ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper is an attempt to introduce and reevaluate Jeon Byung-soon’s newspaper-linked novel “Dogsinnyeo”(A Single Woman, 1966). This novel is not well known because it is a popular novel in the 1960s and is a work of a female writer. However, if you read this work again from a feminist perspective, you can see that it is a unique work that questioned the family planning policy based on birth control and eugenics in the 1960s-1970s. Eugenics was a way of forming an authoritarian state, as representative of Nazi or Japanese imperial eugenics. Eugenics, which controls the quality of the population through racial discrimination and exclusion, tried to explain and naturalize the hierarchy of life in a scientific way. In Korea, eugenics, introduced during the colonial period, is summoned back to the core logic of population policy in the 1960s by family planning for industrialization and birth control policies. The story of the female protagonist’s choice of positive eugenics with this issue to the fore is “Doksinnyeo.” It consists of a unique narrative that says that she will choose superior genetic factors to have children and live as a single woman with a child. It emphasizes women’s right to self-determination by transforming the process of love and marriage, pregnancy and childbirth under a patriarchal system into a narrative of choice. In current terms, it corresponds to a non-marital birth narrative. Walla, the protagonist, realizes that the eugenic choice was foolish and ends up being reborn as a motherhood that embraces a child with love. However, it is important that popular novels are a place where the ruling and resistance ideologies compete and negotiate. This is because it reflects the popular desires of the time. This work also does not completely deviate from the conservative maternal ideology of the time and the patriarchal family ideology of the inheritance of bloodlines. Thus, in the superficial narrative, the patriarchal family ideology seems to be restored. However, the subversive of this work is to experiment with the possibility of a maternal ideology that emerges as a resistance ideology in the depths. The ending, in which the optimistic ending presents the future that the three children with different fathers, the main character Walla, and her adoptive mother will build together, suggests that this work raises fundamental problems with the patriarchal family system and reproduction control.

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