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Study on Impossibility of Mourning in Park Wan - seo's Novels - With Focus on the Mother - Daughter Relationship in 'The Naked Tree' -

kim mi young 1

1전북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

A primary axis which underlies the works by Park Wan-seo is “war, trauma, and mourning.” The components of the axis are interlinked with one another, with “mourning” as a destination. Especially, the death of a “brother” carries an important weight in Park Wan-seo's works. However, death is not the essence of her narratives. Rather, one should try to understand why the person having experienced a loss cannot come out of the mourning. The purpose of the present study is to examine the loss of those who survived and the impossibility for them to completely leave behind the sorrow through the relationship between mother and daughter. The mother in 'The Naked Tree' exerts a negative influence on the narrator in establishing her self-identity. In the present study, the mother's way to mourn deaths was interpreted from a Freudian approach to depression, while a reason why not only the mother but also the narrator could not end the mourning was examined from Melanie Klein's object relations theory. The mother whose mourning had not yet ended did not bring herself to take care of the narrator. And, the narrator, whose existence was ignored, was feeling ambivalent toward her mother, at the same time loving her and hating her, and resenting her, and clinging to her and rejecting her. Furthermore, the narrator was experiencing anxiety because of the “lost intimate relationship with the mother.” With her mother's death, however, the narrator realized that she was both a bad and good mother, a frustrating but at the same time fulfilling mother, and an absent and yet present mother. Consequently, the narrator came to believe that her mother was both an imperfect being and good mother, and decided to remove her ambivalent feelings toward her mother. According to Klein, the birth of a mature self, i.e., an “Subject,” begins at the very moment of loss. From a depressive position, the narrator could perceive her mother as a whole and accept her mother's imperfection. But, at the moment when the views on her mother were consolidated and an integrated, positive view emerged, the narrator found her “physical” mother was already dead. As it is already after she lost her mother, Lee Kyung, the narrator, could not end her mourning, either. Park Wan-seo started writing as a way to overcome the wound left by the Korean War. Also, we speculate that she, as a victim of the war and a witness of the history, could not help but contemplating the wound repeatedly. In the process, a loss of an object iteratively reappeared and transfigured, because the working of mourning over loss which was not completely finished underlies her works. From this perspective, Park Wan-seo's 'The Naked Tree' has significance as a prototype of death and loss motives which have constantly varied in her later works.

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