Abstract

Despite receiving significant popular acclaim as a work by Jeon Byeong-sun, a representative female novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, Lady of the Mist (AngaeBuin) has been evaluated merely as a derivative of Jeong Bi-seok’s Madame Freedom (JayuBuin) and as a conventional work dealing with the infidelities of leisured women. However, Lady of the Mist captured readers’ interest through its narrative variation according to the circumstances of its era, which differed from the familiar conventional narratives de- rived from the social context of “Madame Freedom” as a synonym for leisured ladies or liberated women. Lady of the Mist is a narrative that invoked the liberation and awakening of the female subject as the Other before feminist discourse became established in Korean society. Through the portrayal of a transgressive female protagonist who possesses desires for liberation as the Other of the male subject, as well as the desires of a sexual subject within the socio-economic conditions of existence for women in the 1960s, the work reveals issues concerning sexual desire as an autonomous woman, female autonomy as a subject, and the problems of the modern family system and gen- der role ideology that position women in subordinate places. It holds particular significance in that it anticipated the issues of identity and awakening of the female subject as the Other of men raised in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, at a time in the 1960s when feminism and women’s literature had not yet been fully received in Korea.