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A Study on Ways of Care Perception Expressed in Park Wan Seo Novels

kim mi young 1

1전북대학교

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ABSTRACT

The Study focuses on women’s caring labor described in Park WanSeo’s novel 『Beginning of Alive Days』, 「She knows, I know, and Heavenknows」 and 「The Trance of Falling Sun」, 「Kindhearted Bokhee」. Untilnow, women’s caring labor has been recognized natural. However, whenit comes to women being subjected to receive caring, they tend to berejected. Main characters of aforementioned novels are dedicated to caringwhen they are “provider”, in the name of love, and when they become“receiver” of such care, they are rejected due to family power structure. This serves as an momentum for the female characters to become awareof their identity, questioning their caring relationship. The changes in the perception experienced by women in carrying outtheir care labor can be examined from Carol Gilligan's perspective onethics of care. Gilligan says moral judgments centering around care, relationship, and responsibility to make a determination of actions. Inaddition, she goes further even to the change in the perception of thatwomen are not such the being having obligations only to provide care,but they themselves are also supposed be the object of care. Thissuggests that the ethics of self care could be an alternative whenwomen try to overcome the violence of the patriarchal system they aresuffering while carrying out their care labor and seek for the possibility of gender dissolution. This study intended to look into the ways of care perception expressedin Park Wan Seo novels by classifying them into periods. In her novelsin the 1970s, female characters are expressed as the ones who becomeconscious of the duplicity inherent in the patriarchal system whilefeeling suppression, anger under their distorted and interdependent caringsituations. And in the 1980s, female characters show a change in theirperception of that they enter into a symbiotic relationship with their caredependents based on a trust and recognize themselves as a personentitled to be cared in such interdependent relationships. At this moment,the candidness inherent in the personal integrity emphasized by Gilliganworks as a counterstrategy to restore the identity damaged in the processof care labor. Lastly, this study sorted her novels out of the ones in the2000s as the works showing similar in terms of structure to the contentscovered in the ones in the 1970s and noted the changes in the perceptionwith the passage of the time. Female characters attempt to recover theiridentity by choosing self-reliance through some changes in theirperception to embrace their life positively. Thus, this study was able to find out that those female charactersexpressed in Park Wan Seo novels acquire the possibility of self care bymeans of a gender dissolution attempted under their caring situations. Park Wan Seo novels suggest that women can realize the ethics of selfcare while acknowledging their own existence in their caring process andcarrying out interdependent care ethics.

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