Words in Silence: An Exercise in Third World Feminist Criticism

Abstract

The necessity for cross-cultural communication in women's has been well recognized recently. Feminist critics have discovered a new task: they must understand the cultural particulars of each country as well as the gender universals of women across nations. One of the areas yet to be adequately explored, however, is Third World women's literature. Faced with both transcultural gender oppression and the unique cultural priorities of their countries, Third World women have been forced to seek congenial alternatives of their own, a choice that has placed them in conflict with Western feminism. But the gender struggles and cultural agendas identified by Third World women can provide variant clues useful for feminist criticism in general. They can yield concrete insights about the spectrum of impediments to women's global freedom and can suggest specific strategies for dealing with the origins of female colonization. As a Korean feminist critic, I have chosen to analyze Oh Chung Hee's novella The Soul of the Wind in order to demonstrate some of the possibilities of Third World feminist criticism. Interpreting Korean women's gender problems from a feminist critic's point of view, I shall also outline the particular issues presented by their historical and political circumstances. The Soul of the Wind won the Dong In Literary Prize (a national literary prize) in May 1983 and was published in the same year by Literature and Intellect Publishing Company in Seoul, Korea. It is the story of a woman with a war trauma who undergoes a series of gender pilgrimages. Its author, Oh Chung Hee, is considered one of the best women writers of the eighties in Korea. Most of her fiction is about female frustrations and fimily conflicts seen from a woman's point of view. Nowhere in her writing and literary career, however, does Oh demonstrate a conscious, political feminism. She does embody gender-conditioned female experiences in all her works, but these experiences universally end with the protagonist's internal wrath detached from external action. In fact, Oh writes in the tradition of literature, which is frequently employed by Korean women who write for the purpose of recording their gender sorrow. (I have not found a precise English equivalent for the gender-specific Korean word hahn, which means unresolvable sorrow deeply seated in a woman's heart. In the absence of a better term, I have translated literature of hahn as literature.) Originating in the middle years of the Yi Dynasty, about four hundred years ago, Korean women's confessional adopted as its major genres journals, essays, diaries, and poetry; as its subject matter, domestic, private affairs. A large part of the confessional written through the Yi Dynasty, however, is anonymous. The writers were ashamed of their creative activity, entirely discouraged from dreaming of an independent identity of their own. Confucian patriarchy, the national ideology of the Yi Dynasty, granted absolute power to husbands and fathers over their wives and daughters. Believing in rigid classism, Confucian patriarchs identified hierarchy as the organizing principle of society, and to maintain this principle, they preached master-servant relationships for every human interaction. The consequence was an extreme division between the upper authority and the lower citizenry, between men and women, and between the nobility and the commons. The command of the governing and the obedience of the governed became the axis of social order, and the governed, including women, practically became the property of the governing. Thoroughly disempowered, women of the Yi Dynasty lived in absolute silence, finding their only means of self-expression in private, confessional writing. They were even forced to keep secret this record of their experience, but miraculously, some confessional has been conserved through generations anonymously and remains today to illustrate women's collective pain under Confucian patriarchy. Since Korea began to westernize itself in the early twentieth century, confessional has adopted fiction as a major genre. Fiction in this tradition generally shows extremely