earticle

영어

This study investigates how Korean traditional family consciousness interacts with Korean industrialization in the 1970s. In Our Children, Lee Sun depicts a family's struggle within the turmoil brought about by rapid industrialization to escape from the ranks of the working class. It is well known that one of the consequences of industrialization was the breakup of the larger family structure into nuclear families, but Lee Sun presents Korea's industrialization in the 1970s in the light of the traditional Korean family culture before the breakup. In other words, he gives us a portrayal of Gemeinschaft in Gesellschaft in his description of the extended family's struggle to overcome the day-to-day pressures of modernization and urbanization. The novel presents three generations of a traditional extended family. The eldest son is portrayed as a knife, strong and sharp. His wife has a temporary job that she hopes to give up once they own a house, which symbolizes the family's escape from the working class. The relationship among the family members reveals the core aspects of the ideology governing traditional extended families: the husband is the despotic monarch of the household, solely responsible for the family's economy; the husband is the sky and the wife the earth; and children (the more the better) are expected to lead to stability, welfare, and prosperity. One curious aspect of this family relationship as portrayed by Lee Sun is the expectation that being the eldest son, who already is or will become the patriarch of the family, is the fastest way of reaching middle-class status. And, despite a slight reversal, the novel has a happy ending wherein the family's expectations are fulfilled without much suffering. This aspect should be considered in light of the revolutionary romantic idealism of the novels of the 1930s. The lack of suffering and the easy happy ending may be attributed to the fact that Korea's industrialization came about rapidly and radically, and therefore it is likely that Lee Sun was not able fully to appreciate the full costs of industrialization. This limitation calls for a deeper investigation into the social structure and class consciousness of the 1970s, and also a study of the intertextual relationship of Our Children with other novels of the time.