We hope that more diverse interests will arise in the novels by Park Gye-hyeong By looking at writers and works in time, we identified the key element of Park Gye-hyeong’s novels as ‘romantic’. Romantic nature of this time is lyrical, sentimental, spiritual, unrealistic and idealistic. Based on a romantic understanding of the world, the core sanction of the novel is love, focusing on feelings of sadness, and on the aspects of joy, separation, and pain that arise from loving relationships rather than the aspects of joy. Based on the feelings of grief, the novels end with failure, death and betrayal, thus embodying tragic romanticism.
Before her marriage, Park Gye-hyeong’s novels were love stories that revealed her longing for beautiful love based on sensibility. The idyllic world and longing for nature reveal a romantic world-view. Ultimately, it is a fictional worldview that the author seeks to despair and long for, and to find the sincerity and morality of love in an environment that does not. Park Gye-hyeong, who became a housewife, expressed that she wanted to write a piece that can give readers a sense of nostalgia by embodying “romance at a high level,” not “sentimental.” In subsequent works, physical relationships are treated as failures of love and spiritual relationships as the fruit of love, revealing the lofty spirituality, idealistic longing and religious nature of love.
Park Gye-hyeong confessed her shame about her previous work when she published a new one after more than two decades of writing. And after more than two decades of reflection, her new novel had a new theme of “recovering destroyed humanity.” However, the search for “humanity” in the two novels released after the write-off tends to be somewhat hasty at the end of the novel. The question of human nature, sin and forgiveness, is the next best thing to save as a way of life, rather than as a result of the intense inner agony and behavior of the characters within the narrative, and this also shows a sudden shift in religiousness at the end of the novel. Therefore, the romantic meaning of the superficial is superficial.