ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article aims to clarify Jeon Hye-rin’s contemplation on motherhood, focusing on her diaries. By examining both her unpublished diaries and the ‘Childcare Diaries’ serialized in Family Life, the study seeks to more thoroughly explore Jeon Hye-rin’s thought process, while elucidating the significance of the diary format in public writing. Jeon Hye-rin’s diaries intricately detail the turmoil of emotions surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. They narrate a rejection of motherhood through feelings of anxiety, fear, and disgust, while simultaneously mentioning happiness, awe, and the importance of maternal love. Her contemplation is reflected through spontaneous and incidental emotions and a series of inconsistent thoughts that arise from her experiences. This narrative style is effectively conveyed through the diary format, which is based on personal experience. The diary, an open and unrestricted form, allows for the portrayal of fickle and inconsistent thoughts, various desires, and unrefined views. The myriad questions and musings that arise from her experiences as a daughter and a mother are more richly revealed through the diary format. Questions left unanswered in her experiences, feelings of powerlessness, frustration, anger, and disgust, are born from a collision with the socially defined conventions of womanhood, including motherhood. In this context, the emotions encountered in the process of discovering her unique way of becoming a mother can be considered. This approach does not seek to conceptually redefine motherhood but suggests that motherhood should not be standardized and needs to be considered on an individual level. The diary, as an open and flexible format, maintains the meaning of motherhood in an indefinite and fluid state. Such contemplation critiques and subverts the 1960s discourse on motherhood. Jeon Hye-rin’s ‘Childcare Diary’ is significant in her literary world as it reveals her reflections on motherhood while delving into the significance of the literary form of the diary.

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