Missing Partners: Single Motherhood in Korean Literature and Film of the Japanese Colonial Period

Abstract

This essay examines the single mother figures in Yom Sang-seop’s novel Three Generations (Samdae, 1931, 2005) and Bak Gi-chae’s film The Straits of Joseon (1943) against the backdrop of the late colonial period when the Japanese colonial government was beginning to exercise increasingly more repressive policies of assimilation (doka) and imperialization (kominka/hwangminhwa). By exploring the various levels of social antagonisms involving the single mother and her missing partner in these texts, I unveil the system of social hypocrisy which at once deprived and over-assigned the nation to these women who lacked the socio-economic and family structure in the first place.