박완서의 단편소설에 나타난 음식의 문학적 재현과 의미

초록

This study set out to investigate the patterns of connections between the social environment and women’s self-consciousness in Park Wan-seo’s novels based on the literary reproductions of foods in her works. Recognizing that the writer approached her writing from the viewpoint of women’s lives from her debut work in 1970 to her last novel encompassing life after the Korean War, modernity, and industrialization process, the study focused on food culture, which was the most important in a microscopic approach. The present study examined the literary reproduction patterns of food in Park Wan-seo’s novels by the topic with the publication timing of her works on mind. The study was based on an inference that there would be correlations between changes to her consciousness as a writer according to changes to her social environment and the reproduction patterns of food in her works reflecting these changes even though it did not delve into the correlations thoroughly. In her short stories, various food discourses can be categorized in four meanings. Some of the patterns overlap between her works, but the highlighted ones indicate that the depiction of life of the middle class was overwhelming in the 1970s. Entering the 1980s and 1990s, the narratives stand out which exhibit homesickness for the fixed division of North and South Korea along with the writer’s attention to the life of the elderly. In these narratives, food becomes a medium to stir affectionate feelings in the homesick displaced people in old age and serves as consolation and treatment for the lives of the elderly suffering loneliness and illness. There is a need to pay attention to the last literary reproduction of food in the 1980s and 1990s as it deals with women in old age. It reflects on family issues derived from the diseases of elderly women and the meanings of human beings. This differentiates Park’s food from that of other female writers that were actively creative in the South Korean literary circles since the middle 1990s. Based on her years of experiences as a writer, Park shows the issues of old age and death through food and expands them to the orientation toward human values and the significance of human dignity. By implementing a narrative strategy of reproducing food in a literary fashion, Park offers meaningful expressions of the changing patterns of women’s consciousness of the times along with her superb descriptions of daily life. She demonstrates that the successful embodiment of novels of manners derives from writing that does not neglect plain aspects and symbolic meanings implicated in ordinary dailiness.

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