A Study For Female Images In Wu Zhenji’s Novels

Oh Jung-Hee, a famous contemporary Korean female novelist, her novel mainly investigates the agonizing as a female in real life and the essence and origin of female’s life values. Main character of Oh Jung-Hee’s novel is by characters’ inner heart, view-point of themselves, memory to unfold whole invent. So most of Oh Jung-Hee’s novels by describing perspectives such as character’s mind, dialogue, behavior in vivid detail to deepen the theme.This paper starts with the female characters appeared in Oh Jung-Hee’s novels to analyze themes of novels and author’s consciousness which reflected in these works: classify female characters by age bracket; analysis features of suffering and the way and attitude toward society of females of each stage, then makes further efforts on pointing out female’s subjectivity and deeper meaning of female’s "body". First, this paper focus on analyzing the female characters appeared in Oh Jung-Hee’s novels. The first type of character is "grandmother". This type of character is a symbol of suffering and death. The grandmother in the work The Yard of Childhood, she was a prostitute when she was young. She receives insult and lived in a life full of discrimination. Another grandmother in Chinatown, she has no experience of spawning children, thus she alienated by her family, forgotten by society and dead quietly and lonely. The second type of character is "woman". These women are characters who hold strong maternal instinct and have a desire of free from reality. The woman in Mermaid is described as a great woman who pursues integrated maternal love; but the woman in work Open Field is a housewife who burns out and feels lonely in common life and is eager for run away from home. Last but not least,"young girl" who grows up with perplexity. In work Woman of Toy Store, the young girl is a "body" who abandoned by family and society and shivers lonely. And young girls in Chinatown and The Yard of Childhood are characters who get lost in ashes of war and grow up in a twist way.The second part of this paper analyzes meanings of three types of female characters which have been talked above."grandmother" and "woman" are victims of war. These women belong to vulnerable groups and them in the humiliations of war and suppression of patriarchy. They are repelled by institution, live in underclass and suffer unequally treatment. They are just steeping-stones of male’s success. All these discriminations mainly appear in the surface part of female’s subjectivity:female’s body without soul. But the connotation of female’s subjectivity truly reflected in individuality and desire. We can find the subjectivity from the figure of "young girl". The generation of "young girl", they show rebellion consciousness against the gloomy reality which reflected by "body". By unique physical activity and flesh reflection such as lesbianism, vomit, theft and menophnia shows that they advocate free love, strive for regain and get freedom of "human" in the male center society. They integrate their soul and body to accommodate changes of society actively.Above all, by analyzing female characters of each stage, this paper aims to reveal different types of women of each stage and the ways in which they looking at lives under social inequalities. By analyzing these, this paper successfully explores feature and meaning of the road of female liberation and dissects Oh Jung-Hee’s unique insight of female’s subjectivity in contemporary society of Korea.