in fantasizing about the sexual lives that the
women may have lived prior to taking their vows of abstinence. In the next section, I consider
how Catholic discourses of virginity intersected with the ideology of sexual purity that was
imposed upon girls in the postcolonial period, and how a unique girls’ culture that idealized the
discourse emerged at the seams of its contradictions.
Catholic Discourses of Virginity in Cold War Korean Girls’ Culture
On October 3rd, 1954, the Kyŏnghyang Sinmun published a query from an anonymous
“nun-aspirer” (hŭi sunyŏ) in their advice column section. “I am a recent girls’ school graduate
who wishes to become a nun, even though I am not Catholic,” she begins, but claims to have
been “deeply disappointed” after seeing the film Black Narcissus at the movies.
179
Based on a
1939 novel by Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus is a 1947 British film that depicts an isolated
group of Anglican nuns in the Himalayas who eventually descend into the throes of jealousy,
179
“Hŭksusŏn kwa sunyŏ saenghwal” [Black Narcissus and convent life], Kyŏnghyang sallong,
Kyŏnghyang Sinmun, October 27, 1954.
80
sexual temptation and group hysteria, a prototype for a genre of films that is now dubbed
nunsploitation. “My question,” she asks, “is whether Korean nuns are also [corrupt] like the nuns
in the film?” The columnist’s response to this inquiry is dismissive at best, pointing out how the
very fact that her aspirations are not religiously motivated leads one to believe that they are the
“typical juvenile fantasy of a teenage girl.”
180
“Please be aware,” he frostily adds, “that the nuns
in Black Narcissus are not even of the Catholic order.” Despite its obvious lack of empathy for
her grievances, the newspaper published a follow-up question in the same column a couple
months later, suggesting that there was something about the nun-aspirer that intrigued many of
the newspaper’s readers. Introducing himself as a faithful reader of the column, the contributor
begs for more information about the nun-aspirer that might help him understand “why on earth
would a young girl want to be a nun in the first place.” To this the journalist ruefully responds,
“I’d like to know as well, sir. She left that as a mystery to me as well.”
181
This piece must first be considered against Catholicism’s cultural position within the
context of Cold War South Korea. As Don Baker explains, the cultural and political import of the
Catholic Church on Korean society grew at a rather slow pace during the colonial period. The
main reason he attributes this to is the predominantly high ratio of Western missionaries in the
Church’s leadership at the time, which led to the general perception of Catholicism as a foreign
and culturally remote religion.
182
Statistics show that the indigenization of the Church’s
leadership did not pick up much speed until the 1970s; it could be said, then, that this public
image more or less persisted into the first couple decades after liberation.
183
Moreover, the
180
Ibid.
181
“Sunyŏ toeryŏdŏn ch’ŏnyŏ sosik” [Whereabouts of the young woman who wanted to be a
nun], Kyŏnghyang sallong, Kyŏnghyang Sinmun, December 22, 1954.
182
Baker, “The Transformation of the Catholic Church in Korea,” 18.
183
Ibid., 27.
81
number of Catholic middle schools and high schools remained relatively low in relation to the
population, which means few students had personal experience interacting with Catholic priests
or nuns in a classroom.
184
The general public’s perception of Catholicism, then, was largely
molded by cultural representations of nuns in the mass media, film and literature.
In any case, the Kyŏnghyang Sinmun column sheds light on at least one important fact:
girls in 1950s South Korea displayed a fascination with Catholic nuns, a fascination that was
common enough to be considered somewhat “typical” of female adolescence. Moreover, girls
did not necessarily have to identify as Catholic or demonstrate a depth of knowledge on the basic
structure or tenets of the religion in order to develop such a fascination. The questions to be
asked here are manifold. What kinds of images and representations of Catholicism were girls
exposed to in this period that potentially led to their development of an affinity for its culture?
How did Catholic views on womanhood converge with—or diverge from—the gender
expectations of postcolonial Korean society? How did Catholic discourses of virginity fit in with
state sanctioned discourses on adolescent female sexuality that were newly being set at the time?
A good place to begin looking for answers to these questions would be the girls’
magazine Schoolgirls (Yŏhaksaeng). Running first from 1949 to 1950 under the editorship of the
renowned poet Pak Mok-wŏl, and then returning for longer run from 1965 to 1990 after a fifteen-
year hiatus due to the Korean War, Schoolgirls was the only magazine in Korea with exclusively
curated content for and about adolescent girls. One of the noteworthy things about the magazine
is the frequent appearance of Christian images and narratives in its pages, especially in its first
phase of publication from 1949 to 1950. The religious orientation of the editorial board seems to
indicate a guiding ethos at work during this first year; Pak Mok-wŏl, who was the chief editor of
184
Ibid., 19.
82
the magazine for its first five issues, was widely known to have been a devout Presbyterian. This
could explain why Pak Tu-jin, who was also a practicing Christian and fellow member of the
Blue Deer School of poetry (ch’ŏngnokp’a), along with Mok-wŏl, was invited to write a regular
column titled “Bible Stories” (sŏngsŏ iyagi) beginning in the fourth issue of the magazine. The
series, which ran for only two installments before the magazine went into remission until 1965,
introduces key stories from the New Testament—the Temptation of Christ and the Sermon on
the Mount—in easy-to-read narrative format.
185
The series goes hand in hand with other
individual pieces that feature key figures or stories from the Old and New Testaments.
While it is tempting to interpret the inclusion of these pieces as a proselytization attempt
on the part of Pak, they were more likely intended to provide basic-level knowledge of the Bible
for non-churchgoing girls as part of their larger education in the Western classics. The
widespread assumption among intellectuals in Korea since the colonial period was that Western
canonical literature was essential to the cultural and intellectual edification of Korean youth. Pak
was no doubt a firm proponent of this view, as Schoolgirls included a significant number of
English, French and German literary texts in translation in every issue of the magazine.
186
As
many of these Western classics involved Christian motifs, symbols and settings, a certain amount
of exposure to Christianity became an inevitable part of reading the magazine. A translated
excerpt from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for example, includes several pages
of explanation regarding the basic tenets, rituals and values of the Christian faith so as to provide
185
Pak Tu-jin, “Ch’amsarang ŭi kil,” Yŏhaksaeng (April 1950): 57; “Sansang ui suhun,”
Yŏhaksaeng (June 1950): 34.
186
The writers whose works are translated in the magazine’s first five issues include H. W.
Longfellow, Thackeray, O. Henry, Elinor Wylie, Lord Tennyson, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Sara Teasdale, Louisa May Alcott, Dostoyevsky, Goethe,
Shakespeare, and Alice Meynell.
83
the readers with enough context to understand the basic sequence of events, such as how the law
of sanctuary protected Esmeralda from being captured for her execution when she fled inside the
cathedral.
187
It is also possible to infer, moreover, that the magazine presented Christian content with
the belief that its models of womanhood would be conducive to the production of a wholesome
Korean adolescent femininity. In the fourth issue of the magazine, for example, the writer and
pure literature ideologue Kim Tong-ni published an abridged translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment. What is immediately noticeable about his version is the fact that the title of the
novel itself is changed to “Sonya’s Cross.” The story also shifts to be centered on Sonya,
detailing her struggles to maintain her inner dignity while working at the brothels to feed her
family, as well as her undying love for her spiritually tortured lover Raskolnikov. The climax of
the story is the scene in which she urges Raskolnikov to repent, offering him her treasured
pendant cross before following him to Siberia where he must serve his sentence: “Take this
cross. I have another one, the one Lizaveta gave me before she died. I’ll keep that one for myself.
Take this one, it was my own. Take it and let us go together. Let us go share the burden of our
crosses together!”
188
As such, the narrator presents Sonya as the ultimate figure of self-sacrifice,
one whom the readers of the magazine must aspire to emulate. The inclusion of this version of
Crime and Punishment, therefore, serves the dual purpose of exposing the magazine’s reader to a
canonical text of Western literature and edifying them with a model of feminine virtue and
piousness.
187
Hugo, Victor, Notre-Dame de Paris, 8.
188
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Prestupléniye i nakazániye, 63.
84
Meanwhile, an interesting contrast arises when comparing these pieces with an essay by a
female contributor who also takes Christianity as the subject matter. In the 1949 inaugural issue,
Schoolgirls features an essay titled “In Search of a Convent,” written by a woman journalist
named Kim Rae-rae. Upon first look, the essay shares some similarities with the news articles on
the Chonghyŏn convent from the colonial period that I examined in the previous section: a
journalist visits the convent, explores the church and its exterior grounds, and conducts an
exclusive interview with one of the sisters on-site. While this format seems familiar, Kim’s
overall perspective toward cloistered life is considerably different from that of her predecessors.
The essay begins as follows:
A place where innocence and girlish dreams reside,
A place where sadness crystallizes,
Palms clasped in prayer.
A place where one weeps tearlessly,
A place where the Holy Virgin blankets a dreamer’s body with her cloak…
Any dreaming, sentimentalist girl would have at least once admired this place, the house
of melancholic dreams… I have decided to explore the inner quarters of a convent for my
readers. This is because I too, just like you, have once dreamt of pledging my life to one
of them, so I could preserve my youthful purity forever and live out my life in
melancholic peace.
189
189
Kim Rae-rae, “Sunyŏwŏn ŭl ch’ajasŏ,” 48.
85
Kim sets herself apart with her easy acceptance of the fact that nuns are an object of admiration
for many of her female readers. In fact, she does not merely accept it, but speaks about it from a
place of identification, confessing early on that she also had dreamt of becoming a nun in her
own girlhood. She does not betray any intention to educate the girls on proper womanly conduct;
the “purity” she yearns to preserve is more closely associated with other recurring keywords in
her essay such as “melancholy,” “silence” and “sentimentality” than it does with any kind of
moral virtuousness or religious fervor.
In order to fully account for what “purity” means in this context, we must first take a
closer look at the functions of sentimentalism in girls’ culture in this period. Throughout modern
Korean literary history, sentimentality emerged in various genres and forms of writing, serving
different kinds of functions in each context. It was a characteristic that marked the modern
interiority of iconic male characters in what is known as the earliest modern Korean novels such
as Yi Kwang-su’s Heartless (Mujŏng); only a decade later, the term was pejoratively used to
describe the mass-market romance novels of the 1920s such as No Cha-yŏng’s Flames of Love
(Sarang ŭi pulkkot); in the 1950s, it manifested in the form of sinp’a, a popular genre of theatre,
fiction and film targeted toward housewives that mainly featured stories of family melodrama.
190
Meanwhile, Lauren Berlant examines sentimentality in her book, The Female Complaint,
as a defining element of femininity in twentieth-century America, one that binds women together
into an “intimate public,” a “porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that
promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation,
190
See Yoon Sun Yang, From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men, 37; Ch’ŏn Chŏng-
hwan, Kŭndae ŭi ch’aek ikki, 425; Yi Ho-gŏl, “1950 nyŏndae taejung sŏsa wa namsŏngsŏng
ŭi chŏngch’ijŏk chinghu,” 332.
86
discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.”
191
I find this framework helpful in
approaching the sentimentalism that is closely attached to Kim Rae-rae’s presentation of the
Catholic convent. In her essay, the convent and the nuns who populate it do not so much convey
a concrete religious or moral message as create a certain mood or an emotion that binds herself
and her reader together. The “purity” represented by the figure of the Catholic nun, then, is a
meaningful concept to girls as it is an adolescent feminine state of being that is universally
shared among girls while at the time unattainable to those who are not one of them, an idea that
offers them a sense of belonging, safety and identity.
Another important aspect of Kim’s essay that deserves attention is its strong proclivity
toward melancholic feeling. A useful point of comparison would be an essay titled “My Views
on Korean Girls” by Richard Rutt, published in the December 1965 issue of Schoolgirl. As a
British Anglican missionary who had served in Korea for over a decade, Rutt shares the many
personal impressions that he had received from the girls he met in and outside the church.
Among his various observations, the one that stands out to him the most is a type of
“sentimentalism” that uniquely characterizes Korean girlhood, the intensity of which he finds to
be rather worrisome:
Teenagers are bound to be melancholy to a certain extent. They often indulge themselves
in tears, love reading sad poems and listen to gloomy songs. In Korea, there are girls who
even attempt suicide. I have seen many cases in which Korean girls took their own lives
191
Berlant, The Female Complaint, viii.
87
not because of serious life struggles such as poverty, but rather out of some romanticized
notion of death.
192
In this passage, Rutt is likely referring to the series of joint suicides of teenage girls that occurred
in the early 1960s, the details of which were heavily exposed in the media. What shocked the
wider public about these cases was the fact that their deaths were allegedly inspired by the work
of existentialist writers such as Camus or Sartre.
193
Rutt’s theory is that the adolescent embrace
of religion, or to be more precise, their fascination with the ascetic lifestyle of nuns, is a
manifestation of the same type of “unique sentimentalism” that led them to take their own lives:
The sentimentalism that I previously mentioned sometimes manifests in the form of
religious fervor. Many girls in Korea seem to fantasize about becoming a cloistered nun.
And there is quite a large number of women here who actually do join a convent.
Although there is very little in the life of a nun that is romantic and is actually a road full
of hardship, girls who have never seen the inside of a convent tend to hold romanticized
notions about nuns.
194
Putting its patronizing tone aside, Rutt’s essay does seem to intuit how girls’ reception of
Christian teachings did not always result in their transformation into wholesome and virtuous
192
Rutt, “Naega pon han’guk ŭi sonyŏsang,” 88.
193
For more details about these joint suicides, see Kwŏn Podŭrae and Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, 1960
nyŏn ŭl mutta, 413-415.
194
Rutt, 89.
88
girls; rather, the image of the Holy Virgin coincided with strange and melancholic daydreams,
the specific contents of which remained opaque to those outside of their world.
Perhaps the adolescent attraction to monastic life was simply a manifestation of girls’
desire to completely withdraw from a society that was interested only in their future potential as
devoted wives and mothers of the newly fledged nation. In that sense, it is quite interesting to
consider Kim Rae-rae’s essay against the suicide cases that Rutt mentioned. Kim describes her
journey into the convent building from the main chapel area in a way reminiscent of Orpheus’
trip into the underworld:
You walk through a remote forest trail from the chapel. It is still early autumn, but in
these woods you can already hear the plaintive sound of falling leaves. At the end of the
trail is a low fence surrounding a subdued two-story brick house, submerged in silence….
(Inside the convent) In the middle of the room is a statue of the Virgin Mary, and in one
corner a black piano. The piano looks like an emblem of sadness. Thick curtains are
draped over every window, and the room is dead silent, almost as if it is underwater…. I
peeked over the glass pane to get a glimpse of the nuns’ living quarters. I saw a few of
them slowly drifting around in their long black gowns. Not a single footstep was to be
heard.
195
In this passage, the convent is an otherworldly space that is submerged in its own darkness and
silence; her description of the nuns makes them seem more like specters or shadows than actual
living beings. To think that this is the type of place that Kim and her girl readers yearned to
195
Kim Rae-rae, 49.
89
“preserve [their] youthful purity forever” gives one pause. In some ways, the sentimentalism in
Cold War Korean girls’ culture could be understood as a desire toward self-diminishment, but in
another sense, it could also be interpreted as an aggressive rejection of a society that to them felt
hostile, corrupt and threatening. As such, while the embrace of Christian formations of virginity
by girls may appear to be a simple case of female indoctrination into conservative sexual
ideologies, the girls’ reception of the ideal was in reality a much more complex and multifaceted
process. What is further interesting to consider, moreover, is what happens when girls refuse to
outgrow this fascination with Catholic virginity, even after their maturation into adulthood.
Perpetuating Virginity: No Ch’ŏn-myŏng and Single Womanhood
A conventional biography of No Ch’ŏn-myŏng usually goes as follows: born in 1912, No
grew up in a Catholic household with three siblings in a rural area of Hwanghae Province until
her father’s death in 1918. The remaining family thereafter relocated to Seoul, where she
continued her studies and graduated with a degree in English from Ewha Womans University.
By this time, she was already publishing poems and essays in various outlets, and her first
collection, Coral Forest, came out in 1938, while she was working as a journalist at the Chosŏn
Ilbo. The turbulent course of her life and literary career in the ensuing decades was heavily
shaped by a series of historical events: the Pacific War, liberation, the outbreak of the Korean
War and the subsequent geographical and ideological division of the country under the global
Cold War order. In 1942, No joined the Association of Korean Writers (Chosŏn munin hyŏphoe)
along with other woman writers such as Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi and Mo Yun-suk. The Association
was an organization that was formed by the colonial government to garner support for the
90
Japanese war effort from Korean literary figures. A handful of propagandist poems authored by
No from this period was discovered by left-leaning nationalist critics in the 1980s, earning her
the ignominy of a “pro-Japanese writer.”
196
Meanwhile, in 1950, she joined the Alliance of
Korean Writers (Chosŏn munhakka tongmaeng), an organization for leftist writers and
intellectuals, as a means to survive the North Korean occupation of Seoul. She was imprisoned
and sentenced to a 26-year prison term for this offence after the South Korean recovery of Seoul
but managed to get early release thanks to her colleagues’ petitioning on her behalf. It is right
after this traumatic experience of imprisonment that she was baptized into the Catholic Church,
and in 1957, at age 46, died from acute anemia in her home at Tongin-dong, Seoul.
But the most widely known and oft-written aspect of her biography is that No was one of
the very few women writers in Korea who never married. Her single status attracted an undue
amount of public speculation into the details of her private romantic life. Most of the gossip was
centered on her alleged relationships with married intellectuals such as Kim Kwang-chin or Yi
Sŏng-sil.
197
The depth of her romantic involvement with Kim, in particular, triggered a large
amount of public speculation; in 1939, Yu Chin-o published a short story titled “A Divorce” in
the literary magazine Munjang, which is widely believed to be based on the relationship between
No and Kim. While the relationship between the couple in Yu’s story is fully consummated, the
implication that No and Kim were ever sexually involved is fiercely refuted by other speculators,
such as the journalist Kim Sŏk-yŏng:
196
For examples of this kind of reading, see Sin Kyŏng-nim, “No Ch’ŏn-myŏng ŭi munhak kwa
in’gan,” Hŏ Yŏng-ja, “No Ch’ŏn-myŏng si ŭi chajŏnjŏk yoso,” Kim Chae-yong, “tchitkyŏjin
sijip kwa ch’inil hŭnjŏk chiugi.”
197
Kim was an economist, who later became famous when he defected to North Korea with the
popular singer Wang Su-bok and was appointed as advisor to Kim Il-sung.
91
No was a woman who aspired to uphold the traditional values instilled in her during her
youth; a lover of classical Korean beauty, so much so that she never even dressed herself
in Western-style clothing. There was no way she would ever dream of sacrificing the
happiness of another woman (Kim’s wife) for her own, no matter how deeply she cared
for the man.
198
In this essay, which was published in the magazine Sirhwa after No’s death in 1957, Kim
defends No’s honor by arguing that the poet parted ways with Kim Kwang-chin long before she
became seriously—or in other words, sexually—involved with him. Meanwhile, other more
outlandish theories include the argument that the deer in No’s poem of the same title was
actually inspired by Paek Sŏk, the famous poet whom No was allegedly infatuated with.
199
Some
people even suspected that the friendship between No and Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi was of a
homosexual nature.
200
While there is no historical evidence to substantiate these claims, they
appear regularly in the popular press to the present day. In fact, many of the rumors mentioned
above are included in the biography section in the latest 2020 edition of No’s complete works,
attesting to how much the reading public is still invested in finding an exception to the poet’s
“spotless” sexual record.
What is visible in these rumors is a certain collective desire to resolve the “problem” of
No’s singlehood by placing her in romantic and/or sexual scripts, whether it be marital,
extramarital or homosexual. The stories are circulated not as mere titillating gossip for the public
198
Kim Sŏk-yŏng. “Yŏryu siin No Ch’ŏn-myŏng ŭn wae p’yŏngsaeng toksin saenghwal ŭl
hayŏssŭlkka?” 480.
199
For a recent iteration of this theory, see Song Chun, Siin Paek Sŏk.
200
92
to consume, but also play the important function of eradicating the possibility of celibacy from
her single status. While Adrienne Rich’s famous concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” offers
an apt explanation for this cultural phenomenon, No’s case also provides an opportunity to think
about what recent sexuality scholars such as Kristina Gupta have come to refer to as
“compulsory sexuality.”
201
The term refers to the assumption that sexual desire and activity is—
or should be—a universal in human nature, which then leads to the marginalization of anyone
who displays some form of nonsexuality, such as a lack of sexual desire or behavior.
In the case of Korea, unmarried women suffered the worst forms of such marginalization,
as the absence of sexual activity in a fully matured woman’s life was commonly believed to
produce various physical and psychological ailments. In her research on the history of disability
in Korea, Eunjung Kim examines the nineteenth-century prose poem, “Noch’ŏnyŏga” (A
Spinster’s Song) to illustrate how, from the Chosŏn period onward, the sexuality of unmarried
women has often been negatively associated with disability and mental illness. In the poem, the
spinster’s complaints are centered more on her unmarried status and her lack of access to sex and
childbearing than they are on the physical discomfort of her disability. What is even more
interesting about this poem, Kim argues, is that the spinster’s physical impairments—her
crippled arm, deafness, and blind eye—are miraculously cured after she sexually consummates
her marriage, implying that sex is a cure-all for problems in the female psychosomatic.
202
These
negative perceptions of the spinster were even more reinforced in the colonial period with the
introduction of sexological discourses from the West. The pseudo-scientifical concept of
“spinster hysteria” (noch’ŏnyŏ hisŭt’eri) emerged, referring to a mental condition allegedly
201
Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality,” 132.
202
Kim, Eunjung, Curative Violence, 29-30.
93
suffered by sexually frustrated spinsters, such as the neurotic housemistress in Hyŏn Chin’gŏn’s
famous short story, “Proctor B and Love Letter” (B-sagam gwa leobeu leteo). No’s biography is
also rife with testimonies (mostly from her male colleagues) of her allegedly cold, neurotic and
supercilious temperament, allowing us to imagine the amount of pressure she faced to protect her
own public and poetic persona as a single woman writer against such pathologization.
Despite the poet’s reluctance to publicly discuss her status as an unmarried woman, it
was frequently invoked as the ultimate key to interpreting major themes in her literary writings,
most notably that of solitude. This type of reading became prominent after her death. Take, for
instance, the following obituary written by her friend and fellow writer, Chŏn Suk-hŭi, published
in the Kyunghyang Sinmun:
You have lost your father at a young age, and without ever experiencing love from a
husband or children, you have left the world as a lonely, unmarried woman. And despite
that solitude, your fastidiousness kept you from easily making friends. Your noble,
refined personality led you to live a short life filled with purity and quietude. Like a
solitary deer, like a wild berry in the deep of the valley, you were destined to become a
lofty poet.
203
In this passage, Chŏn attempts a posthumous recuperation of No’s reputation as a cold and
unfeeling spinster by associating her loneliness and fastidiousness with her literary genius. The
equation she makes between No and her most iconic poetic object, the solitary deer, is a reading
that persists to the present moment.
203
Chŏn Sukhŭi. “Sobok ap e kobyŏl ŭl.”
94
No’s singlehood is also foregrounded in readings that focus on the political implications
of her work, particularly in relation to Japanese colonialism and the Korean War. The literary
scholar Kim Yun-sik provides an example of such interpretations with his essay “The Struggles
of a Caterpillar and Butterfly,” which was included the 1997 edition of No’s complete poems. In
his discussion of No’s “Miscalculations,” a 1952 semi-autobiographical short story about her
experience of North Korea’s occupation of Seoul, Kim Yun-sik points to the poet’s fastidious
temperament as part of the reason behind No’s aversion to real world politics:
One night the soldiers came and left their guns in my house, and on another night, they
rifled through all my books, after which they condemned me for leeching on the blood of
the common people. When I first moved in, I had adored my new house but after that
experience I found every nook and cranny of it somehow terrifying… I hated to touch
anything that their hands had touched, and the bullet holes in my washing room made me
recoil every time I went to wash my face.
204
In his reading of this passage, Kim suggests, “Perhaps the poet felt a sense of violation that was
similar to what a girl would feel when she is physically violated. Politics (and ideology) had
finally succeeded in trampling over the symbolic virginity that she had so fiercely guarded her
whole life.”
205
In other words, Kim argues that No’s aversion of politics (read: communism) has
the same roots as her supposed aversion of men: a fastidious and sensitive temperament that
refuses any intrusion of the masculine elements into her hyperfeminine inner world.
204
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Osan iŏtta,” 450.
205
Kim Yunsik, “Songch’ungi wa nabi ŭi momjit,” 480.
95
While these pieces are reductive and limiting in their biography-centric approaches to
No’s literary oeuvre, it is also true that No’s writings tend to draw at least some attention to her
own singlehood. I do not say this in a manner of “victim blaming” the poet, but to explore the
possibility of No’s poetic persona being one that the poet herself deliberately constructed to
address the subject of her celibacy. “A Self-Portrait” is a poem that enumerates such a reading:
Five feet one inch and 3 millimeters tall; two inches shy of desired height. A face that has
lost all its plumpness. A frosty countenance, one that many find difficult to approach.
Dark eyebrows, perhaps befitting for these large eyes…
206
This austere image is further developed in the following lines, where the speaker describes her
difficult personality, one that has led her to “spend many sleepless nights agonizing over the
smallest of troubles, depriving the body of any corpulence.” She also sees in her pursed lips a
“sorrowful habit” of “enduring pain in solitude, rather than sharing it with others.” The last lines
of the poem are famous for its vivid depiction of the interiority of an uncompromising woman:
I may break like a bamboo stick, but I would never bend like a copper rod.
It is this unyielding temperament that sometimes tortures me.
207
The self-portrait is more or less what the larger society would expect to see in a spinster:
hypersensitive, severe, and noncompliant. At a glance, the speaker’s tone appears to be self-
206
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Chahwasang,” 26.
207
Ibid., 26.
96
deprecating, but also present in this poem is the undeniable glimmer of pride and pleasure in her
contemplation of the self. As such, there is a way in which this poem could be read as No’s
attempt to take control of her public image as a spinster, which the poet was no doubt highly
self-aware of. What the poem ultimately articulates is a female interiority that lies beneath the
“frosty” and “unyielding” exterior of the reflection, one that is self-doubting and idealistic at the
same time, but passionate in its pursuit of dignity and self-fulfillment.
This type of reading is appealing for the way it imposes a narrative of empowerment on
No and imbues her with the agency to narrate her own celibacy. It is inspired by Benjamin
Kahan’s interpretation of Marianne Moore (1887-1972), an American poet who is reminiscent of
No not only in her modernist appreciation of brevity and restraint in poetic language, but also in
her spinsterhood, which generated a fair amount of discussion among American poetry readers
and critics over the years. In his book, Celibacies, Kahan challenges preexisting queer readings
of Moore that interpret her celibacy as a mere front to cover up her homoromantic or homosexual
inclinations, pointing out how such interpretations continue to treat celibacy as a type of lack or
absence, one that can only be resolved through a romantic coupling, whether it be of a hetero or
homosexual nature.
208
His contention is that rather than representing an absence of desire or a
cover for a latent homosexuality, celibacy was at the very center of Moore’s poetics and politics,
a point that I believe is of equal importance when approaching No Ch’ŏn-myŏng’s life and work.
Kahan further argues that in her writing and public appearances, Moore consciously
“deployed and managed” her public image as a spinster, aiming “to fashion herself a celibate
celebrity and to recast the social position of celibates more generally.”
209
Such emphasis on the
208
Kahan, Celibacies, 59.
209
Ibid., 59.
97
celibate subject’s “strategic” deployment of the dominant social discourse on spinsterhood in
readings of No’s work must not result in the erasure of a certain sincerity that is present in her
literary idealization of virginity. In No’s poetics, an insistence upon virginity (both literal and
symbolic) is a valuable means to preserve the self against a wide range of threats, including the
slippage of time, state violence, and the compulsoriness of sexual maturation.
One of the ways in which this accomplished is through the creation of a writerly persona
that essentially refuses to grow up, thereby remaining perpetually in the realm of girlhood. In a
1932 essay titled “Stray Thoughts,” No writes, “I still feel as if I am still a girl student. Most of
the time, I act like one as well. Even though I have other clothes, I still can’t bring myself to take
off my black skirt, and I feel uneasy when I try to put on more sophisticated clothes. Nothing
about the way I feel or act has changed [since my girlhood].”
210
Ten years later, in 1942, she
writes, “I can hear the elegant sounds of a piano drifting from the auditorium of Kyŏnggi Girls’
School behind my house. Whenever I hear the sound of girls singing in the school, I feel my soul
being refreshed, as if it is being cleansed with clean water. When I recognize a song that I also
had learnt during my girlhood, I feel the sound tugging at my heartstrings.”
211
In a 1945 poem
titled “Nostalgia,” the poet looks even further back into her past as a young girl growing up in a
rural village in Hwanghae Province:
The girls climbed Ttunggulle Mountain to pick squills
And hollyhock, knotweed, knapweed, catchflies, blackberry lilies, majujae, and wild
geese,
210
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Tansang,” 90.
211
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Pom kwa chorŏp kwa,” 110.
98
Balloon flower roots, virgins, short smoking pipes, groundsels, angelica trees and tobira.
They would end every one of their sentences with “kwa!”
While peeling their hazelnuts, the boys loved telling stories
of ogres who lost their gold clubs.
212
This idyllic portrayal of childhood and adolescence appears recurrently throughout No’s poetry
and nonfictional writings, leading many critics to designate nostalgia as one of the defining
elements of her literary aesthetic. While nostalgia presupposes the existence of a discontinuity
between past and present, what is equally important in No’s articulation of nostalgia is the
endeavor to suture the distance between past and present by placing adolescent femininity at the
very center of her poetic persona and sensibility.
Meanwhile, virginity also emerges as a prominent subject in poems and essays that deal
with her early upbringing in and later baptism to the Catholic Church. Included in the book
Coral Forest is a poem titled “A Nun”:
Behind the convent, a place where no one passes
Is the Sacred Cave of Lourdes
On the night when the Holy Mother’s statue glimmered whiter than usual
With a black bead rosary clasped in her hand,
A virgin appeared and quietly began to pray.
212
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Manghyang,” 79.
99
Who shall fathom the troubles in her silent heart?
213
With its vivid imagery and brevity of language, this haiku-like poem exemplifies No’s modernist
aesthetic at its best. At the same time, it is strongly indebted to the types of sentimentalist
portrayals of Catholicism that can be found in girls’ culture. The religious virginity of Mary and
the young nun signify a transcendent purity, one that the poet remains fascinated with throughout
her literary career. The following is part of a poem titled “A Rose Falls,” written upon the death
of her beloved niece, Yong-ja:
Before the afternoon mass bells rang
Colòmbe held fast to her statue of Jesus
And closed her eyes, as if to fall asleep.
Twenty and two years of age
With a splintering sound, a rose has fallen.
214
Coincidentally, the baptismal name of Colòmbe is shared between Yong-ja and a famous virgin
martyr named Kim Hyo-im, who was executed at the early age of twenty-six during the
nineteenth-century Catholic persecutions.
215
Several years after the publication of this poem, No
herself was baptized in the Catholic church at the age of 40. “In Search of the Sea” (Padatka rŭl
ch'ajasŏ) is an essay in which she describes the ceremony:
213
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Sunyŏ,” 57.
214
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Changmi nŭn kkŏkkida,” 163.
215
Kim Ok-hŭi, Han’guk ch’ŏnjugyo yŏsŏngsa, vol.2, 119-126.
100
This morning I bathed myself, put on my new white dress and followed my sister-in-law
to church. I had never felt so solemn in my life.
A nun at the church placed a floral crown on my head and caressed me, as one
would caress their newlywed wife. She then led me to the Priest, who was in the main
chapel…. He gave me the baptismal name of “Veronica.”
216
What is interesting here is the predominance of women in No’s literary portrayal of Catholicism.
In a way, religious virginity offers No an opportunity to inhabit a space to which the readers of
Kim Rae-rae’s essay dreamed of escaping: a no-man’s land in which one’s girl purity can be
preserved forever.
It is worth noting that this virginal space does not by any means signal a lack or absence
of sexuality; on the contrary, No’s depictions of adolescent and religious virginity are replete
with what Karma Lochrie articulates as “an erotics of bodily integrity and a chaste form of
pleasure.”
217
In her study of medieval English literature, Lochrie argues that the premodern
erotic “destabilizes our modern assumption of what counts as erotic,” emphasizing how the
virginity of nuns in this period should not be understood as a sexual position that represses
carnality but rather “one that fosters unlimited forms of female eroticism and fellowship.”
218
Homoeroticism is a theme that has often been mentioned as another prominent feature of No’s
poetry; take, for example, a poem titled “To a Friend” (Ŏttŏn ch’in’gu ege), published
posthumously in her 1958 collection, The Song of the Deer:
216
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Padatka rŭl ch'ajasŏ,” 267.
217
Lochrie, Heterosyncracies, xviii.
218
Ibid., 29.
101
When I first met you on our college campus
My eyes rejoiced, as if they had seen the first signs of spring
How my heart pounded on that day we first joined hands
You and I shone like sister stars.
Those who saw me were reminded of you
And those who spoke to you also thought of me.
219
This erotic pleasure that is unique to intimacy between women is present in the scene of her
baptism as well, with the white dress, floral crown, and nun who lovingly caressed the speaker
“as one would caress their newlywed wife,” painting a picture of the ceremony as a type of
symbolic wedding.
The important question at hand, then, is how, as present-day readers, to assess the
political and aesthetic import of No’s literary articulation of virginity. Perhaps the answer should
be pursued by placing No Ch’ŏn-myŏng’s life and work against the discourse of the “single
woman” (toksin yŏsŏng) that was newly emerging in the 1950s. As Yi Sŏn-mi points out, the
figure of the single woman became an alternative way for society to make sense of unmarried
women outside of the spinster paradigm. In her study of the women’s magazine, Yŏwŏn, Yi
points out the underlying tensions between the more traditional virtues expected of the “wise
mother good wife,” and US-imported ideals of the modern, well-educated and socially active
woman that emerged in the magazine’s discussion of single women.
220
The initial editorial goal
219
No Ch’ŏn-myŏng, “Ŏttŏn ch’in’gu ege,” 124.
220
Yi Sŏn-mi, “Chŏlmŭn Yŏwŏn: Yŏsŏngsang ŭi pidŭngjŏm,” 270.
102
of the magazine was to show their readers how to both fulfill their domestic duties and be
successful in their career at the same time. The problem, however, was that in reality, the
successful women that they managed to find and interview for the magazine were Im Yŏng-sin
or Kim Hwal-lan, both of whom were single. By the late 1960s, No Ch’ŏn-myŏng also obtained
a solid space within the annals of exemplary Korean women. The 1967 issue of Schoolgirl, for
example, includes a special essay, “Exemplary Women”, that features four women for girls to
emulate: No Ch’ŏnmyŏng, Kim Hwal-lan, Pak Sun-ch’ŏn, and Ko Hwang-gyŏng.
221
These
women, the magazine contends, have “surrounded themselves with a halo of optimism,
steadfastness, purity, respect, and faith, and have grown up to become women with deep
maternal love.”
222
What is perhaps ironic about their emphasis on “maternal love,” however, is
the fact that three out of these four women spent their whole lives as single women. As such,
these magazines for women and girls in this period had a tendency to idealize—perhaps
inadvertently—female singlehood and the types of opportunities that the lifestyle could offer to
women.
Another distinctive aspect about the single woman discourse during this period is the
silence surrounding the question of their sexuality. This, I suggest, was a strategic way of
avoiding having to use the label of noch’ŏnyŏ, a term that denigrated and pathologized
unmarried women for their (assumed) lack of access to heterosexual sex. The silence also
protected them against the social scrutiny regarding their sexual conduct, since any form of non-
marital sexual relations with a man was still strongly discouraged and would have invited moral
221
Kim Hwal-lan (1899-1970) and Ko Hwang-gyŏng (1909-2000) were both well known as
educators who respectively served as deans in Ewha Women’s University and Seoul
Women’s University. Pak Sun-ch’ŏn (1898-1893) was a politician who rose to the upper
ranks of the Democratic Party in South Korea.
222
“Uridŭl ŭi isangjŏk in yŏsŏng,” 103.
103
condemnation of their single status. In their interviews and cover stories on single women,
therefore, it was only natural that the editors took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach and tactfully
steered clear of any discussions regarding their sexual lives. The sexuality of single women,
therefore, became a type of undefined gray area, one that could only allow for vague and
intrusive conjectures: were there secret, illegitimate ways through which these women were
fulfilling their sexual needs, or did they actually manage to remain asexual and perpetually
virginal?
Additionally, this silence is noticeable even in more contemporary variations of the single
woman discourse, such as the figure of the “career woman” (k’ŏriŏ umŏn) or the “willfully
unmarried woman” (pihon yŏsŏng) of recent decades. In her ethnographic study of single women
in neoliberal South Korea, Jesook Song writes:
It is notable that sexual pleasure was hardly mentioned by my participants, even when I
asked them about it directly. This is somewhat surprising, considering the popularity of
Sex and the City and other foreign TV dramas, as already mentioned…. My research
participants clarified that the sex talk in foreign dramas was not applicable in the Korean
context and was rarely a subject of their personal conversations, even with close
friends.
223
If we are to view their silence only as a symptom of a sexually repressive society, it allows for
one of two reductive interpretations: first, single women do seek sexual pleasure but are unable
to speak about it due to repressive sexual norms, or second, repressive sexual norms discourage
223
Song, Jesook. Living on Your Own, 72-73.
104
single women from seeking sexual pleasure altogether. Would it be possible, however, to simply
take their silence at face value, and conclude that perhaps sexual activity—at least, in the way
that we conventionally define them as interpersonal (and often hetero-) genital sex acts—do not
play a central role in the construction of their pleasure regimes or erotics?
I find No Ch’ŏn-myŏng’s poetics to be politically and culturally meaningful in the way it
articulates an example of one such alternative pleasure regime and erotic. Her writings allow us
to see single womanhood not as a state in which sexual desire is absent or repressed, but one
where the withholding of sex holds meaning and value that could be shared and celebrated with
others. This is not to argue that female celibacy represented any kind of a conscious
antinormative political practice in Cold War South Korea. If anything, the nostalgia,
sentimentality, and idealism that are intertwined with No’s attachment to adolescent and
religious virginity signify a regressive step back into the realm of the interior, a refusal to take
part in the struggle to reconcile the self with external reality that sexual and social maturation
naturally entails. While it did not pose any major challenges to the heteronormative organization
of society at the time, it does challenge how female sexual agency and political subjectivity are
often imagined in present-day queer and feminist scholarship only in relation to the “resistance”
and “subversion” it presents to the status quo.
105
Chapter Three
Adolescent Same-sex Romance in South Korean Women’s Literature
and the Problem of Lesbian Literary History
The “Chŏn Hye-rin phenomenon” (Chŏn Hye-rin hyŏnsang) refers to a large following of
young (and mostly female) readers that formed around the writer Chŏn Hye-rin after her
premature death at age 31 in 1965. The intensity of the phenomenon could perhaps be gauged by
the remarkable sales record of her first essay collection, And Never Said a Word (Kŭrigo amu
maldo haji anhatta), published posthumously in 1966. The first print of the book sold out in
merely 15 days after its initial release and remained uncontested as the number one bestseller for
as long as 16 weeks.
224
It continued to rank on major newspaper bestsellers lists up until the late
1970s; a reader survey from 1982 also reveals how Chŏn was consistently cited as a popular
writer among young women in the 1980s.
225
In 1960s parlance, bookish young women like Chŏn
and her followers were commonly known as “literary girls” (munhak sonyŏ), a term that first
emerged during the colonial period to describe (often in a derogatory sense) hyper-sentimentalist
girls who hold an unusually strong passion for reading and writing. What the Chŏn Hye-rin
phenomenon essentially marks, then, is how, by the 1960s, these literary girls had become a
formidable presence within the South Korean publishing market.
One notable aspect about Chŏn Hye-rin is the wide discrepancy between the popular and
critical reception of her work. Despite her popularity across generations of young female readers,
Chŏn is often dismissed as a kind of “failed genius” within mainstream literary criticism, a
224
Pak Suk-cha, “Yŏsŏng ŭn pŏnyŏkhal su innŭn’ga,” 6.
225
“Kŭmju ŭi pesŭt’ŭ sellŏ,” Maeil kyŏngje, June 29
th
, 1976; “Yŏdaesaeng aejŏng sosŏl manhi
ingnŭnda,” Tonga ilbo, May 27
th
, 1982.
106
perpetually aspiring writer whose actual literary talent did not quite match up with the intensity
of her creative passion or her celebrity status. Kim Yun-sik, for example, who was one of the
first literary critics to examine Chŏn’s work from a serious angle, generously includes her in his
1974 selection of the 25 most representative modern writers of Korea in Han’guk kŭndae chakka
non’go. His assessment of the late writer in the book, however, is somewhat scathing. “In all of
her writing, she focuses on no one other than her own self,” he claims, and further criticizes the
confessional and autobiographical quality of her essays as proof of her narcissistic personality
and disinterest in the lives of others and larger society.
226
This kind of interpretation persisted
well into the ensuing decades, reinforcing the general perception of Chŏn’s writing as one
steeped in feminine self-indulgence, sentimentalism, and immaturity. As a result, she became the
type of writer that serious readers or scholars of literature would be rather embarrassed to admit
to have ever appreciated in their younger years, a writer that one should eventually grow out of
as they reach intellectual maturation.
In more recent years, however, there has emerged in Korean literary scholarship an
attempt to recuperate the Chŏn Hye-rin phenomenon and her writing from a feminist angle. Sŏ
Ŭn-ju is often cited as one of the first scholars to have engaged in this body of work; in her 2004
article, she points toward the conservatism and male-centeredness of the 1960s South Korean
literary sphere as the main reason behind the historical elision of Chŏn.
227
Meanwhile, Pak Suk-
cha seeks to reinstate Chŏn’s contributions to Korean literature by focusing on her
accomplishments as a translator of modern German literature, ultimately arguing that Chŏn Hye-
rin should be reconsidered as a representative figure of 1960s youth culture in South Korea.
228
226
Kim Yun-sik, “Ch’immuk hagi wihae marhaejin ŏno: Chŏn Hye-rin ron,” 400.
227
Sŏ Ŭn-ju, “Kyŏnggye pakk ŭi munhagin,” 40-41.
228
Pak Suk-cha, “Yŏsŏng ŭn pŏnyŏkhal su innŭn’ga,” 36-37.
107
Kim Yong-ŏn’s Literary Girls (Munhak sonyŏ) is a 2017 monograph that nicely sums up the past
two decades of this recuperative scholarship. Through a comprehensive examination of Chŏn’s
essays, translations, and the posthumous impact of her life and work, Kim seeks to dispel the
common stereotype of the writer as a “snooty upper-middle class literary girl,” and further
emphasizes how Chŏn served as an entry point into the world of literature for many generations
of women in Korea.
229
Building on this scholarship, this chapter examines the life and writings of Chŏn Hye-rin,
focusing specifically on the centrality of homoromantic feeling in the construction of her writerly
persona as well as her literary work. I argue that Chŏn Hye-rin should be remembered and
reevaluated for articulating what she refers to as a “Schwesterseele” (sister soul), a mode of
platonic same-sex love that drew inspiration not only from the passionate friendships that were
prevalent in East Asian girl cultures of the early twentieth century, but more interestingly, pre-
Stonewall European novels that featured representations of homoerotic relationships between
men. By tracing the transnational literary influences behind Chŏn’s articulation and performance
of same-sex romance, I will show how Chŏn and her readers exemplify what I call the “minor
cosmopolitanism” of South Korean literary girls who sought erotic agency within an increasingly
militarized and ideologically polarized Cold War society.
Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Chŏn Hye-rin in Munich
229
Kim Yong-ŏn, Munhak sonyŏ, 16-18.
108
Since there exists very little English language scholarship on Chŏn Hye-rin, I begin with
a brief biographical sketch of the writer.
230
Chŏn was born in 1934 to an upper-middle class
family in South P’yŏngan province. After graduating from Kyŏng-gi Girls’ School, she began
studying law at the Seoul National University, but quitted midway and left for Germany at 21
years of age, to study literature at the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich. At age
22, she married Kim Ch’ŏl-su, a fellow graduate of the Seoul National University law
department who was also in Munich at the time to study legal philosophy.
231
After returning to
Korea with her husband and newborn daughter in 1959, Chŏn taught German literature at several
universities in Seoul, all the while actively publishing essays and translations in various scholarly
and literary publication outlets.
232
In 1964 she divorced her husband; in the following year, 1965,
she committed suicide at her parent’s home in Namhaktong, Seoul, at the age of 31. Her
posthumous essay collection, And Never Said a Word, took its title from the 1953 novel by
Heinrich Böll that she had translated into Korean a year prior to her death. A second collection of
her writing, consisting mainly of her private journals, was published under the title In Future
Perfect Tense (Mirae wallyo ŭi sigan soge) later in the same year.
233
230
For preexisting English-language scholarship on Chŏn, see Jeom Suk Yeon, “That Fierce
Inner Struggle: The Journals of Sylvia Plath and Jeon Hyerin.”
231
For more details about their courtship and marriage, see “Tongŏp pubu: pŏptae kyosu Kim
Ch’ŏl-ssu ssi wa Chŏn Hye-rin yŏsa,” Chosŏn ilbo, June 4
th
, 1962.
232
Chŏn translated and published a total of 11 works during her lifetime: Un Certain Sourire by
Françoise Sagan (1956), Anne Frank: Spur Eines Kindes by Ernst Schnabel (1958), Der Yalu
Fließt by Mirok Li (1960), Fabian by Erich Kästner (1960), The Diary of Anne Frank by
Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (1960), Mitte des Lebens by Luise Rinser (1961), Emilie
by Hermann Kesten (1963), Zhiv Chelovek by Vladimir Maksimov (1963), And Never Said a
Word by Heinrich Böll (1964), Demian by Hermann Hesse (1964), and Sonnenseuche by
Heinrich Nowak (1965).
233
After 1981, In Future Perfect Tense was republished under the title All This Suffering, and Yet
Again (I modŭn koeroum ŭl tto tasi).
109
An aspect of Chŏn’s biography that is often commented upon by literary critics is how
her father, Chŏn Pong-dŏk, had served as a high-ranking police official under the Japanese
colonial government. He later rose to the position of provost marshal in the postcolonial South
Korean government after helping install Syngman Rhee as president. In an essay titled “A
Solitary Journey” (Hollo kŏrŏon kil), Chŏn reminisces of her earliest memories of her father as
follows:
My father was the one who taught me how to read both Korean and Japanese when I was
merely 3 or 4 years old. As far as he was concerned, studying was to be my only job.
He would not even let my mother assign me to any household chores. Throughout
my childhood, I never had to lift a finger around the house; all I ever had to do was to
stay in my room and study, to read all the books that my father had bought for me, of
which there were always plenty. The reading habits that I acquired then persisted
throughout my secondary school and college days.
234
As evident in this excerpt, a large part of Chŏn’s early intellectual development was indebted to
the material and moral support from her father, who had himself climbed the social ladder by
collaborating with the colonial government. Scholars such as Kwŏn Podŭrae and Ch’ŏn Chŏng-
hwan foreground Chŏn Pong-dŏk’s history of collaboration in their examination of the writer,
suggesting that the exceptionality of Chŏn Hye-rin derives not so much from the writer’s
individual genius, but rather the exceptionality of her father’s social position as a high-ranking
234
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo amu maldo haji anhatta, 28-29.
110
colonial elite.
235
While there is no doubt that writer had benefited from her father’s wealth and
cultural capital, I question whether that fact in and of itself is enough to dismiss the cultural
significance of the Chŏn Hye-rin phenomenon as a whole. What is perhaps a more meaningful
question to be asked about Chŏn’s familial background is what it might have to do with the
writer’s general lack of interest in issues of class and political ideology, a matter that I shall
return to later on in this chapter.
Meanwhile, the elder Chŏn’s career trajectory impacts the writer in yet another
significant way when he relocates his family to Sinŭiju, a city that was located on the northern
Korean border to China. It is in this border town that the early roots of Chŏn’s uniquely nomadic
spirit develops, as recounted in “A Solitary Journey”:
I am a woman with no place of origin.
Asphaltkind (children who grow up in the asphalt streets of the city) is a German
expression that perhaps best describes my history. The two years I spent in the northern
tip of the country after my father’s placement in Sinŭiju, however, evokes in me such a
great nostalgia that whenever I see the word “hometown,” Sinŭiju is always the first to
spring to my mind.
236
At the time, Sinŭiju was a portal location where the diverse cultures of Korea, Japan, China and
Russia intersected. The writer’s memories in the essay attest to this unique cultural context, as
she recounts how her younger self enjoyed wandering through “the cottages of Chinatown,
235
Kwŏn Podŭrae and Ch’ŏn Chŏng-hwan, 1960 nyŏn ŭl mutta, 409.
236
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 27.
111
listening to the cacophonous sounds of their exotic language,” or how her father would
sometimes take her to “the white Russian dressmaker and buy her lace trimmed dresses that
looked fit for a princess.”
237
It is in this essay that Chŏn introduces her readers to the German
expression fernweh, which many critics explain is the key sentiment that underlies her literary
oeuvre. Chŏn astutely translates the word as “a nostalgia for a faraway place,” a vague
restlessness that compels one to leave her home for foreign yet strangely familiar lands.
238
It is when she travels to West Germany in her early twenties that Chŏn is finally able to
fulfill her longing for departure. It is worth nothing how the mid-1950s was still a time when
studying overseas was a privilege that was afforded only to an exceptional number of people,
especially women. According to a 1954 survey, there were a total of 2,040 students who were
out of the country to pursue their studies abroad; among them, only 549 (or 27 percent) were
women.
239
It was even rarer, moreover, for a South Korean student to earn an opportunity to
study in Europe. The U.S. was by far the most common destination for students seeking an
overseas education, usually in the form of short-term training or exchange programs offered as
part of the U.S. government’s educational aid.
240
In 1955, which was when Chŏn began her
studies at the University of Munich, there were 936 people who left Korea to study abroad; 756
of them went to the U.S., while only 20 students (among which only 2 were female) chose West
Germany as their destination.
241
Most Korean students in Germany at the time, moreover, were
there to pursue an education in law, mainly because the South Korean legal system took the
237
Ibid., 28.
238
Ibid., 30.
239
“Tohap ich’ŏn yŏ myŏng: haeoe yuhaksaeng ŭi silt’ae,” Chosŏn ilbo, August 2
nd
, 1954.
240
Yi Sŏn-mi, “1950 nyŏndae miguk yuhak tamnon kwa taehak munhwa,” 243. For more details
on the U.S. government’s educational aid program, see Im Tae-sik, “1950 nyŏndae miguk ŭi
kyoyuk wŏnjo wa ch’inmi ellit’ŭ ŭi hyŏngsŏng.”
241
“Kongŏp kyet’ong i suwi: haeoe yuhaksaeng silt’ae,” Tonga ilbo, November 6
th
, 1955.
112
German judicial structure as its basis.
242
It is not difficult to imagine, then, how at the time of her
registration at the University of Munich, Chŏn was both exceptionally and marginally positioned
as one of the few—if not only—Korean female students of literature in Germany. In any case,
the experience of studying abroad undoubtedly played a formative part in Chŏn’s intellectual
development, not only launching her career as a scholar and translator of German and French
literature, but also becoming the inspiration behind many of her most widely read
autobiographical essays.
Chŏn’s nostalgia for her childhood experiences in Sinŭiju as well as her interest in
Western European languages and cultures must be contextualized with the cosmopolitan spirit
that began emerging in South Korean culture in the 1950s. In her book, Cold War
Cosmopolitanism, Christina Klein uses cosmopolitanism as a framework to “think beyond
Americanization” when discussing Korea’s postcolonial modernization process, one that can
foreground the “ongoing legacies of Japanese colonialism and the [nation’s] newly forming
relationships with Western Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia” as a crucial part of
1950s South Korean culture.
243
Indeed, the development of Chŏn’s cosmopolitan subjectivity
was shaped by the particular material circumstances set by Japanese colonialism and the Cold
War. The culturally hybrid Sinuiju, for example, was a city that was built along with Japan’s
construction of the Kyŏngŭi railway line in 1904 as part of the Russo-Japanese War effort.
Opportunities for students to study abroad in first world countries such as West Germany,
moreover, were an important means for South Korea to build stronger ties with other members of
the so-called “Free World” through educational and cultural exchange. Klein emphasizes,
242
Lee, Eun-jeung and Hannes B. Mosler, “130 Years of German-Korean Relations,” 35.
243
Klein, Christina, Cold War Orientalism, 5.
113
however, that Cold War cosmopolitanism was characterized by a fascination with Western
cultures and values that in some ways mirrors the West’s Orientalist gaze toward Asia.
244
In
Chŏn’s particular case, this fascination took shape during her early adulthood in the form of a
unique Europhilia, or more specifically, an idealization of German literature, culture, and
society.
The idealized image of Germany that Chŏn presented to her readers was largely
constructed from her personal experiences of living in Schwabing, a borough of Munich in
which LMU is located. In an essay titled “The Montmarte of Munich,” Chŏn lovingly describes
Schwabing as a safe haven where the spiritualism and ascetic lifestyle of Old Germany is
preserved:
While most districts of Munich are now indistinguishable from other cities of America or
Europe, Schwabing is famous for retaining much of Munich’s old charm. The shabby
attire of the students, poets, writers, artists, scholars and musicians who populate the
district is shocking, even by Korean standards… People converse affectionately with
strangers, share their last cigarette and sometimes even pay for their lunch, whether they
be black or Asian. It is a place driven by a fervent anti-bourgeois sentiment. …Men
always wear shabby sweaters, while women clad themselves in baggy black skirts and
sweaters, black socks, and black headscarves over their long unkempt blonde hair.
245
244
Ibid., 6-7.
245
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 56-57.
114
With this description, Chŏn’s directly counters the general perception held by South Koreans of
Western society as a site of material abundance and consumption. On the contrary, the residents
of Schwabing are committed to a bohemian lifestyle that values intellectual and artistic
accomplishment over material wealth and bourgeois respectability. Clad in such “shabby” attire,
she contends, the impoverished students and artists of Schwabing take only a “pint of beer and
bowl of soup” for their dinner, and together discuss how they might convince the world that “it is
not tight schedules and diligent labor but idleness that will save humankind.” What is interesting
here is how Chŏn positions this idyllic space in direct opposition to a commercialized American
culture:
My first impression of Germany was that it was a nation deeply scarred by its defeat in
the Second World War. It had, moreover, much like any other city in Europe, forfeited
much of its unique culture to accept the new world order under the U.S.
Teenagers were all wearing blue jeans, everyone had a ravaging appetite for jazz
music, and danced in the streets as if there was no tomorrow. Consumption was preferred
over contemplation, and all anyone cared about was to make more money for a
comfortable life. German children seem to internalize this type of mindset from an early
age, and they later grow up to become anti-sentimental realists.
In this passage, Chŏn bemoans how the rapid Americanization of postwar German society was
robbing the nation of its cultural and philosophical heritage. Along with the invasion of
American “blue jeans” and “jazz music” came a hedonistic materialism that was threatening the
very intellectual and spiritual fabric of German society. As such, on the other side of Chŏn
115
Europhilic gaze toward Schwabing is a deep animosity toward what she perceives to be the
excessive consumerism and homogeneity of American culture.
To be fair, the way in which Chŏn positions American popular culture to be at odds with
the “anti-bourgeois sentiment” of Schwabing is not an historically accurate representation of the
cultural politics of 1950s Germany. In fact, American culture played a crucial part in the
emergence of a countercultural youth movement in West Germany. The “teenagers in blue jeans”
that Chŏn was speaking of were then referred to in the German media as the Halbstarke:
working-class adolescents who drew inspiration from American jazz music, rock’n’roll culture,
and Hollywood icons such as Marlon Brando or Sidney Poitier to create a subculture that stood
in opposition to German bourgeois respectability.
246
These “rebel youths,” as Diethelm Prowe
concedes, were the predecessors to the bohemian students and Gammlers of Schwabing who
started the Schwabing riots in 1962, the starting point of the sixties revolution in West Germany.
As such, Chŏn’s perception of Schwabing as an intellectual sanctuary against the corrosive force
of Americanization was an idea that was more or less divorced from the actual political realities
of the city of Munich.
Meanwhile, Chŏn takes a critical stance toward the increasing cultural hegemony of the
U.S. not only over Europe but postwar South Korean society as well. She becomes particularly
concerned with the new models of femininity that were being introduced to Korea through the
influx of American popular culture:
Today I happened to run into S on the street. She is a girl I used to know who has
recently returned to Korea from America. In a matter of seconds, I noticed her
246
Poiger, Uta, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels, 80-82.
116
condescending attitude, her anxious attempts to flaunt her newfound Americanness
through her flashy hairdo, makeup and clothes. Her overall demeanor was arrogant and
rude… She once used to be so pure and earnest; is America to blame for how shallow she
has become?
247
Yesterday I watched the film Butterfield 8. I found it to be quite unimpressive. The
characters were shallow, its social satire unconvincing; there was nothing of substance
except for the tasteless display of Liz Taylor’s big breasts and buttocks.
248
In these excerpts, Chŏn criticizes women who “flaunt” and “display” their sexuality in public
spaces, for which, in her view, American culture is to blame. In a way, Chŏn is not wrong in
making this association. One way in which the American value of freedom was introduced to
postcolonial Korean society was through images of American women in Hollywood films,
fashion ads and editorials, who seemingly enjoyed a larger degree of sexual freedom and self-
expression. As Kang So-yŏn notes, moreover, American popular music played a large part in the
emergence of a “dance hall” (taensŭhol) culture in mid-1950s Korea, which became a space “not
only for female college students but even housewives and daughters of élite families” to dance
and socialize with men. For many of Chŏn’s female contemporaries, consuming such cultural
products from the U.S. was a way to test new boundaries of their sexual autonomy, often to the
chagrin of male writers such as Chŏng Pi-sŏk who labelled them as promiscuous “madame
freedoms” and “après girls.” The fact that Chŏn would also cast a disapproving glance toward
247
Chŏn Hye-rin, I modŭn, 157-58 (emphasis added).
248
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 215.
117
these women, however, is somewhat surprising, especially when she herself must have been
exposed to more liberal attitudes toward female sexuality during her time in Germany. While this
could be viewed as a type of sexual prudishness on her part, the more generous interpretation
would be to consider it in the context of her general intellectual orientation toward an ascetic
idealism. Considering how her dualistic world view was predicated upon the effacement of
corporeal pleasures and desires, it is perhaps not too surprising that the commercialization of the
female body in American popular culture would not agree well with her idealistic sensibilities.
Another way in which Chŏn’s anti-materialism manifests is through her anti-bourgeois
critique of Cold War South Korean society. This critique does not by any means stem from a
leftist sensibility; as her romanticization of poverty in Schwabing might suggest, Chŏn remains
quite blind to problems of class disparity and does not betray any self-awareness of her own
privileged upper-middle class roots. Nevertheless, her distaste for middle-class culture and
values stands out quite prominently in her writings, especially in discussions of marriage and
what she refers to as the “bourgeois family unit” (siminjŏk kajŏng). In an essay titled “A Season
of Thirst” (Mok marŭn kyejŏl), Chŏn explains how, since her adolescence, the biggest imperative
in her life was to avoid resorting to the “ordinary” (p’yŏngbŏm) life of a married middle-class
woman:
Back then, I believed that the root of all unhappiness in humans was the inability to be
alone; for this reason, I found Nietzsche’s aphorisms on marriage to be incredibly
enlightening. I was convinced that one must abstain from marriage and the bourgeois
lifestyle if they desired to live a life of ideas and intellectual clarity.
118
Chŏn is unable to uphold this adolescent vow into her adulthood, as she marries Kim Ch’ŏl-su in
the second year of her studies in Munich. The marriage is known to have been arranged by the
parents of the couple, who most likely disapproved of their children being single while living
abroad.
249
By the second year into her marriage, however, Chŏn already experiences feelings of
discontent in her marital life, as evident in a journal entry from 1958:
Marriage inevitably leads to a type of narrowmindedness. It leaves no room for any
ambitions other than that for the coziness of a fireplace, and the comfort of good food,
clothing and housing. It erodes one with the idea of comfort and happiness for two.
250
Despite her upper-middle class upbringing, Chŏn maintains a deep suspicion toward the
bourgeois values of stability and material comfort. This is largely due to the idea that a
comfortable domestic life is fundamentally at odds with one’s drive for intellectual and spiritual
growth, a view that was perhaps exacerbated by the restrictive gender roles of Cold War South
Korean society that afforded limited opportunities for women beyond their domestic role.
Chŏn’s anti-bourgeois sentiments, therefore, are intimately connected to the development
of her proto-feminist consciousness. In 1961, Chŏn begins reading Mitte des Lebens, a 1950
novel by Luise Rinser that traces the charismatic and free-spirited protagonist Nina’s journey
through two failed marriages, a suicide attempt, imprisonment under the Nazi regime, and
eventual success as a writer in postwar Germany. In her review of the book, Chŏn introduces the
character of Nina as follows:
249
For more details about the families’ involvement in Chŏn and Kim’s marriage, see Chŏng
Kong-ch’ae’s biography, Pulkkot ch’ŏrŏm salda kan yŏin, Chŏn Hye-rin, 103.
250
Chŏn Hye-rin, I modŭn, 18.
119
More than anything, Nina is a woman who instinctively aspires to be free, who fights to
preserve her freedom of mind. With her sharp intuition, intellect, and decisive
personality, she always puts herself at risk and walks the thin line between life and death.
Despite such precarity, she manages to carry herself with a certain sense of triumph and
optimism.
There is no doubt that Chŏn saw her own self in the character of Nina, as did many of her girl
readers in Korea who were eager to read Chŏn’s 1961 translation of the novel.
251
Mitte des
Lebens was one of the most successful foreign language novels on the South Korean publishing
market in the 1970s, undoubtedly thanks to Chŏn’s endorsement of the book in And Never Said a
Word. In her book review, Chŏn presents to her readers what seems to be an existentialist
feminist critique of marriage, suggesting that it is a type of sedative that blinds women of their
own intellectual and spiritual capacities:
More than anything, the book tells us not to be fooled by the deceptive mirage that is
marriage, that even if you escape to marital life, you will still one day have to pay the
heavy price of existence. It teaches us that a life where there is no distinction between
your today and tomorrow, where there is no potential for greatness, where you experience
251
Kim Mi-jŏng explains that when Rinser was invited on a book tour to South Korea in 1975,
her talk at Ewha Women’s University was overrun by fans of her book, filling the
auditorium’s maximum capacity of 4,000 guests. See Kim Mi-jŏng, ““Han’guk-ruije rinjŏ
ranŭn kiho wa yŏsŏng kyoyang sosŏl ŭi pulganŭngsŏng,” 229.
120
neither pure pleasure nor despair and instead choose a cheap cocktail of both, is nothing
more than gradual suicide. In reality, you might as well already be dead.
In this sense, it could be said that Chŏn’s reception of Rinser’s feminist existentialism as well as
personal experience of heteronormative—or in her words, “ordinary”—middle-class marital life
plays an important part in Chŏn’s articulation of her own feminist critique of South Korean
society. While she was by no means capable of acquiring a wider leftist outlook of the world,
moreover, I contend that the writer should also be recognized for arriving at her own unique
form of an anti-bourgeois consciousness by way of this feminist perspective.
As such, Chŏn’s Europhilia should not be reduced to an upper-middle class postcolonial
female subject’s blind embrace of Western cultures and values. The privileging of Europe, Sŏ
Ŭn-ju notes, was an attitude that was shared by many of her contemporaneous South Korean
intellectuals and artists who were seeking sources of inspiration from outside their national
borders. Compared to Japan (which was the nation’s ex-colonizer) and the U.S. (which was
quickly establishing itself as a neo-colonial force in Korea), Europe was a third space that
Korean could aspire to emulate without being inhibited by specific memories of colonial
invasion or exploitation. With her own imagined ideal of Germany, Chŏn offered to her readers
an attractive alternative to hegemonic U.S. culture and its definitions of modernity, freedom, and
womanhood.
Homoromantic Feeling in the Essays of Chŏn Hye-rin
121
Chŏn Hye-rin’s disillusionment with the institution of marriage does not in any way
mean she was disillusioned with the idea of love itself. In fact, love was a subject that the writer
was deeply fascinated with throughout the course of her literary career. In an essay titled “The
Eternal Instant” (Sun’gan ŭi chisok), Chŏn defines love as a phenomenon that allows us to
transcend the limits of our corporeal existence:
The feeling of being passionately and madly in love is only experienced when our love
for the other person is of a pure and spiritual nature. But we can dwell in that state of pure
love only in short and fleeting moments. The rest of the time, we suffice with a diluted
version of it, or a mere substitute.
The ideas of love presented in this excerpt are based on the Platonic dualism that constitutes
Chŏn’s world view, one in which the mind takes firm precedence over the body. In other words,
love in its most authentic form is a spiritual phenomenon that allows us to transcend our
corporeal existence. “Love,” she further contemplates in a 1959 journal entry, “can only be
possible when two souls are in constant conversation with one another.” True love, then, serves
as evidence of the existence of the soul (Nur-Seele); conversely, those who are incapable of
experiencing this kind of love are, in her view, equivalent to “soulless beings.” It is perhaps
natural, then, that Chŏn found the marriage to be an institution antithetical to the experience of
love, as authentic love is by its very nature meant to exceed the boundaries of what she calls the
“ordinary” realm of human existence.
The idea that true love is a disembodied and spiritual experience is one that can be traced
back to the 1920s in colonial Korea, a time in which the newly imported concept of romantic
122
love was excitedly debated among writers and intellectuals. Romantic love, as Hyaeweol Choi
succinctly explains, was, for many colonial Koreans, a novel concept that offered them the
opportunity to reinvent themselves as modern “individuals” who act on behalf of their own
desires and free will instead of what is dictated to them by custom.
252
Borrowing from the
language developed in the fields of literature, sexology, and feminism in the West, many colonial
period intellectuals ambitiously presented their own definitions of what true love is or should be.
On one end of the spectrum was “free love,” the idea that love is primarily a sensual experience
that occurs between two desiring bodies, and on the other was “platonic love,” a spiritual bond
between two people that transcends the limits of the body and materiality.
253
Yi Kwang-su’s
1917 essay, “An Opinion on Marriage,” is one example of how colonial Koreans conceptualized
the latter concept:
Romantic love is an intense attraction and affection between a man and woman who
understand and respect each other’s individuality. Attraction toward one’s superficial
traits such as the beauty of their face, voice, and bodily comportment is of course an
important component of love, but the intellectually sophisticated modern individual can
never be fully satisfied by the other person’s physical beauty alone; satisfaction only
comes when they become fully enraptured by the other’s spiritual beauty…. That is why
these men and women are so intent on seeking spiritual rather than physical fulfillment
through the experience romantic love.
254
252
Choi, Hyaeweol, New Women in Colonial Korea, 94.
253
For more details on such polarized notions of love in the colonial period, see No Cha-yŏng,
“Yŏsŏng undong ŭi che 1 inja,” 96.
254
Yi Kwang-su, “Honin e taehan kwan’gyŏn,” 30-31.
123
For Yi, the essence of romantic love lies in the “rapture” that one feels toward another’s spiritual
beauty. Love was proof of the “intellectual sophistication” of the modern man, a form of relating
that was much loftier and morally superior to the feudal custom of marriage, which was, in his
opinion, arranged solely for the fulfillment of physical and economic needs. Such were the
idealistic hopes and dreams that were invested in the concept of romantic love in the early
decades of colonial modernization.
What Chŏn Hye-rin’s writings on love illustrate, then, is how these idealistic notions of
love that were developed in the colonial period survived well into the postcolonial moment.
Interestingly, the object of such romantic feelings in Chŏn’s writings is not her husband or any
other actual sexual partner, but her friend, Chu-hye, whom Chŏn’s biographer Yi Tŏk-hŭi
describes as the writer’s “first object of love.”
255
Chŏn’s relationship with Chu-hye develops
while they were both students at Kyŏng-gi Girls’ School, which Chŏn reminisces as a time in
which she nursed “a burning, Faustian desire for knowledge.”
256
In an essay titled “A Season of
Thirst” (Mok marŭn kyejŏl), Chŏn recounts her earliest memories of Chu-hye in close detail:
[It was during my schoolgirl years that] I found my soulmate. While I was rather
standoffish and cynical in temperament, Chu-hye was by nature a much more congenial,
warm, and wholesome girl. We did not talk much in person, but always exchanged letters
between one another. Even though we would see each other at school every day, we were
constantly writing letters to one another.
257
255
Yi Tŏk-hŭi, Chŏn Hye-rin, 160.
256
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 134.
257
Ibid., 134.
124
What bound the two of them together, Chŏn explains, was not only the shared dream of one day
becoming a writer, but on a more fundamental level, “a passion for literature, philosophy, and
language (English, German, French, Classical Chinese, Korean), one that almost bordered on an
obsession.”
258
Chŏn further describes her relationship with Chu-hye as a “love that transcended
everything, one that was of the purest and most spiritual kind.”
259
The language with which Chŏn
describes their intense spiritual connection is in many ways closer to that of romantic love than a
conventional friendship.
Curiously, the essay describes in close detail how, during their adolescent years, the
works of French writers such as André Gide and Roger Martin du Gard played a prominent role
in the expression of their love for one another:
Upon reading The Fruits of the Earth (Les Nourritures Terrestres) together, we were so
moved by the line, “Nathaniel, let us embrace this rain,” that one day, we decided to
wander about the streets in a rainstorm without our umbrellas.
260
After reading Martin du Gard’s The Gray Notebook together, we immediately decided to
fashion our own gray notebook. Every day, either one of us would take the notebook
home and write a journal entry, and then slip it in the other’s school desk drawer the
258
Ibid., 135.
259
Ibid., 135.
260
Ibid., 135. I was unable to locate this specific line—“Nathaniel, let us embrace this rain
(Nat’aniel iyŏ, uri nŭn pi rŭl pada tŭrija)”—in the French original, and suggest the possibility
that it was reassembled in the writer’s memory.
125
following day. We exchanged the notebook in this manner for years. Back then, that
notebook and Chu-hye were the only two things that mattered in my life.
261
One thing that must be noted here is the fact that both Gide and Martin du Gard were early
twentieth-century French writers for whom homosexuality was a central aspect of their writing
as well as their private lives.
262
Coincidentally, the two writers were also close friends during
their lifetime, whose epistolary exchanges reveal a shared investment in writing about themes of
male same-sex attraction at a time when the French state was increasingly repressing
homosexual expression and practice.
263
An examination of these works, then, potentially offers
us a better understanding of Chŏn and the nature of her relationship with Chu-hye. I offer below
a cursory reading of The Gray Notebook to shed light on the intertextual connections between the
novel and Chŏn’s essay.
The Gray Notebook is the first volume of Martin du Gard’s The Thibaults, a 1922 novel
sequence for which the Nobel Prize laureate is most well-known. The story, which is set in the
first decade of nineteenth-century Paris, is focused on the passionate friendship between two
schoolboys, Jacques Thibault and Daniel de Fontanin. The two boys share “a school exercise-
book bound in plain grey cloth,” containing, as the narrator explains, a steady exchange of letters
between one another:
261
Ibid., 135.
262
For a more detailed account of André Gide’s biography and reading of The Fruits of the
Earth, see Patrick Pollard, André Gide: Homosexual Moralist and Michael Lucey, Gide’s
Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.
263
For more details on their friendship and correspondences, see Roger Martin du Gard, Notes
on André Gide, 23-28 and Christopher Robinson, Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female
Homosexuality in Twentieth-century French Literature, 21-22.
126
I shall never forget the moments, too few, alas, and too brief, when we are entirely one
another’s. You are my only love. I shall never love again; for a thousand memories of
you would bar the way. Goodbye, I feel feverish, my forehead is throbbing, my eyes are
going dim. Nothing shall ever separate us, promise me. Oh, when, when shall we be free?
When shall we be able to live together, go abroad together?
264
In the early chapters of the novel, the omniscient narrator reveals the contents of the notebook
for the reader, which, as illustrated in this excerpt, consists mainly of the two boys’ fervent
confessions of love for one another. Much like Chŏn and Chu-hye, the two characters also share
a deep appreciation for literature, and nurture dreams of becoming writers themselves:
I have just finished Zola’s La Débâcle. I can lend it to you. I haven’t yet got over the
emotions it produced. It has such wonderful power, such depth! I am going to begin
Werther. There, my dear, we have at last the book of books. I have also taken Gyp’s Elle
et Lui, but I shall read Werther first.
265
The similarities between the two relationships are striking: an intense outpouring of feelings for a
same-sex peer, the central role of letter-writing in their relationship, and a shared love of
literature and the arts. Although Chŏn does not reveal in the essay the specific contents of her
own gray notebook with Chu-hye, it is not difficult to imagine that it would have been more or
less akin to Jacque and Daniel’s in form and content.
264
Martin du Gard, Roger, The Thibaults, 44.
265
Ibid., 48.
127
Meanwhile, Hermann Hesse’s Demian (1922) is another novel that Chŏn writes about
with great affection. In an essay titled “Two Worlds” (Tu kae ŭi segye), Chŏn praises Demian for
its description of the young protagonist’s “unquenchable thirst and solitary journey toward his
destiny, which, in the end, is fulfilled through [his] death.”
266
This glowing review of the book,
which was published in And Never Said a Word, was what led to the development of a “Hesse
boom” in Korea in the mid-1960s.
267
The novel was ranked at the very top of bestsellers lists
between the years of 1966 and 67, and, as the publisher recounts, soon became the kind of book
that “any bookish student, especially if they were girls, would carry around with them.”
268
What
must be noted here is how the commercial success of Demian in the 1960s Korean publishing
market was, by global standards, a bit of an anomalous phenomenon. In the U.S., for example,
the circulation of Hesse’s works in the 1960s largely corresponded with the “Vietnam War, the
hippies and other youth movements,” with books such as Siddhartha being the most popular for
its anti-bourgeois sensibilities and Orientalist mysticism.
269
Demian, on the other hand, is a
romanticist bildungsroman set in early twentieth Germany that traces the intellectual and
spiritual maturation of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair. It focuses mainly on Sinclair’s Manichean
struggle between two opposing life forces: light and darkness, Christian morality and pagan
266
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 233.
267
Demian was first translated and published in Korea in 1955 under the title Chŏlmŭn nal ŭi
konoe (The Anguish of Youth) but remained in relative obscurity and soon went out of print.
Chŏn Hye-rin published her own translation of the book in 1964 as part of Noobel munhak
chŏnjip, a book series on literary works that won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the article
cited in 35n, the publisher of Demian’s 1966 edition explains how he decided to acquire the
rights to Demian after realizing the high demand for the book among Chŏn’s readers. The
1966 edition’s first print sold out in many major bookstores in Seoul and the book ended up
selling 50,000 copies in the first year of its publication.
268
“Herŭman hese chak temian,” Hŭllŏgan manin ŭi sajo pesŭt’ŭsellŏ 15, Kyŏnghyang sinmun
June 2
nd
, 1973.
269
Cho, Chang Hyun, “The Development of Hesse Reception in Korea from the Year 1926 to
1999,” 174.
128
hedonism, bourgeois stability and carnivalesque chaos. Scholars such as Pak Suk-cha suggest
that Demian was likely preferred by Chŏn over other more conventionally famous works by
Hesse such as The Glass Bead Game (which earned the writer a Nobel Prize in Literature) for the
way in which the novel spoke to her own identity crisis as a postcolonial female subject who was
split in between the Western cultures and values she admired and the bleak sociopolitical
realities of postwar South Korea. The spiritual and existential crisis Chŏn was experiencing, Pak
explains, was also shared by South Korean youth in the 1960s, a generation that was grappling
not only with the traumas of the Korean War but also deeply disillusioned with the materialism
of postwar developmentalist ideologies.
270
While I generally agree with Pak’s assessment, I argue that the homoerotic elements of
Demian must be recognized as another key point of attraction for Chŏn and the larger South
Korean girl readership at the time. Much like Martin du Gard’s The Gray Notebook, the story is
centered on the intense friendship between Sinclair and Max Demian, who meet one another in a
boy’s school in an unnamed small town in Germany. What perhaps supports my particular
approach is a comparison with the unique impact that Demian had on the development of
Japanese girls’ manga in the 1970s. As Deborah Shamoon points out, Demian was a crucial
source of inspiration for Hagio Moto’s The Heart of Thomas (Tōma no shinzō, 1974) and
Takemiya Keiko’s The Song of the Wind and the Tree (Kaze to ki no uta, 1976), two
foundational texts in the subgenre that is now widely known as “boys’ love” (shōnen ai).
271
Much like Demian, both mangas featured the spiritual love between boys against the backdrop of
boarding schools in Europe, which itself developed into a common trope in the genre thereafter.
270
Pak Suk-cha, “Yŏsŏng ŭn pŏnyŏkhal su innŭn’ga,” 26.
271
Shamoon, Deborah, Passionate Friendship, 105-111.
129
As such, the way in which Demian was embraced into Japanese girl culture primarily for its
homoerotic content perhaps supports the case that Chŏn’s appreciation of the text was also of a
similar nature. If this is so, the foreign novels that Chŏn carefully curated for herself since her
adolescence—The Fruits of the Earth, The Gray Notebook, Demian, and Thérèse Desqueroux—
could also be understood as a type of queer archive that effectively articulated alternative forms
of intimacy and bonding that she herself had experienced with her female peers.
One thing that must be recognized about writers such as André Gide, Roger Marin du
Gard, Hermann Hesse and François Mauriac is the fact that the expression of same-sex love in
their writing were heavily conditioned by the discourses of homosexuality of early twentieth
France and Germany. Each of these writers employed varying degrees of narrative concealment,
elision, or sublimation of homosexual desire to negotiate the boundaries set between socially
acceptable and perverse sexualities. In The Gray Notebook, for example, the intimate bond
between Jacques and Daniel soon becomes overshadowed by a fear of punishment and
internalized shame, and as result never quite materializes into physical intimacy. The initial crisis
to their relationship arises when their parents and schoolteachers discover their shared notebook,
the homoerotic content of which puts them at risk of being expelled from school. Although they
successfully run away together to Marseilles, the sexual tension that existed between them
transforms into mutual shame on the first night of their elopement:
The furniture of the room consisted of two beds, a chair, and a basin. As they entered, a
like shyness came over them both—they would have to undress in front of each other! ….
Then they sat on, wondering what next to do. To gain time, Daniel unlaced his shoes;
130
Jacques followed his example. A vague feeling of apprehension made them feel still more
embarrassed. At last Daniel made a move.
“I’ll blow out the candle,” he said.
When he had done so, they hastily undressed and climbed into bed, without
speaking.
272
The two boys’ adventures in Marseilles end with the dissolution of their friendship, when Daniel
ends up losing his virginity to a local girl, an act that is taken by Jacques as an unforgivable
betrayal. As such, The Gray Notebook is a good example of how pre-Stonewall explorations of
same-sex sexualities in modern Western literature often did not allow for the consummation of
homosexual desire.
273
The love depicted in the novel is spiritual and disembodied, one that
stubbornly remains within the realm of the textual.
There is a way in which Chŏn’s attachment to this spiritual mode of romance seems out
of time and place, in a way almost stubbornly old-fashioned. This is especially so when
considering the general cultural climate of the 1960s, a time in which discourses of sexual
liberation and new sexual cultures were sweeping through other parts of the free world. This
outdatedness can partially be explained by the general “isolation” of South Korea from global
sixties culture as explained by Charles Kim in his book, Youth for Nation. Large-scale poverty as
well as the authoritarianism of dictatorial regimes in South Korea resulted in the formation of an
ideologically conservative youth culture and activism, one that remained more or less
uninterested in the postmaterial political causes of the West such as women’s liberation and the
272
Martin du Gard, Roger. The Thibaults, 52-53.
273
For more details on Martin du Gard and the impact of homophobia on early twentieth French
writing, see Robinson, 67-69.
131
so-called sexual revolution.
274
Even so, conventions of heterosexual mating in the 1960s in South
Korea had already expanded far beyond the confines of romance novels and secret
correspondences of prior times. By then, courtship between women and men were normalized in
various public spaces such as college campuses, tearooms and dance halls, and Hollywood films
offered new models of romantic love for the public. Nevertheless, it was not in any racy
Hollywood movie or romance novel but in the pages of these musty old European books that
Chŏn discovered a form of love worth enacting. This anachronistic attachment to the past is why
I would define Chŏn Hye-rin’s brand of cosmopolitanism specifically as a minor
cosmopolitanism.
Meanwhile, Chu-hye continues to play a critical role in Chŏn’s life beyond their
adolescent years. Their friendship, which remains constant even after the two girls enroll in
college, meets a pivotal turn when Chu-hye emigrates to the U.S. with her family after a couple
years, an event that Chŏn recalls with “intolerable sadness.”
275
In a 1959 journal entry, Chŏn
recounts how she found “a small piece of happiness (Glück)” in her mailbox that day: an
unexpected card from Chu-hye, whom she describes as “someone I once loved with all my heart,
and still love deeply to this very day.” What comes next in the journal entry is the most effusive
and passionate confession of love that can be found in all of her published writings:
The dark blue night is lit by the frozen stars and dull yellow glow of streetlamps. The
night air is still and sweet, almost like a scene from a children’s book. My one and only
dearest friend Chu-hye, I have not forgotten you. Your name is engraved in the deepest
274
Kim, Charles, Youth for Nation, 17.
275
Chŏn Hye-rin, Kŭrigo, 137.
132
recesses of my subconscious (Unterbewußstein). You are the identical twin to my soul.
How I longed for you after losing your noble presence (Gegenwart) in my life!...
Everyone seems so vulgar, mean, and uncouth compared to you. The fact that you
exist, the fact that a woman like you could have been born in a country like Korea itself
gives me incredible solace…. I will never forget you, no matter what may happen to me
in the future…. My love and admiration for you is constant.
This journal entry was written during Chŏn’s last year in Munich, only a month before the birth
of Chŏn’s first and only child, Chŏng-hwa. While the two women had continued to correspond
with each other into their adult years, it is not difficult to imagine how challenging it must have
been to maintain their relationship across the geographical distance that divided them. The very
fact that Chŏn insists upon the “constancy” of her love betrays a certain anxiety over whether
their friendship would withstand the passage of time. Chu-hye’s name appears once more in
Chŏn’s journals from 1962, a time in which her depression was already becoming quite
prominent in her writings:
That day when Chu-hye left [for the U.S.], I remember how uncontrollably I cried; my
tears flowed endlessly. I realize now that that was the last time that I was ever to see her
again. Letters are not enough. They only offer me small solace, as beautiful flowers or a
handkerchief would. How I miss Chu-hye. I still long for a chance to see her again, even
if we end up disappointing each other. Before I shall die……
133
The journal entry ends on a rather ominous note, especially to its present-day readers who are
now well aware that the writer passed away less than two years after its composition. In any
case, the passage reveals how Chu-hye remained an object of love for the writer more than a
decade after their physical separation. This leads us to rethink the common perception that the
intense bonds between literary girls, as common as they may be, are mere rites of passage that
they eventually grow out of as they reach maturation.
The reason why the intimate bond between the two women were able to withstand the
test of time was perhaps because of the way it was, from the very beginning, a disembodied love
cultivated from epistolary exchange. After all, it was precisely this insistence upon the
spirituality of love—and its superiority over carnality—that had attracted Chŏn to the story of
Jacques and Daniel in The Gray Notebook in the first place. For Chŏn, the sanctity of love is
preserved in the intensely romantic yet nonsexual bond she shared with Chu-hye; heterosexual
relationships, as far as she was concerned, were mere shadows of that kind of transcendental
love, irreparably contaminated with the shallow philistinism of middle-class marital life. For this
reason, I suggest that the relationship between Chŏn and Chu-hye could be considered as a form
of “homoromance.” As a term that first emerged in the online forums for the asexual community
in the recent couple of decades, homoromanticism refers to feelings of romantic attraction for
someone of the same sex that do not necessarily entail a sexual attraction.
276
While I am not by
any means suggesting that either of the two women were asexual, homoromanticism is a useful
concept that helps us consider the experience of romantic love without automatically assuming
sexual attraction or practice to be a part of it.
276
For more details on the concept of homoromanticism, see Amy N. Antonsen et. al., “Ace and
Aro: Understanding Differences in Romantic Attractions Among Persons Identifying as
Asexual.”
134
The nonfictional writings of Chŏn Hye-rin, then, could be considered as a postwar South
Korean archive of female homoromantic feeling. What the remarkable popular success of her
work allows us to further imagine, moreover, is how it inspired girl readers in Korea to
conceptualize and perform their own homoromantic relationships modelled after the ones in the
stories they read. In other words, the European novels that Chŏn introduced to her readers
provided them with an opportunity to engage in a type of queer role-play, to create an insular
community of female adolescent readers who enacted a homoromantic mode of relating with one
another within the confined space of normative girlhood in 1960s South Korea.
277
Traces of this
influence might be discovered in “exchange diaries” (kyohwan ilgi), or the practice of sharing
letters and journals in notebooks that is still commonly observed in South Korean girl culture to
this day. It could be said, then, epistolary exchange as well as communal reading and writing
practices played a central role not only in Chŏn’s relationship with Chu-hye but also in the
culture of literary girls in 1960s South Korea and beyond.
In Search of a Korean Lesbian Literary History
In 1982, the journalist and writer Yi Tŏk-hŭi published a biography of Chŏn Hye-rin,
whom she had met and built a close relationship with shortly after Chŏn’s return to South Korea
from Germany. The biography was a major commercial success, mostly for the way in which it
offered a much closer and more personal look into the details of Chŏn’s private life that had up
until then not been exposed to the public. What immediately draws the reader’s attention is Yi’s
277
Thérèse Desqueroux is a 1928 novel by François Mauriac that features the homoerotic
friendship between two women.
135
descriptions of the epistolary exchanges that had taken place between herself and the writer not
long before the latter’s passing. The following is one example of a letter from Chŏn that Yi
includes in the biography:
If ever I am to be granted redemption, it would be through you, Céline.
278
C’est toi, qui
m’aideras. Oui, c’est toi, c’est toi. All I remember from that cocktail party we attended
three days ago is you, Céline. Tu es belle, si belle. The color of your hat and your
countenance, your eyes that flash with triumph, just like those of Luise Rinser’s Nina, the
curl of your eyelashes, and your long hair—I cannot tell you how much I missed them. I
missed you so. Je t’adore. How many times I have written such letters only to tear them
up into pieces? This letter will also most likely be torn up—at night, to join the other
countless letters I have written you on drunken nights!
279
By the time Chŏn wrote this letter to Yi in 1963, she had already long been settled into the role
of wife and mother in a normative South Korean middle-class family. With its hyperbolic
language and fervent praise of Yi’s physical beauty, however, this letter is more or less written in
standard love-letter format. It is difficult to gauge what exactly these intense relationships meant
to the women involved. Yi herself leaves the relationship rather vaguely defined, merely stating
how in Chŏn she discovered a source of “deep empathy (kip’ŭn konggam) and intense pleasure
(kangnyŏl han kippŭm)” that she could not find from any of the other people in her life.
280
At the
278
Yi explains in parenthesis that Chŏn often called her by her Catholic baptismal name “Céline”
in their correspondences.
279
Yi Tŏk-hŭi, Chŏn Hye-rin, 66.
280
Ibid., 49.
136
same time, Yi also explains that the majority of their letters consisted of abstract and
philosophical subjects, so much so that despite such feelings of intimacy, the two women had
very little knowledge about the actual details of each other’s day-to-day lives.
281
In any case, the
loving correspondences between the two women show how epistolary relationships with a
female peer continued to hold a significant place in Chŏn’s private life, well beyond her
adolescent years.
In the previous section, I identified the homoerotic bildungsroman of early twentieth
century German and French writers to have had a direct influence on Chŏn Hye-rin’s
nonfictional writings on female adolescent same-sex romance. The style and form of Chŏn’s
letter to Yi Tŏk-hŭi, however, also bears a remarkable resemblance to the following epistolary
essay, published exactly thirty years prior in the colonial period women’s magazine, Sin Yŏsŏng:
S ŏnni! You once told me of the pastoral love story of Romeo and Juliet… How poetic,
two lovers, hand in hand, singing the spring night away without a single worry or want!
Will that happy day ever come for me? …Will you not consider me as your
Juliet? ...Please adore me and love me. Here I write on a sleepless night, as I cannot dare
say such things to you in person…
Yŏng’s letter stretched on for dozens of pages. …But this anguished letter will
most likely not be delivered to her S ŏnni the next day, and instead be torn up and burned
to ashes in the candlelight.
282
281
Ibid., 57-58.
282
Kim Sun-yŏng, “Ŏnni chŏ tallara ro,” 54-55.
137
The two letters are strikingly similar in terms of content and rhetorical style; both employ
hyperbolic, exclamatory language, make allusions to characters in literary texts so as to convey
the intensity of their emotions, and end with an emphasis on the pains of unrequited love for a
female peer. It is perhaps possible, then, to place Chŏn within a longer tradition of women’s
homoromantic writing in modern Korean literary history, one that was dictated by its own unique
conventions and decorum.
The term “S ŏnni” in the Sin Yŏsŏng essay not only anonymizes the addressee of the
letter but also alludes to the so-called “S relationships” that were widely formed among
schoolgirls in colonial Korea.
283
News reports and anecdotal stories about these relationships
proliferated in the popular press in this period, most notably in the magazines and newspapers of
the 1930s. Among them, an article in the November 1930 issue of the magazine Pyŏlgŏn’gon
titled “Stories of Same-sex Love by Women Celebrities” (Yŏryu myŏngsa ŭi tongsŏng yŏnaegi)
particularly stands out; in this piece, Hwang Sin-dŏk claims that “most girls get involved in a
same-sex relationship at least once during their time in school,” while Hŏ Yŏng-suk boasts how
she is “second to none when it comes to the number of same-sex lovers” she had had in her
schoolgirl years.
284
The media frenzy that surrounded the double suicide of Kim Yong-ju and
Hong Og-im, moreover, is also commonly referenced by historians as evidence of the intensity
283
The Latin alphabet “S” in S relationships is assumed to represent the English word “sister.” It
was indeed in many ways a sororal relationship, one in which an older girl (S ŏnni) would
take on a nurturing role for her younger counterpart (S tongsaeng). The German word
Schwesterseele that Chŏn Hye-rin uses in her descriptions of female fellow-feeling could be
considered as another iteration of this tradition.
284
“Yŏryu myŏngsa ŭi tongsŏng yŏnaegi,” 120. Hwang Sin-dŏk was a famous journalist and
educator who later became one of the first female legislators in South Korea. Hŏ Yŏng-suk is
well known as the first female obstetrician in colonial Korea as well as the wife of the
renowned writer Yi Kwang-su.
138
of some of these S relationships as well as the difficulty of its survival into adult womanhood.
285
The general consensus among literary historians who have examined these texts is that S
relationships were indeed quite widely practiced by upper middle-class girls who attended girls’
schools in the colonial period.
Despite the proliferation of discussions on adolescent female same-sex love in the
popular press, it is quite difficult to find texts authored by women and girls who themselves had
been involved in such relationships. “Stories of Same-sex Love by Women Celebrities” are rare
first-person accounts of such experiences, which is precisely why the text is so often referenced
by scholars today. The vast majority of these discussions, however, were led by intellectuals,
journalists, and doctors, who often used pseudo-scientific concepts and terminology to lend
authority to their views on the topic. Girls involved in same-sex relationships, Hyŏn Ru-yŏng
claims, experience intense feelings of attachment, jealousy, and melancholy toward a female
peer, but eventually grow out of such tendencies in the coming stages of their maturation.
286
“Such relationships are essentially harmless,” So Ch’un (Kim Ki-jŏn) also concedes, “so long as
they do not develop into a sexually active relationship.”
287
Same-sex relationships can even be
considered as beneficial to girls, he adds, as they “help the girls to develop their womanly
sensibilities while keeping them away from boys.”
288
As such, schoolgirl intimacies were often
considered a rite of passage for sexually immature girls, one that did not pose any serious threat
285
The double suicide of Kim Yong-ju and Hong Og-im drew much public attention due to the
upper-middle class backgrounds of the two girls. For more details on the circumstances of
their death, see Ha Sin-ae, “Femininity under the Wartime System and the Symptomacity of
Female Same-sex Love,” 148-149; Pak-Ch’a Min-jŏng. Chosŏn ŭi k’wiŏ, 248-271.
286
Hyŏn Ru-yŏng, “Yŏhaksaeng kwa tongsŏngae munje,” 20.
287
So Ch’un, “Yo ttae ŭi chosŏn sin yŏja,” 58.
288
Ibid., 58.
139
to the normative family unit. Needless to say, the voices of girls who were actually involved in
such relationships remain entirely absent from such discussions.
One thing that must be noted here is how female adolescent same-sex attraction is a
phenomenon that is not particularly unique to the colonial Korean context. The “rave” culture of
schoolgirls in Edwardian England as well as the practice of “smashing” in late nineteenth century
American women’s colleges are often mentioned by scholars as points of comparison.
289
The
form and sentiment of “Dear Sister,” moreover, should be quite familiar to scholars of Japanese
and Chinese girls’ studies, since same-sex intimacies between schoolgirls can be commonly
discovered in their respective histories as well. In fact, the term “S relationship” itself first
emerged from girls’ schools in prewar Japan, before spreading to East Asian colonies through
the dissemination of Japanese girls’ magazines and novels. The S relationships found in colonial
Korean girls’ schools, then, could be considered to have been strongly influenced by the
transnational flow of girl cultures among East Asian nations in the early twentieth century. This
means that the scholarship on S relationships in the field Korean girls’ studies could benefit
greatly by engaging with preexisting scholarship on schoolgirl same-sex intimacies produced by
Japanese and Chinese girls’ studies scholars.
Much of East Asian studies scholarship on early twentieth-century S relationships and
their historical offshoots seeks to locate in this unique cultural formation a seed for queer or
feminist resistance against the hetero-patriarchal structures of their respective societies. In her
reading of the homoerotic literature of Yoshiya Nobuko, for example, Michiko Suzuki suggests
that the same-sex-loving girls in Yoshiya’s fictional writings are “resistant figures who refuse to
289
The first scholar who made this comparison is Gregory M. Pflugfelder, in “‘S’ is for Sister,”
133.
140
move on to heterosexuality [and] reject society’s demands for girls to mature into compliant,
heterosexual Good Wives, Wise Mothers.”
290
In her book, Backward Glances, moreover, Fran
Martin argues that embedded in the nostalgic Chinese schoolgirl (same-sex) romance narrative is
a critique of the “social imposition of hetero-marital relations upon young women as a condition
of feminine adulthood.”
291
A similar type of approach can be found in Korean studies
scholarship on adolescent female same-sex attraction as well. Pei Jean Chen, for example, uses
Lee Edelman’s theories of queer negativity to argue that the double suicides of young women
such as Kim Yong-ju and Hong Og-im in the 1930s were themselves a form of violent protest
against the “reproductive futurism” of colonial Korean society.
292
These scholars, then, discover
in the literary trope of schoolgirl same-sex love a certain potential to challenge the patriarchal
status quo through a rejection of the teleological narrative of female maturation.
Inhering in such queer and feminist readings is the desire to discover from the past
models of anti-hetero-patriarchal dissent that are relevant to the political needs of the present-day
moment. However, some scholars have argued that this desire to locate in historical instances of
female same-sex relationships the kind of subversive or countercultural qualities we see in
contemporary lesbian identity ends up obscuring the historical and cultural specificities of the
phenomenon at hand. Deborah Shamoon has been particularly vocal in critiquing Western
scholars who romanticize the S relationships in prewar Japanese girls’ literature e as a rebellion
against heteronormativity. Within the social context of Shōwa Japan, she argues, “S relationships
were not necessarily pathologized, nor were they subversive, but rather mimicked heterosexual
290
Suzuki, Michiko, Becoming Modern Women, 38.
291
Martin, Fran, Backward Glances, 7.
292
Chen, Pei Jean, “Problematizing Love,” 134.
141
courtship in a safe, socially acceptable way.”
293
Such debates are not unique to the field of
Japanese studies; as Valerie Traub insightfully points out, lesbian historiography as a
methodology has always oscillated between the “continuist” and “alterist” views of history.
294
While scholars who take on a continuist approach would focus on similarities between past
forms of female same-sex desires and the present-day lesbian experience, those who emphasize
historical alterity would forego any such transhistorical approaches to the subject. I agree with
Traub that there is way in which the stand-off between these two positions has exhausted its
scholarly utility; what the practice of lesbian history truly requires is to recognize the intellectual
and political salience of both approaches and to make use of them with critical self-awareness
and sensitivity.
How might we envision a Korean lesbian history that remains faithful to the archive as
well as aspirational of a transformative politics? I suggest that Paek Chong-ryun’s “The
Genealogy of the Modern Korean Queer Narrative” (Han’guk kŭndae k’wiŏ sŏsa ŭi kyebohak) is
an exciting example of how such scholarship can be done. This 2019 study is to date one of the
most insightful and comprehensive examinations of representations of same-sex desire in Korean
literature from the colonial period. The construction of a queer Korean literary archive, Paek
argues, must not been seen merely as an attempt to impose romanticized notions of queer
resistance onto texts from the past; it is a project that is propelled by the contemporary queer
reader’s desire to find points of identification within the literary history of one’s own
language.
295
The problem with alterist approaches to history such as that of Shamoon is that it
fails to recognize the urgency of this desire for history among the queer population today. In that
293
Shamoon, Deborah, Passionate Friendships, 36.
294
Traub, Valerie, “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography,” 124.
295
Paek Chong-ryun, “Han’guk kŭndae k’wiŏ sŏsa ŭi kyebohak,” 206.
142
sense, Paik’s approach is generative for the way in which it self-consciously positions the
present-day queer Korean subject at the center of his historical methodology. As such, his work
is a conducive example of a queer Korean historiography that places the past in conversation
with the present while remaining mindful of the historical differences that divide the former from
our contemporary selves.
Keeping this in mind, I now examine how female same-sex desire was discussed and
represented in writings from the postcolonial period. Women’s literature from the 1950s and 60s
is an archive that remains relatively underexplored in scholarship on female homosexuality, as
the majority of discussions have tended to take place around texts that were produced either in
the colonial period or the post-1990s contemporary moment. This oversight is rather unfortunate,
since the literature of this period is actually replete with texts that attest to the survival of S
relationships into the postcolonial period. First of all, women writers who had attended girls’
schools during the later years of the colonial period found new opportunities to publish semi-
autobiographical works based on their memories of S relationships. Ch’oe Chŏng-hŭi’s The
Green Door (Noksaek ŭi mun, 1953) is one such example; the earlier chapters of the novel are
largely centered on the homoerotic relationships between its main girl characters, a theme that
Ch’oe had begun to tentatively explore in the propagandist short stories she had written for the
Japanese war effort.
296
Pak Kyŏng-ni’s Days of Illusion (Hwansang ŭi sigi, 1963) is another
woefully under-researched text, in which the girl protagonist Mini chronicles a series of events
that occur when she develops a secret infatuation for a Japanese girl in her school. In these
works, recollections of girlhood are largely structured by feelings of nostalgia and longing, thus
296
Here I am referring to “Yŏmyŏng,” a short story that was published in the May 1942 issue of
the magazine Yadam. For an in-depth reading of “Yŏmyŏng,” see Ha Sin-ae, “Femininity
under the Wartime System and the Symptomacity of Female Same-sex Love.”
143
betraying the writers’ desire to resurrect their treasured memories of schoolgirl intimacies from
the erosive force of time.
Meanwhile, the 1950s and 60s in South Korea was also a time in which homosexuality
was increasingly becoming the target of pathologization and social marginalization under the
capitalist patriarchy of Cold War authoritarian regimes. As Todd Henry insightfully illustrates
through his examination of commercial weeklies (chuganji) of the 1960s, female same-sex
couples were displayed in the mass media as “cautionary tales” intended to warn normative
middle-class readers of the suffering and moral deprivation caused by sexual deviance.
297
The
couples that appeared in these articles mostly consisted of working-class women who had to
support themselves with ill-paid jobs after being ostracized from their natal families. Due to such
unfavorable portrayals of same-sex relationships, terms such as “tongsŏngae” or “tongsŏng
yŏnae” (same-sex love) came to acquire the kinds of negative connotations that were attached to
the word “homosexuality” in the West at the time. These were connotations that did not
previously exist when the terms had been used to describe the S relationships in colonial Korean
girls’ schools. Although they were written and published at the same time as these articles, then,
the nostalgic narratives of schoolgirl romance in works such as The Green Door and Days of
Illusion were quite divorced from the bleak reality that actually surrounded the lives of same-
sex-loving women in this period.
How might the writings of Chŏn Hye-rin be positioned within this historical context?
Interestingly, there is one instance in which the writer mentions the word homosexuality
(tongsŏngae) in her journals. After returning to Korea from Germany in 1959, Chŏn kept herself
busy with adjunct teaching positions, while actively contributing her translations of German
297
Henry, Todd, “Queer Lives as Cautionary Tales,” 208.
144
literature to various publication outlets. In the year 1961, she was finally appointed to the
position of assistant professor in the German literature department of Sŏnggyun’gwan
University. What her letter to Yi Tŏk-hui in 1962 reveals, however, is the fact that she was also
exploring ideas for her own first novel during this same period:
The novel that I plan to write is something like this. A deranged family, where everyone
(the parents and their children) is full of hatred for one another. I’m not entirely sure why
I keep coming up with these outlandish stories. I think it’s because my own soul is
craving for something stimulating and provocative. My days are as monotonous and
uninspiring as a law book. But I guess everyone’s lives are like this….
298
A February 1961 entry from her journal further reveals a skeletal plot and character sketches that
Chŏn was working with for this story:
The characters that will form the basis of my novel:
1. A married couple who despises each other.
2. Their children, who also hate one another. The relationship between the children and
their parents are also equally bad.
3. Cause: genetics, innate personalities, their social environment
4. The novel’s tone: nihilistic
The couple: low-ranking government officials (police)
298
Yi Tŏk-hui, Chŏn Hye-rin, 255.
145
Father: stingy, licentious, violent
Mother: vulgar, wasteful, mean
Son: alcoholic, homosexual, kleptomaniac
Daughter: neurotic, homosexual, alcoholic, debaucherous.
299
The homosexuality that Chŏn assigns to the son and daughter character of this unpublished story
is clearly meant to represent the mental illness and moral degeneration that runs in the family.
What is also evident is that Chŏn would never have considered using the word to describe the
homoromantic feelings that she herself had harbored for her female peers at various stages in her
life.
From the 1960s onward, representations of female same-sex desire in South Korean
women’s writing tends to fall on either side of this conceptual divide between “deviant”
homosexuality and platonic same-sex romance. O Chŏng-hŭi’s “The Toy Shop Woman”
(Wan’gujŏm yŏin, 1968) and An Il-ssun’s Mudflats (Ppaetpŏl, 1995), for example, are texts that
place female characters in homosexual relationships to explore the interiority of deviant or
socially marginalized women. Within such stories, homosexual female characters take on the
kind of subversive and minoritarian identity that can be found in contemporary formations of
lesbianism. For this reason, scholars often read these texts through theoretical frameworks
developed by lesbian feminists in the 1980s, such as Adrienne Rich’s concept of the lesbian
continuum as a form of female alliance against patriarchy.
300
299
Ibid., 255.
300
For an example of this kind of reading, see Jin-kyung Lee, Service Economies, 158.
146
Meanwhile, Sin Kyŏng-suk’s The Solitary Room (Oettan pang, 1995) is a novel that
inherits Chŏn Hye-rin’s representations of adolescent same-sex romance as a platonic and
spiritual form of love. The homoromantic feelings that the semi-autobiographical girl protagonist
Kyŏng-suk feels toward her friend Hee-jae do not signify any type of marginalized identity or
feminist dissent; such feelings, as Ruth Barraclough rightfully confirms, were “at the heart of
normative institutions and discourses about family, love, and productivity” within the gender-
segregated environment of factory workplaces and high schools in developmentalist South
Korea.
301
For this reason, Barraclough reads the intense yet platonic love between Kyŏng-suk
and Hee-jae as an attestation to the way in which working-class girls in this period themselves
sought to contain their sexual desires within the boundaries of a pure and virtuous love.
302
But
must non-sexual forms of romantic bonding always be considered as a result of sexual repression
and self-censorship? Perhaps the disembodied spirituality of the love that Kyŏng-suk felt for
Hee-jae was precisely what offered certain types of erotic meaning and pleasure that she simply
could not have obtained in a corporeal relationship. In this sense, Sin Kyŏng-suk’s is, along with
Chŏn Hye-rin, another postcolonial woman writer who inherits the idealism that characterized
colonial period treatises on spiritual love in order to articulate her own adolescent experiences of
homoromantic bonding.
301
Barraclough, Ruth, Factory Girl Literature, 119.
302
Ibid., 133.
147
Coda
In this dissertation, I have traced the historical emergence of a girls’ culture in South
Korea, one whose aesthetics and sensibilities were centered on idealized notions of sexual and
spiritual purity. I have also shown how this girls’ aesthetic and sensibility was taken up by South
Korean women writers such as No Chŏn-myŏng and Chŏn Hye-rin to articulate the contours of
non-heterosexual female pleasures and desires. The female embrace of purity that we find in
these texts raises a difficult question: why would women invest their aesthetic and political
aspirations in an ideal that in many ways historically embodies the masculinist intent to deprive
women of their sexual agency? Admittedly, this is a question that I have asked myself numerous
times when reflecting on my own undying love of popular girls’ comics and K-pop girl groups.
Why do I remain so attached to clichéd stories and images of purity and innocence that constitute
these cultural products? Does this prolonged attachment to girl culture attest to some form of
unconscious sexual self-censorship on my part, an internalization of normative restrictions
placed against the expression of female sexual desire?
In my future research, I hope to offer better answers to such questions by examining girl
aesthetics and sensibilities in contemporary South Korean literature and popular culture. South
Korean girls’ comics, for example, is itself a complex and fascinating archive that cannot simply
be reduced as a form of false consciousness. Perhaps relevant to the purpose of this dissertation
is the fact that the genre has, since the 1980s, taken on the moniker of sunjŏng manhwa. In this
context, the word sunjŏng—which can roughly be translated into English as “pure feeling”—
connotes the unique affective response that girls’ comics elicits from their readers through its
148
sentimentalist portrayals of a pure and everlasting love between boy and girl.
303
With this, I now
return to Like a Lady, the poetry collection by Pak Sang-su that I discussed in the opening pages
of this dissertation. In her review of Like a Lady, the critic Yun Kyŏng-hŭi praises Pak Sang-su
for his unique poetic articulation of sunjŏng, which she describes as a “distinct Korean pathos”
that is “nearly impossible to translate into other languages.”
304
She writes:
Sunjŏng originates from the fantasy world of manhwa (comics)… The schoolyard
romance of Yi Hye-sun, Kim Tong-hwa, and Ikeda Riyoko, the pre-adolescent
melodrama of Yi Hŭi-jae and Yi Sang-mu, and the girls’ comics magazine Renaissance
and its successors…. Sunjŏng, at least that of the later decades in twentieth century South
Korea, is an affective state that cannot be understood without discussing this so-called
“ninth art” form, its distribution process and main readership.
305
In this excerpt, Yun traces the genealogy of Pak Sang-su’s poetics back to the aesthetics and
sensibilities of 1980s’ girls’ comics. What is especially insightful about Yun’s review of Like a
Lady, however, is the way she sheds light on the intimate relationship between pure feeling
(sunjŏng) and the abject (oesŏl):
Sunjŏng is an affect that is born, ironically, out of abjection, the subterranean comics
cafés (manhwa bang) in the impoverished outskirts of the city. In the darkness of that
303
For more details on the history of sunjŏng manhwa, see Sŏ Ŭn-yŏng, “Sunjŏng changnŭ ŭi
sŏngnip kwa sunjŏng manhwa.”
304
Yun Kyŏng-hŭi, “Sunjŏng kwa oesŏl,” 335.
305
Ibid., 335.
149
shady and illicit space, we experienced our souls being uplifted to a world of purity and
beauty… There we immersed ourselves in exotic images and sentimental stories, if only
to protect our vulnerable bodies and souls from the real world, which was full of poverty
and violence. How we thirsted to remain in that world of beauty, away from all the
sorrow and rage….
306
As Yun succinctly articulates, the world of girls’ comics was one that was full of “exotic images
and sentimental stories,” far removed from the “poverty and violence” that girls such as herself
were exposed to while they were growing up under the postcolonial authoritarian regimes of
South Korea. It could be said, then, that pure feeling was an affective register that many girls
chose to dwell in so as to escape the bleak realities of capitalist patriarchy and authoritarianism
in Cold War South Korea. It offered to them a cocoon-like space in which they could incubate
their dreams for another world.
In short, the longing for purity that characterizes representations of romantic love in
modern and contemporary Korean literature illustrates how idealism is not always a luxury only
afforded to the privileged classes. Clinging to a seemingly impossible ideal such as purity is,
sometimes, the only place where the most disenfranchised members of a society can find solace.
I suggest, moreover, that the unique girl aesthetics and sensibilities that were developed around
the ideal of purity are increasingly acquiring queer meanings and significations in their present-
day iterations. One example of this could be found in the queer community that has formed
around the fandom for K-pop girl groups. These fandoms have become a breeding ground for the
effeminate gay boys and young dykes of contemporary South Korea. What unites these two
306
Yun Kyŏng-hŭi, “Sunjŏng kwa oesŏl,” 336.
150
seemingly disparate groups is, I suggest, an embrace of the girl aesthetic that the performers
embody. Through their YouTube dance tributes and femslash fiction, queer fans repurpose this
aesthetic into kitschy—yet earnestly devotional—art forms that can be enjoyed together with
other members in their community. If there ever is a reason why homoromantic women’s writing
such as that of Chŏn Hye-rin and Shin Kyŏng-sook should be considered as part of the archive of
queer South Korean literature is not so much because it represents the lesbian experience of
female homosexual desires and pleasures, but rather for the contributions they made to the
emergence of sunjŏng as a queer structure of feeling in contemporary South Korean culture.
151
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
Purity is often deemed as a concept that is fundamentally antithetical to an emancipatory politics and its principles of heterogeneity and inclusiveness. This dissertation argues that purity deserves to be reconsidered as an expansive discourse that generated a wide array of political effects in South Korea. It takes as a starting point the literary trope of the girl, whose virginal body was fetishized as the very embodiment of purity within nationalist discourses both before and after Japanese colonization. However, a closer examination of South Korean girls’ magazines, canonical literary texts, and critically neglected popular nonfiction by women writers reveals how many girls and women were also deeply invested in the idealization and aestheticization of female adolescent purity. In these texts, new sexual positions and pleasure regimes are developed not only against the ideal of female sexual purity but often times with and around it. The girls’ magazine Yŏhaksaeng (1949-1950), for example, shows how girls in this period drew inspiration from Catholic discourses of virginity to celebrate the physical and spiritual purity of girlhood. In her poetry and essays, No Chŏn-myŏng (1912-1957) further develops out of this cult of Catholic virginity a distinct poetics of celibacy that is centered on the pleasures and eroticism of ascesis. Another key aspect of South Korean girlhood that is discussed in this dissertation is the prevalence of female same-sex romance in literature for and about girls from the colonial period onward. The idealization of schoolgirl intimacies in the popular essays of Chŏn Hye-rin, moreover, calls for a deeper contemplation on how to locate representations of same-sex loving girls within a South Korean lesbian literary history. ❧ The erotic practices of female celibacy and homoromanticism that emerged out of South Korean girl culture force us to reconsider the feminist critique of purity as an unequivocally oppressive ideology that was mobilized for the regulation of female sexuality. It also challenges the more general assumption that purity is synonymous to political inaction or conservatism, a view that was upheld by leftist nationalist writers and intellectuals since the colonial period. By illustrating the ways in which non-heterosexual female desires were culturally articulated through the figure of the virginal girl, my dissertation ultimately questions how we define compliance and resistance, tradition and modernity, and queerness and normativity within ethno-nationalist, Cold War developmentalist and neoliberal regimes such as those of South Korea.
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Creator
Eo, Kyunghee
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Core Title
Politics of purity: the making of girlhood in South Korean literature
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College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
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English
Degree Conferral Date
2021-12
Publication Date
09/25/2023
Defense Date
06/03/2021
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Celibacy,Chŏn Hyerin,girls' magazines (sonyŏ chapchi),No Ch'ŏnmyŏng,OAI-PMH Harvest,same-sex love (tongsŏngae),sexual purity
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Tags
Chŏn Hyerin
girls' magazines (sonyŏ chapchi)
No Ch'ŏnmyŏng
same-sex love (tongsŏngae)
sexual purity