Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the colonialist conditions under which the movement of women at the time is being politicized through Kim Mal-bong’s novel, which secured a unique status as a popular writer in the 1930s, and to examine how the privileged position of women who were able to travel caused cracks in the male order. In this process, as travel, a representative form of women’s movement, became epic, the topography of movement, in which the relationship between race, gender, and class is newly rearranged, was explored through the gender composition and intersection of urban space. Kim Mal-bong experimented with the politics that the narrative style of popularity can imply through the mobility gap between a governess who moved to another’s mansion to engage in caring and emotional labor while bound to the realm of livelihood (=Oikos) and a finite class woman who brutally disrupted the balance and order of colonial cities. In the course of the experiment, he also revealed that the order of male society, which internalized imperial patriarchy, was not only a tension between class consciousness and gender categories, but also a false consciousness formed by intersecting with national issues. This is thought to have led to the exploration of how the long-standing practice of colonial women’s movement, which had been dealt with in terms of cultural enjoyment, was imaged as a vulgar act in public consciousness, and conversely, the travel of such secularized women was perceived as a crisis of the times that would undermine men’s social authority. In order for women’s movement and travel to be carried out, the movement of low-ranking subjects had to be managed. However, in Joseon in the 1930s, the cultural enjoyment of the privileged class of free movement exposed the duality that worked on the horizon of class, gender, and race. The social character of the aesthetic irony caused by the duality was represented through Kim Mal-bong’s novel.