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Women’s Time and Deferred Redemption - Kim Mal-bong’s The Lineage of the Sun as a Wartime Romance Narrative

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(2), pp.317~356
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.2.009
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : May 10, 2026
  • Accepted : June 15, 2026
  • Published : June 30, 2026

PIAO YUEXIANG 1

1성균관대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines Kim Mal-bong’s The Lineage of the Sun not simply as a wartime melodrama or a popular romance novel, but as a text that reveals the gendered structure of time within a wartime romance narrative. The study focuses on how women’s waiting, labor, emotional adjustment, and maintenance of relationships do not function as a passive time of devotion that guarantees male return. Rather, they operate as a time that defers and reexamines the meaning of male decision, departure, and redemption. The article first analyzes how male passion is staged through the intensity of the present moment and the affirmation of the self. It then examines how guilt, which emerges after the failure of love, does not remain within the sphere of relational responsibility but is transferred into the language of departure and sacrifice. In this novel, however, guilt and departure are not immediately approved as redemption. Female characters continue to regulate their emotions, sustain everyday life, and leave open the question of whether male choice can truly restore a damaged relationship. In particular, Shin-hui’s labor and waiting should not be read as signs of devotion or sublime endurance. They constitute a form of time that sustains wartime life while withholding the final meaning of the relationship. Through this analysis, the article argues that The Lineage of the Sun moves beyond the repetition of popular sentiment and asks upon whose labor and waiting postwar life is sustained. Kim Mal-bong’s wartime romance narrative presents male passion and decision in a compelling form, yet it also shows that their meaning must be tested within women’s sustained time. In this sense, The Lineage of the Sun can be reevaluated as a work that reveals both gendered temporality and a feminist literary consciousness within the form of wartime melodrama.

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